After yesterday’s drive of around 39 m, we are just 24 m away from the boundary of the Shoshone quad! The landing site is divided up into squares 1.5
After yesterday’s drive of around 39 m, we are just 24 m away from the boundary of the Shoshone quad! The landing site is divided up into squares 1.5 km on a side that we call quads . All of the targets in a given quad are assigned names from assigned names from various geologically interesting sites on Earth. Right now we’re in the Hanover quad, so recent targets have been named after locations in New Hampshire. Before that we were in the Kimberley quad, so target names were locations in the Kimberley region in Australia. Once we enter the Shoshone quad after today’s drive, target names will be based on places near Shoshone, CA near Death Valley.
Planning today was a bit challenging because we were limited on the amount of data we could collect, but after a full Mars year of practice the team is good at working with constraints. The main activity in the plan is a ~3 hour drive block, but before the drive we managed to fit in one ChemCam observation of a rock called Bloods Brook with a Mastcam documentation image to go with it, plus our usual post-
drive images.
Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.
Written by Ryan Anderson, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center
