By 
June 27th, 2020
Looking back up towards “Bloodstone Hill.” Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Right B image taken on Sol 2804, June 26, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2805 tasks.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image acquired on Sol 2804, June 26, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The robot recently drove about 49 feet (15 meters), reports Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick; Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. That drive ended up having the rover with bedrock and sand in its workspace.
“Normally, Fridays are our busiest day in the geology theme group (GEO). We choose targets for contact science, with lots of back and forth between all the geochemistry, camera and engineering teams, to pick the best ones, while the environment theme group (ENV) plans a range of environmental activities,” O’Connell-Cooper adds.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image acquired on Sol 2804, June 26, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Software updates
“Not this weekend though! Curiosity is taking some time to do routine software updates,” says O’Connell-Cooper, “so the next couple of plans will be concentrating on those, leaving not much room for anything else.”
ENV have planned Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) and Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) environmental monitoring activities, part of their ongoing daily activities.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
“We will still be here next week, and we’ll pick up our contact science at that point, in time for the July 4th U.S. holiday,” O’Connell-Cooper concludes.
New road map
This map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 2804 Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (June 26, 2020).
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 2802 to Sol 2804, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 43.05 feet (13.12 meters), bringing the rover’s total odometry for the mission to 14.12 miles (22.72 kilometers).
The base image from the map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image acquired on Sol 2804, June 26, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2804, June 26, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Posted in Space News
