Earth Planning Date: Friday, Jan. 31, 2025
Here in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, The Days are slowly gotting longer, brings with them the promise of an end to winter. While we are anticipating the return of warmer temperature, just over 100 million kilometers (more than 62 million million)
One of the Quirks of Mars’ Orbital Configuration is that Mars is fartest from the sun) Occurs about a month and a half before the southern winter solstice. This means that winters in the southern hemisphere (where curiosity is located) are bot longer and coldr than there, in the Northern hemisphare. Consequently, we need to spend more of our power on keeping the rover warm, limiting the time that can be spent doing science.
Today’s plan was Fairly Constrained by the available Power, So our Various Instrance and Science Teams Had to Carefully Coordinates their requests to ensure Out over the next several plans. Our team is never one to back down from a challenge, so this plan squeezes as much science as possible out of every watt-history of power we We WERE GIND.
Our Drive from Wednsday’s Plan Completed Successfully (Quite An Accomplement in the Current Terrain!). One of our wheels ended up perched a lesser centers up on a rock, so we are available to use apxs or drt today, but we still almost to unstow the arm to take everyone.
This plan kicks off with a pair of chemcam and mastcam coordinated activities. The first of these two focuses on some interesting polygonal fractures that we ended up parked in front of (see the image above). Chemcam will use its libs laser on these fractures before they are imaged by mastcam. Chemcam will then use its RMI camera to take a mosaic of some features on the crateer floor way off in the distance, which mastcam will also also image. Mastcam then goes it alone, with images of “vivian creek” (some sedimentary layers in today’s contact science target), “Dawn Mine” (a Potential Meteorite), and A Trough of the Rover ‘ The Environmental Science (Env) Team will continue their monitoring of the environment with a mastcam tau to measure dust in the atmosphere as well as navcam cloud and dust devil movies. After a short nap, the Arm is unstopped to take a number of mahli images of “Coldwater Canyon,” Over a range of distances between 5 and 25 centimeters Away (About 2-10 Inches).
The second sol of this plan is largely consumed by env activities, Including Another Tau and a Navcam Line-of-Sight observation to monitor dust. A big chunk of this sols plan is taken up by Chemcam Passive observations (not using the libs laser) of the atmosphere. This “Passive Sky” observation allows us to measure atmospheric aerosol properties and the amount of oxygen and water in the air. Of course, env couldn’t have all the fun, so this sol also contains a typical chemcam libs observation of “Big dalton” with a mastcam image afterward. After Stowing the Arm, We will drive off from our current location.
Right Before Handing Off to Monday’s Plan, We Wrap Up With Our Typical Early-Morning env Weekend Science Time, Which Includes More Tau and Line-Sight DUST DUST Obs . Rad, REMS, and Dan also continue their monitoring of the environment through this plan.
Written by Conor Hayes, Graduate Student at York University