Archive for the ‘Space News’ Category
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February 4th, 2020
Curiosity Left Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2661, January 31, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2665 tasks.
“It’s not the ground that is tilted, we are!” That’s the report from Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B image taken on Sol 2665, February 4, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity is near the contact between the clay-bearing “Glen Torridon” unit and the “Greenheugh” pediment, and the rover is parked at a mission-record setting 26.9˚ tilt.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 2664, February 3, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Chemical information
Mars researchers are set to use the rover’s arm and remote sensing instruments to investigate the interesting textures and chemistry of rocks near the contact.
Fraeman says also on tap is use of the robot’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) to collect chemical information from a bedrock target filled with nodules called “Garron Point” and a dark float rock that may have come from the Greenheugh pediment named “Mull of Galloway.”
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager photo produced on Sol 2664, February 3, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity Dust Removal Tool (DRT) is in use as is Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and ChemCam to make observations of “Berwickshire,” a typical-looking piece of bedrock.
Nodules and veins
APXS and MAHLI will also observe “Cairnbulg,” an area with nodules, and MAHLI will take some images of a vein named “Ross and Cromarty.”
Also on the plan is a Mastcam multispectral observation of Berwickshire and a stereo Mastcam mosaic of the contact between the Greenheugh pediment and Glen Torridon.
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager photo produced on Sol 2665, February 4, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“ChemCam will collect more data from ‘Ramasaig,’ a dark vein near the rover, and ‘St. Monanas,’ another piece of rock with interesting textures,” Fraeman adds. “The rover will also acquire some environmental science observations that will be used to understand atmospheric properties and search for dust devils.”
Drill target
On the plan is a drive by Curiosity towards some flat rock outcrops that are nearby, but which the rover will be able to reach without having to park at such a high tilt.
Curiosity Right B Navigation Camera image acquired on Sol 2664, February 3, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Right B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2665, February 4, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“The observations we collect from this area next week,” Fraeman concludes, “will help us decide whether these flatter rocks would be a good target to drill!”
Posted in 
China’s farside rover images Chang’e-4 lander in the distance.
Credit: CNSA/CLEP
After landing on the Moon’s farside on January 3, 2019, China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit-2) has now driven 1,204 feet (367.25 meters).
Both the Chang’e-4 lander and the rover ended their work for the 14th lunar day on Saturday (Beijing Time), and switched to dormant mode for the lunar night, according to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration.
Yutu-2 rover (Jade Rabbit-2) has now driven 1,204 feet (367.25 meters). Credit: CNSA/CLEP
Lander/rover experiments
During the 14th lunar day of exploration, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports, the Yutu-2 continued to move along the planned route. The scientific instruments on the lander and rover worked as planned.
“The neutron radiation detector and low-frequency radio spectrometer on the lander worked normally and acquired first-hand scientific data. On the rover, the near-infrared spectrometer, panoramic camera, neutral atom detector and lunar radar carried out scientific exploration as planned,” Xinhua explained.
China’s Chang’e-4 mission was launched on Dec. 8, 2018, making the first-ever soft landing within the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
Chang’e-5 mission is intended to return lunar specimens back to Earth.
Credit: CCTV/Screengrab/Inside Outer Space
Next up: lunar samples
The country’s next lunar foray is the Chang’e-5 mission, slated for liftoff later this year.
The 8.2-metric-ton Chang’e-5 mission includes a lander, an orbiter, an ascender and a returner. The key tasks of the mission will be lunar sample collection, takeoff from the Moon, rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit, followed by a high-speed reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
Credit: CCTV Video News Agency/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Quality of samples
Peng Jing, deputy chief designer of the Chang’e-5 probe at the China Academy of Space Technology recently noted that the mission will depart Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province during the fourth quarter of this year.
If successful, this robotic spacecraft would attempt the first lunar sample return to Earth in over 40 years.
This mission is targeted for the northwestern part of the Oceanus Procellarum, a lunar mare on the western edge of the Moon’s near side.
Locations of proposed Chang’e-5 landing sites (marked by red stars) from new study.
Credit: Chisenga, et al.
“The quantity of samples it will bring back depends on many factors, such as the landing site’s geology. We hope that it can collect at least 1 kilogram, and if everything goes well, it may bring two kilograms or even more,” Peng said in the China Daily story.
Scientific outpost
Turning to future lunar exploration, Peng said scientists and engineers have proposed that two or three missions could be made to set up a simple scientific outpost on the Moon, which would be able to accommodate astronauts for short-term stays, to carry out experiments and explore the feasibility of long-term visits.
Go to this video describing the mission:
China to Launch Chang’e-5, Mars Probes in 2020
Curiosity Chemistry & Camera image acquired on Sol 2663, February 2, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL
As many of the readers of this website know…I do inspect quite a number of Curiosity Mars rover images daily.
