NASA

Sols 4350-4351: A Whole Team Effort

Earth planning date: Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 Just like you and me, the Curiosity rover has a few idiosyncratic tendencies — special ways that the rover behaves that we, the team on Earth, have come to understand to be harmless but still throw a curveball to our planning. Unfortunately, the set of activities that were […]

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Nov 1, 2024 - 11:00

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Sols 4350-4351: A Whole Team Effort

A grayscale image from the Martian surface shows medium gray soil interspersed with numerous lighter colored flat rocks. Wheel tracks from the rover are visible on the ground in the upper right corner of the frame. Portions of the rover are also visible in the middle of the frame.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Right Navigation Camera on sol 4348 — Martian day 4,348 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Oct. 29, 2024, at 14:20:08 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Earth planning date: Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024

Just like you and me, the Curiosity rover has a few idiosyncratic tendencies — special ways that the rover behaves that we, the team on Earth, have come to understand to be harmless but still throw a curveball to our planning.

Unfortunately, the set of activities that were planned to execute on Monday behaved in one of these special ways — leaving the rover’s arm down on the ground without completing the planned set of activities, including the remainder of our contact science, remote sensing, or drive.

When this happens the whole team gets together to review the information Curiosity sends to us, and we ensure as a team that we understand the quirky way the rover acted and that we are good to proceed. While not ideal for keeping up with our scientific cadence, I appreciate these moments because they remind me of all the experts we have evaluating the rover’s health and safety day in and day out.

So for today’s plan — we completed the contact science observations of “Reds Meadow” that had been planned on Monday and picked up a second suite of contact science measurements of “Ladder Lake.” Both of these are bedrock targets and the APXS and MAHLI observations we make will continue our characterization of changes in bedrock composition and morphology in this area. We also repeated the remote sensing observations planned on Monday that did not execute.

With a fresh set of Rover Planner eyes, we reassessed if the drive planned on Monday was still the best we could do and, impressively, today’s RP agreed. So the drive remains the same, making excellent progress toward our next imaging waypoint.

The remainder of the plan contained our usual atmospheric measurements!

We’ll see what Friday holds!

Written by Elena Amador-French, Science Operations Coordinator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory