Earth planning date: Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Winter is almost half over on Gale, but this explorer isn’t hibernating! The last time we stopped for more than a few sols was at the Ubajara drilling site in early May, almost 1 kilometer 150 sols ago. Now, five months later, we are approaching the next drill site in an area of alternating band layers spread across the lithified sand. The jury of scientists is still out on which block is their favorite, but the operations team is already preparing to begin a two- to three-week training campaign in the near future. With the solar conjunction fast approaching, it will be interesting to see how much of a training campaign we can undertake between now and November 11th.
For this two-sol, infinite plan, we built a remote science block containing two Navcam events to measure atmospheric opacity and look for dust devils (we’ve seen some big ones recently!). The Mastcam will follow up with a mono, Right-only Mastcam mosaic of the upper ridge of Gediz Vallis that we have been traversing in parallel since our crater cluster campaign. ChemCam will complete the block with a 5×1 LIBS raster on a nodular bedrock target named “Black Giant,” with Mastcam Right documenting the effort afterwards.
On sol 3953 (20 September 2023) the Mastcam-34mm filter wheel (Left Mastcam) stalled between filters L0 (clear) and L1 (green) while running a multispectral atmospheric opacity (tau) imaging sequence. Since then, the Mastcam team has sent a series of diagnostic commands with various motor drive parameters, in an effort to characterize the problem and return the filter wheel to its most frequently used L0 position. To date, some progress has been achieved and the team hopes that the L0 position will be achieved soon. Analysis will then proceed to determine whether the filter wheel can be safely returned to normal service. Remember, this rover has been outside Earth’s protection since late 2011! This isn’t the first time our engineering team has fixed something remotely and it won’t be the last.
Once the rest of the Mastcam Left diagnostic activity is complete, our first arm backbone will begin and include two contact science targets: “Helen Lake” (a less dusty dark-colored layer) and “Marion Peak” (a slightly dustier dark-colored layer ). Here is an example of a dark layer fragment (where Blackcap Mountain is!) sitting on top of a light layer from sol 3962. MAHLI will take a complete series of images at Lake Helen from distances of 25cm, 5cm, and 2cm and another series of thumbnail images at Marion Peak from a distance of 25cm and a distance of 5 cm. After imaging, our arm turret will rotate to the APXS frame for nighttime integration on two targets. The first orbiter to pass by our rover will be the Trace Gas Orbiter, which will transmit our long-range data and weapons back to Earth at ~3:30am Pacific tomorrow (Thursday) morning.
We mostly napped through the night, and on the second solstice we would wake up with another remote sensing block starting again with a Navcam dust devil movie. Mastcam would follow up this time with some sand trough mosaics near the field between blocks (I love this example from sol 3966), and ChemCam would fire their second LIBS target named “Bridgeport” on smoother bedrock. Once all weapons activity is complete, we will be ready to drive and potentially end up near the next drilling site. Our post-trip data will begin its descent to Earth at ~5am Pacific on Friday, and from there we’ll begin weekend planning while our rover rests its wheels for the night.
2023-10-23 05:16:43
#Dreaming #Drilling #Campaign #NASAs #Mars #Exploration #SurabayaPostKota.net
