Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Curiosity Front Hazcam Left B image taken on Sol 1964, February 14, 2018.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Now deep into Sol 1965 operations, the NASA Curiosity Mars rover is checking out a site where the robot will restart drilling duties.

Mark Salvatore, a planetary geologist from the University of Michigan in Dearborn, reports that plans for the rover have been “a bit on the thin side.”

The reason is that Curiosity’s power allotment is being dedicated to activities associated with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. “As a result, Curiosity only has about 50 minutes to make observations and measurements of the surrounding workspace,” Salvatore adds, “but the team did a great job in packing it full of great observations!”

Curiosity Navcam Left B image acquired on Sol 1964, Feburary 14, 2018.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Safe to drill

A to-do list of Sol 1964 tasks included: Mastcam’s multispectral imaging capabilities to image a recently brushed and analyzed target named “Newmachar,” followed by a calibration image, and then two additional multispectral observations of two vein targets named “St. Kilda” and “Benbecula.”

Curiosity ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager photo taken on Sol 1964, February 14, 2018.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

Salvatore notes that Mastcam was slated to then perform some additional stereo imaging to assess the rover’s workspace “and to acquire enough data for the rover engineers to determine whether this area is safe for our first use of the drill since the Fall of 2016!”

Curiosity Mastcam Left image taken on Sol 1963, February 13, 2018.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Workspace workout

Following these engineer-requested Mastcam mosaics, Curiosity was scheduled to also use the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) high-resolution camera to investigate some interesting targets in our workspace,” Salvatore concludes.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Road map

Meanwhile, a new Curiosity traverse map through Sol 1962 has been issued.

The map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 1962 Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (February 12, 2018).

Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 1 kilometer (~0.62 mile).

From Sol 1950 to Sol 1962, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 96.32 feet (29.36 meters), bringing the rover’s total odometry for the mission to 11.31 miles (18.20 kilometers).

The base image from the map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.