10 August 2017
Sol 1781 Blog: Dusting off the wheels and hitting the road!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
This image was taken by Navcam: Left B (NAV_LEFT_B) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 1755 (2017-07-14 10:30:03 UTC). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Following our month of conjunction and first full day of operations on Monday, we’re finally ready to dust off the wheels and get back to driving towards Vera Rubin Ridge. Today was a pretty smooth day of planning, as we’re still getting back into the swing of things.
We’ll kick off today’s plan with a touch and go (MAHLI imaging plus a short APXS analysis) on the target ‘Mackerel Ledge,’ which we got our first taste of with ChemCam on Monday. For reference, Mackerel Ledge is located on the small patch of Murray bedrock at the center of the Navcam image above.
We’ll then complete our drive, take some standard post-drive images, and perform a SAM Electrical Baseline Test (EBT). Our ENV activities for today include standard REMS and DAN blocks as well as Mastcam tau and LOS extinction measurements.
Written by Rachel Kronyak, Planetary Geologist at University of Tennessee
