We’re gearing up for a nice long drive toward the “Naukluft Plateau” in today’s plan! The sol 1262 plan starts off with ChemCam of the bedrock targets “Gemsboktal” and “Ghaub”, with Mastcam documentation. Mastcam will also take a picture of the interesting wind-blown ripples of the target “Hoachanas”. After that, we will drive 70 meters or so to the northwest, stopping on a small ridge. After the drive, the rover will do standard post-drive imaging of our new surroundings. Overnight, CheMin will analyze its sample from Scoop #5 on the target “Gobabeb”.

Sol 1263 will be all untargeted observations. Mastcam will observe the rover deck to assess how much dust and sand are on the rover, and ChemCam has two long distance RMI mosaics of the stratigraphy of the Peace Vallis alluvial fan (these can be untargeted because they’re so far away that the camera pointing doesn’t really change much when we drive). Mastcam then has a standard “tau” observation, and Navcam has some cloud monitoring of the southern horizon. Later in the day, Navcam has some more atmospheric monitoring, and Mastcam will repeat the tau observation.

by Ryan Anderson

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the martian environment, communication relays and rover status.