Sols 3882-3884: Weekend Routine for a Red Rover

Sols 3882-3884: Weekend Routine for a Red Rover
by Natalie Moore | Mission Ops- MSSS
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 12, 2023

Earth Planning Date: Friday, July 7, 2023. Happy Friday, Earthlings! Few things are better than planning an action-packed weekend on Mars. It's even better when the last plan executed like a charm; our drive from Wednesday's plan made it over 44 meters and put us in veiny, layered bedrock heaven! We're still headed towards a local cluster of craters ~150 meters to the east, and my Mastcam brain is excited for a far-field imaging campaign when we get there.

In the meantime, I'm using my MAHLI brain to plan some close (and some extremely close) images of the terrain in front of us. And since the downlink arrived as expected, Curiosity is in great shape for her classic weekend routine.

On the first sol in this weekend's plan, which will actually kick off around 10:15am Pacific, our rover will wake up and spend some time organizing her data from the previous plan. After a leisurely mid-morning nap she'll start her first science activities which include: Mastcam stereo mosaic of Kukenan butte in the far distance, ChemCam LIBS 5-spot raster of a nicely-layered block in the workspace named "Akrata," a Mastcam-Right documenting image of the LIBS laser spots, and a DAN measurement in parallel with all to measure any water-related atoms present in the ground (here's a reminder of DAN's capabilities). Around 2pm she'll take another nap to prepare for arm activities in the late afternoon, kicking off around 3:20pm and continuing all evening!

What does a Martian rover do on a Saturday evening? Stick her cupcake-sized APXS on some dust-free rocks and "sniff" the surface chemistry of course! But first, she has to pre-game with some dust-clearing and MAHLI images while the sun is still up. This weekend we picked a layered bedrock target for our DRT to swish the dust away and named it "Desino." After brushing Desino, it's time to take our usual Mastcam-Right images of the DRT for documentation and head into some major MAHLI imaging.

Starting with a dark, plate-like target named "Planitero," MAHLI will take images at 25cm and 5cm from the surface. Then we have an exciting 2x3 mosaic planned of some bedrock layers at ChemCam's Akrata LIBS target, for a total of 6 images at best focus (actually, we take 8 images at difference focus values for each mosaic position to make sure we're getting the best focus possible in addition to an extra full frame - so that's really 54 images, plus 6 subframes.

It's a MAHLI party!). Last plan we did a similar type of mosaic along a vertical fin, and the surrounding bedrock shows the type of layers we're hoping to get with this weekend's mosaic (single frame from that mosaic for reference). For the MAHLI's finale she'll take images of dust-cleared Desino at 25cm, 5cm, and 2cm from the target's surface. On a side note - this is our first western-like heading in quite some time and for MAHLI that means much better chance at full-sun image lighting, which is almost always preferred.

After the MAHLI party, APXS will settle into some surface sniffing - starting with Planitero and ending with Desino at ~9:30pm. It's an early night for Curiosity, but she'll be awake in intermittently to send the sol's data to Earth via orbiters when they pass overhead.

For the second sol, which kicks off ~11am Pacific this Sunday, Curiosity will have another late morning and start her science activities around noon. Mastcam will take a multispectral stereo frame (in 7 wavelength filters for each camera) of Desino and a couple, smaller stereo mosaics of the vertical rock fins and sand cracks around us.

ChemCam will shoot another bedrock target named "Skotani" with LIBS and Mastcam follows up with the usual documentation image of the spots. Then it's time to pack it up and drive away! A ~17 meter Sunday stroll will hopefully get us closer to the local craters in the distance and put some more interesting bedrock in the workspace for Monday's planning. Another fun weekend for Curiosity, and we hope you enjoy yours as well!