Mars rover continues progress along upper Gediz Vallis ridge

Curiosity continues to make progress alongside the margin of higher Gediz Vallis ridge, investigating the damaged bedrock in our workspace and buying pictures of the ridge deposit because the rover drives south.

Right this moment’s 2-sol plan centered on a DRT, contact science, and drive on the primary sol, adopted by untargeted distant sensing on the second sol. The staff needed to make some selections in the beginning of planning about whether or not to drive on the primary or second sol of this plan, and the way that may have an effect on the upcoming weekend actions.

Because it turned out, the staff was in a position to match all the desired contact science and distant sensing actions on the primary sol, along with the drive on the primary sol, which suggests we’ll be capable to downlink extra details about our end-of-drive location to higher inform planning for the weekend. Weekend plans present alternatives for lots of nice contact science, so it is going to be actually useful to have that extra knowledge down for planning.

Meaning the primary sol of this plan is totally loaded! The plan begins with a DRT exercise to reveal a contemporary floor on the bedrock goal “Tilden Lake,” adopted by APXS integrations to analyze its composition. Then the Geology theme group deliberate a number of hours of distant sensing actions, together with ChemCam LIBS on the bedrock goal “Curry Village,” which has the same “dragon scale” texture (or “tire tracks”) to what we had noticed within the earlier workspace.

This huge distant sensing block additionally consists of ChemCam lengthy distance RMI mosaics to evaluate the stratigraphy at Gediz Vallis ridge and the distant butte Kukenan. These lengthy distance RMI pictures reveal a number of nice element about distant targets, like the variety of clasts at Gediz Vallis ridge, as seen within the above picture.

The plan additionally consists of numerous Mastcam actions to characterize native textures, sedimentary buildings, darkish rocks, and sandy aeolian bedforms (referred to as Transverse Aeolian Ridges, aka TARs) in a close-by trough. The Environmental theme group additionally deliberate actions to observe the motion of fines on the rover deck, seek for mud devils, and monitor atmospheric mud.

After this huge distant sensing block, Curiosity will use MAHLI to picture the contact science goal, after which proceed driving south. The second sol consists of untargeted actions like an autonomously chosen ChemCam AEGIS goal, extra Navcam deck monitoring, and Navcam line-of-sight observations. After the drive we’ll take publish drive imaging to organize for the following plan.