You are browsing the archive for Curiosity.
13 April 2015
Sols 953-955: Dumping Telegraph Peak
by Ryan Anderson Our sol 952 drive went well, and we’re very close to crossing over into a new “quad” of the map that was made before landing (meaning we will get a whole new bunch of target names to choose from!). On Saturday the team planned for a lengthy ChemCam focus test on sol 953, where we collect images of the target “Eaton Canyon” at different times of day …
10 April 2015
Sol 952: A Longer Drive and Slippery 10k
by Ken Herkenhoff MSL drove 18 meters on Sol 951, as planned, putting the rover in position to image the terrain ahead and plan a longer drive on Sol 952. The total “wheel odometry” for the MSL mission is now over 10 km! But the total traverse distance is still less than 10 km, because the wheels sometimes slip while driving, and the wheel odometry does not take slippage …
9 April 2015
Sol 951: 10k
by Ryan Anderson We are continuing our driving tour of Artist’s Drive, and we should be reaching the 10k mark on Curiosity’s odometer in the sol 951 plan! The rover will start off the day with a targeted science block full of Mastcam observations. We are planning two Mastcam mosaics looking at the layers in the valley walls on either side of us, plus a routine “clast survey” image to document the soil and gravel …
8 April 2015
Sol 950: Taking in the Scenery along Artist’s Drive
By Lauren Edgar Like most tourists who visit Artist’s Drive on Earth, Curiosity is busy taking lots of photos to document the valley walls of Artist’s Drive on Mars. We are officially on the road again, and working our way through a very scenic drive. I’m the Geology Science Theme Lead today, and today’s plan involves a pre-drive science block, a drive for hopefully ~30-40m, and some post-drive imaging …
6 April 2015
Sol 948: Good Morning Mars
By Lauren Edgar As we started the planning day before sunrise, I was reminded of the first three months of the mission that we spent living on Mars time. Today is an early “slide sol,” meaning that the planning timeline is shifted 1.5 hours earlier in order to compensate for our downlink and uplink times. Today is also a “tight” planning sol, meaning that the planning timeline is slightly shorter …
3 April 2015
Sols 946-947: Mars Hand Lens Imager mosaic
by Ken Herkenhoff The MAHLI operations team did a lot of good work preparing for Sol 946, so I expected that it would be an easy day for me as uplink lead. Unfortunately, a problem on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) prevented some of the data we expected to receive in time for planning from being relayed to Earth. MRO has been very reliable in the past and we have gotten used to …
1 April 2015
Sols 944-945: Return to Garden City
by Ken Herkenhoff After receiving and analyzing the most recent “Garden City” data, the MSL team decided that more data are needed to better understand this interesting outcrop. Therefore, after acquiring some ChemCam and Mastcam observations near “Kanosh,” the rover will drive back to Garden City on Sol 944. The goal is to position the rover for contact science activities in a part of the outcrop that was not previously within the arm’s …
30 March 2015
Sols 942-943 Cap Rock “Kanosh”
By Lauren Edgar Over the weekend, Curiosity drove further into Artist’s Drive to investigate a rock named “Kanosh.” This boulder appears to represent the “capping unit,” so we’re planning to study Kanosh in more detail to understand this resistant type of rock. Today’s two sol plan consists of remote sensing and contact science to investigate this boulder. We’ll acquire ChemCam on the targets “Piru,” “Little Devil,” and “Tierra Blanca.” We’ll …
29 April 2011
Gale Crater Videos
Yesterday I participated in a telecon about Gale Crater, one of the potential landing sites for MSL. It’s a fascinating place to talk about and would make for a spectacular mission. Ok, this is true for all four finalist landing sites, but the scenery at Gale, with its 5km tall mountain of layered rocks would be particularly great. One of the presenters at yesterday’s telecon, Dawn Sumner, posted two very nice videos on YouTube covering much of what she talked about. The videos also serve to show off a very-cool new open-source 3D visualization and GIS tool called Crusta being developed by a student at UC Davis.
3 January 2011
AGU 2010 – Days 3 and 4: Exoplanets, Impact Basins and Alteration
Now that it’s a New Year, it’s time I wrapped up my AGU 2010 recaps. This post covers Wednesday and Thursday, with lots of good stuff about super-earth exoplanets, impacts on the Moon and Mars, and lasers on Venus!
