Pasadena CA (JPL) May 12, 2022 Curiosity is getting a good start to the week! The weekend plan...
Curiosity is getting a good start to the week! The weekend plan completed successfully, leaving some great rover tracks behind us as seen in the attached picture.
Today my role was "RP2", which supports the Rover Planners for the day in planning the arm and drive activities, and doing our final modeling and verification steps before sending the commands to the rover.
Mastcam will image the veins in the bedrock in front of the rover called "Partang" then ChemCam will fire the laser on it.
We'll take some MAHLI images of the targets "El Oso" and "Parima." El Oso is a cluster of clasts on a rock that we aren't sure are loose or attached.
The arm Rover Planner described them as looking like they are crumbling off the block.
To accommodate all this great science, we are splitting our drive to occur in two segments and allow MRO to communicate with the rover in between those segments.
Luckily the Rover Planners have a great store of documentation to help refresh ourselves on all the things we need to do to safely pass the information on how the first drive segment completed before continuing in the second segment.
Once the second part of the drive completes, we'll take a bunch of images of our final location to prepare for the next plan's activities.
On sol 3470 we'll have some environmental monitoring imaging, along with an autonomously selected ChemCam target.
It's been a challenging week in Gale crater, but Curiosity and the rover team are ready to put those challenges behind us as we head into a busy weekend plan.