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Sol 1166: Uplink Problems

Unfortunately, our plans for the weekend were thwarted by aproblem with the Deep Space Network that prevented the plans from being sent tothe rover.

Unfortunately, our plans for the weekend were thwarted by a
problem with the Deep Space Network that prevented the plans from being sent to
the rover. As someone on the team pointed out in response to the issue, this
just goes to show how many steps in the process have to go just right for us to
be able to operate a rover on Mars, and it’s pretty impressive that these sorts
of issues are as rare as they are.

Given its lack of instructions, Curiosity spent the weekend
in “runout” mode. Runout mode mostly consists of environmental monitoring.
Since the weekend plan was not uplinked, much of today’s plan contains repeats
of what we tried to do over the weekend.

In the sol 1166 plan, ChemCam has observations of the
targets “Zaris” and “Swakop”, and Mastcam has a 5×4 mosaic of “Swakop” and its
surroundings. Then we have a block of arm activities to allow MAHLI to take
some images of the targets “Swartkloofberg” and “Swakop”. This will be followed
by brushing the dust off of Swartkloofberg, taking some more MAHLI images, and
then placing APXS on Swartkloofberg to analyze it overnight.

Meanwhile, this week is the ChemCam team meeting here at
USGS in Flagstaff! Since much of the team will be busy with the meeting,
ChemCam activities this week will be kept to just two or three per day. The
meeting also means that Ken, Lauren, and I will be extra busy this week so we
won’t be blogging every day even though operations will be happening daily. By Ryan Anderson -Ryan is a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of the ChemCam team on MSL. 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

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Last Updated
Oct 29, 2024

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