Earth planning date: Friday, September 29, 2023
Welcome to another weekend at Gale crater, Mars! As Abigail Knight explained in Wednesday’s blog, we chose not to pursue the latter plan while we waited for workspace imaging from the Navcam and Mastcam to arrive on Earth. Everything went as expected and we received the necessary imaging to assess the terrain well enough to use our DRT on the beautiful light colored rock slab in front of us. With the image open, I just want to point out the remote and contact science targets we analyzed on Wednesday: The ChemCam LIBS sol 3962 target, Pants Pass, is in the center-right region of the plate with sediment layers. Here you can see the LIBS points on the Pants Pass layer of ChemCam RMI. The contact science targets, Blackcap Mountain and Burnt Mountain, are dark raised layers at the bottom center and top center of the slab respectively (don’t miss them!).
It’s important to characterize the bedrock between the light colored blocks and the dark colored blocks ahead, so for today’s plan we decided on two (!) DRT targets to double the contact science while we were in a stable position to disengage. arm. The first DRT target, “Cloudripper,” is located on a super flat spot to the left of Blackcap Mountain. The Second DRT Target, “White Pass,” is located at another flat point below Burnt Mountain and above Pants Pass. MAHLI will drop to a distance of ~3cm from each of these targets to get a complete image sequence, meaning we can get a resolution of ~0.017 mm/pixel – the size of a siltstone grain!
For long-range science, ChemCam shot their LIBS at Wednesday’s Burnt Mountain contact science target and a nearby block called “Sky Pilot” (the vertical layered block in the bottom center of this Navcam image). We are staying at this location for further bedrock analysis on Monday’s plan, so Mastcam will document the LIBS targets starting today but delay any mosaics until Monday.
In other news, we are having soliday this weekend (I think I explained this term quite well in one of my blogs last year) so next week we will be able to plan for “unlimited” sols, i.e. days where Earth and Earth will be. Mars time zones align. Over an indefinite planning period, we obtain information about how the activities we planned on one Earth day are actually executed on Mars in time for the start of planning on the next Earth day. This will be our first unconstrained planning cycle without sufficient budget for Tuesday’s operations, so we still need to plan two soles at once on Monday. However, we were able to save the drive for the second sol and keep our nightly APXS integration on the first sol. Hope you have a great soliday weekend!
2023-10-22 18:51:35
#Double #DRT #Soliday #NASA #Mars #Exploration #SurabayaPostKota.net
