Curiosity Mars Rover: Last Views of Drill Sample, Sand Dancing (Updated)

 

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2557.

Reviews Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the rover is taking its final views of the Glen Etive 2 drill pattern. A latest plan had the robotic cleansing out the remaining pattern throughout the drill and doing contact science evaluation on the dumped pattern.

 

Each the Chemistry and Digicam (ChemCam) and Mastcam shall be looking at “Penicuik,” a pebble goal, and “Monach Isles,” a possible small meteorite. Additionally deliberate is a normal environmental statement suite: a Mastcam crater rim extinction and tau, and a Navcam supra-horizon film.

Dumped pattern

After the focused observations, rover planners are to dump out the drill pattern, after which take MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) photographs of the dumped pattern, the drill gap and tailings, and the SAM (Pattern Evaluation at Mars) Inlet 1.

Utilizing proximity mode to keep away from touching the floor, the robotic will carry out Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) integrations on two positions over the dump pile, Stroupe explains.

New street map

Newly launched map exhibits the route pushed by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity by means of the 2556 Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (October 15, 2019).

Numbering of the dots alongside the road point out the sol variety of every drive. North is up.

From Sol 2555 to Sol 2556, Curiosity had pushed a straight line distance of about 6.03 toes (1.84 meters).

Since touching down in Bradbury Touchdown in August 2012, Curiosity has pushed 13.13 miles (21.14 kilometers).

The bottom picture from the map is from the Excessive Decision Imaging Science Experiment Digicam (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Scuff marks

Fred Calef, Planetary Geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes that the rover drive purposely ran over a megaripple (fantastic grained sandy ripple with a coarser pebble coating) to create a “scuff” which churned up and bisected the characteristic to look at any layering or materials inside. The rover science staff selected to examine the inside of the wheel observe scuff and the unique undisturbed ripple floor.