On a usual week of Curiosity operations, Friday plans take the longest since they span the whole weekend. This rare Monday morning, however, we're planning five sols to start covering Tuesday - Monday of operations so the team can spend Thanksgiving on Earth. When we plan a large chunk of sols like this, the first couple sols are lightweight with minimal risk activities from environmental sensors like RAD and REMS.

This time those are Sols 3660 and 3661, so Tuesday and Wednesday will be pretty quiet in Gale while we catch up on downlinking old data. Any remote sensing activities from instruments like Mastcam and ChemCam will kick off on the third sol (Thursday), and for safety reasons we're waiting until the last sol (Saturday) to plan any arm activities.

For example, any faults that occurred wouldn't be mitigated until at least Tuesday, and it would not be ideal for MAHLI to be stuck with her dust cover open near the surface for sols at a time! As part of the MAHLI uplink team today I was aware of this constraint and knew we'd have only a single sol available for planning today.

We began planning with news of a successful ~46 meter drive back towards the Mount Sharp Ascent Route (MSAR) from our detour to image the Gediz Vallis Ridge (GVR). Probably the last view of the GVR we'll have for quite some time, the past few weeks were spent taking lots of Mastcam images and ChemCam Remote Micro-Images (RMIs). Abby Fraeman wrote about the reasoning behind this detour in the Veteran's Day blog from 10 days ago. Since we're now traversing on a "paved" road back to the MSAR and Marker Band valley, the weekend drive was easier to plan and even included Full MAHLI Wheel Imaging (FMWI).

This is when we get MAHLI out during the drive and image all wheels from five small bumps, something we haven't done since June. Last plan's mobility Rover Planner, Keri Bean, described the process behind Full MAHLI Wheel Imaging and why we do them in the last blog. Taking a look at this weekend's downlink, it's amazing to see what over 29 kilometers and 10 years on Mars can do: MAHLI image of our left middle wheel! The engineers will analyze these images in the coming days, but their last analysis suggested we should be able to drive many more kilometers on these wheels.

The first opportunity for remote sensing is on Sol 3662 and includes ~60 Mastcam stereo frames of our view back to the MSAR and hills beyond Marker Band valley. ChemCam is taking the early opportunity and shooting five laser spots on our workspace block at a target named "Urutai," as well as an RMI of the GVR while we still have the view.

Sol 3663 has more opportunities for remote sensing and kicks off with a second round of ChemCam laser spots on another workspace block target named "Lontra" and another RMI of dry channels in the distance near the GVR. Mastcam will follow with 20 more stereo frames of our nearby rock textures and tones before sunset (reminder that sunsets on Mars are blue!!). Finally, Sol 3664 is where things really get moving with a third nearby ChemCam laser target "Purue," yet another RMI of distant hills from our past, and the arm activities.

Our arm activities include using our Dust Removal Tool (DRT) on a bright vein target named "Poraque" and letting APXS sniff the dust-cleared spot after MAHLI images it from ~25, 5, and 2 cm away. We're also prepping a target named "Los Tranques" for DRT in tomorrow's plan by getting 25 cm and 5 cm MAHLI images before letting APXS sniff it, dust and all. Mastcam is also included in the arm activities today for imaging her cousin camera MAHLI.

Every ~120 sols or so MAHLI requests Mastcam high-resolution images of MAHLI's dust cover. These images are some of the highest resolution Mastcam is capable of at ~1.6 meters away for focus. Check out this one from Sol 3541! Since Martian dust is magnetic, these images also show how much dust is accumulating on the cover's magnet over time.

Tomorrow we'll be planning the last two sols of our holiday weekend, Sunday and Monday, which includes a drive away from our Thanksgiving site and resumption of our normal planning schedule. I'll be blogging on our first plan back next Monday as well, and on a personal note I'm feeling very thankful for this incredible mission I get to be a part of and my team members who inspire me every sol. I'll be thinking of our hardy rover all weekend as I watch Mars rise in the east each night, somehow feeling close even at 52 million miles away.

Working Through the Weekend - Sols 3657-3659
by Keri Bean | Rover Planner Deputy Team Lead - JPL
Pasadena CA (JPL) Nov 21 - Today was a plan chockful of goodies to cover the weekend! Luckily the rover repositioning mentioned in the previous blog worked and we could safely use the arm in this plan.

We start the rover off right away in the morning on sol 3657 with a very long block of remote sensing, including a Navcam dust devil survey, a ChemCam laser observation of "Cigana," some long distance ChemCam imaging, a DAN observation, and several Mastcam observations of Cigana, Rafael Navarro, Gediz Vallis Ridge, and some imaging of the rover deck. The rover will take a nice nap until later in the afternoon where the rover will wake up and perform some arm activities.

As I've blogged before, we're really having fun challenging our arm Rover Planner trainees and today included two uses of our Dust Removal Tool! We brush and take MAHLI imaging of both the "Lua" and "Rio Jufari" targets, and start the evening with the APXS instrument observing the Lua target. Mid-evening we will replace the APXS on the Rio Jufari target to get an observation of that target. Later that night we will stow the arm to prepare for the next sol's drive.

Starting out nice and early in the rover's morning on sol 3658, we take a full 360 panorama around us in the morning light, followed by some imaging of Gediz Vallis Ridge. A bit later in the morning we do some atmospheric monitoring imaging with Mastcam and Navcam, a ChemCam laser observation of the previous sol's arm target Rio Jufari, some distance imaging with ChemCam, and a slew of Mastcam observations of Saddle Mountain, "Xua," Lua, and Rio Jufari.

After all that great imaging, the rover will spend the next 4 hours driving! Today I was the mobility Rover Planner, so I was responsible for driving the rover today! In today's plan we included something we don't do very often, and that's what we call the Full MAHLI Wheel Imaging activity, where we use a combination of Mastcam and MAHLI to image our wheels and monitor our wheels for any new damage.

We have some requirements to find a spot safe to do this imaging, so a lot of my morning on shift was verifying a good safe spot to perform this activity in. Luckily there was a good spot about 5 meters behind where the rover is, so we back up, run this activity, then start heading back the way we came. We'll be driving about 45 meters, retracing our steps, and ending near the sand ripple from a few sols ago with hopefully some bedrock in the workspace for the next Rover Planners to play with.

After the drive completes, we'll take our post-drive imaging block of Hazcams, Navcams, and Mastcams to provide the imaging for the next planning team to use. We'll take a bit of a nap (after all, 4 hours of driving is a lot!) and later in the evening we'll take a MARDI image.

The third and final sol of this plan, sol 3659, has an autonomously selected ChemCam target in the morning before sleeping until very early on sol 3660 where we'll take a slew of atmospheric monitoring images with Navcam and Mastcam. Throughout the plan are our standard environmental monitoring with DAN, RAD, and REMS as well.

Related Links
Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more

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Thanksgiving Plan Part Two - Sols 3665-3666
Pasadena CA (JPL) Nov 23, 2022
Thanksgiving plan part two would of course include all the traditional pleasures we know - if you are in the US that is, if you are, like me, in Europe then we'll have to wait a few more weeks until Christmas time to have our traditional family gathering, and others again will have it at an entirely different time of the year. Curiosity, though, will celebrate all those earthly festivities by getting more science and finding out yet more about Mars and Gale crater's rock record! The image above sh ... read more