I was intrigued by a recent new image…and I asked Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist of the Mars Institute and SETI Institute to help me identify what I’m observing. Here’s his reaction:
“The feature at the top of the image does look like a terrestrial nautiloid-form (important to keep those two words together and hyphenated)! Given that the background rock is full of spheroidal mineral concretions of the same scale, however, the nautiloid-form is most likely just a cluster of concretions that has been differentially eroded and made to stand out like a fossil might,” Lee told Inside Outer Space.
Lee added that, even if this was a fossil — which it likely isn’t” – “we should be reminded of what Carl Sagan used to say: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Credit: Pascal Lee
Tree of life…forest of life
However, Lee said, this also does bring to the fore the important point, which he has been harping about for some time, that, even if this were fossil life, no amount of fossil-finding on Mars will establish that we’ve found alien life. We would have found signs of “life off Earth,” but not necessarily established that it is life “that is not of the Earth.”
Lee said that alien life would be “establishable” as such…only if we could show that it does not fit on Earth’s Tree of Life, to which all known life forms on Earth belong (based on phylogeny, i.e., shared genetics).
“It would have to belong to a separate Tree of Life, one resulting from an independent origin. Once we’ve established that there are at least two Trees of Life in the solar system, we can speculate confidently that there must be a Forest of Life out there,” Lee advised.
Deep diving on Mars. Cavers deploy for underground exploration of the Red Planet.
Credit: Pascal Lee
Mars underground
To establish that scientists have found an alien life form on Mars, Lee added, we have to do genetics — not necessarily “DNA” sequencing, but genetic analysis in a more generic sense. To do genetics, the life form has to be alive – or dead since a very short time; biochemically still intact, he said.
“To find life that’s alive, we need to explore Mars’ underground where, deep enough, conditions at present would be warmer, wetter, and more sheltered than at the surface, sheltered especially from ionizing radiation, micrometeoritic bombardment, low atmospheric pressure, and drastic day-night temperature variations, which are likely to be bad news for any life,” Lee advised.
Loaded to the brim with samples, a robotic Mars Ascent Vehicle rockets off the planet under the watchful eye of an accompanying “go fetch” mini-rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL
Return sample
Even if we found fossils in samples returned from Mars, Lee said, “we would be hard-pressed to establish that it’s alien, as opposed to just life derived from life shared with the Earth in the past, via impacts, unless the samples actually contained extant life, which they would likely not…given that they would be from the surface of Mars or would have sat there for a long time.”
So in short, Lee said, the nautiloid-form pictured by Curiosity is indeed “weird and cool,” but ultimately, he added, “to have any chance of finding life that we’d be able to establish as alien, we must go and look for it underground.”
Interesting texture…but
“It is an interesting texture, could be anything from melted volcanic glass to weathering sedimentary concretions to slime molds from outer space sent to take over our Solar System,” adds Penelope Boston, Senior Advisor for Science Integration at NASA Ames Research Center. “I don’t know the size scale on the image nor the context of where it is from, etc.”
“I would add that finding any fossil material on Mars would be extremely exciting but would require the building of a major framework case of the geological context, the search for any biomolecules that might have been preserved in the material ranging from organic carbon to remains of lipids,” Boston told Inside Outer Space.
Confirmation of the existence and extent of life on Mars, whether ancient or current, will benefit human exploration. Here an exobiologist examines what appears to be a porous relic of a hot spring that has fallen from the canyon wall.
Credit: NASA/Pat Rawlings
Weak evidence
Boston said there are many additional techniques to try to see whether a form is a “one-off” or is in a setting with more than one example of a form. In addition, is there a stable isotope value consistent with what we know that life on Earth does to carbon (i.e. make it lighter than the source CO2)?
Similar in view as Pascal Lee, “we cannot tell from any of that whether it is related to Earth life or a second genesis,” Boston said. “Morphology alone is weak evidence, albeit possibly critical in drawing our attention to something to investigate, so it is super helpful but very far from definitive in any way,” she concluded.
Biological origin
As for the new Curiosity imagery showing an interesting feature, “it’s hard to say,” explains, Chris McKay, a noted Mars researcher at NASA Ames Research Center.
“There are certainly biogenic features that look like this but that’s quite a long way from saying these have to be biogenic features and could not be produced abiotically,” McKay adds.
Mars expedition probes the promise that Mars was a home address for past, possibly life today.
Credit: NASA
There are now a slew of papers that look at Curiosity images and some photos taken from the Mars Exploration Rover missions (Opportunity and Spirit) and say “these features look biotic to me,” McKay points out. “Very few people are convinced. These may or may not be biological.”
On Earth, McKay suggests, “such a claim of biological origin would be based on much better images, thin sections, etc. and backed by extensive analysis of the samples with multiple laboratory instruments. It is possible that someday a picture from Mars will be so good that its biological origin will be clear. Not yet,” he said.
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2663, February 2, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2663 tasks.
Recent images include close-up photos of the robot’s surroundings, use of its Dust Removal Tool, and other scenic shots.
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B image acquired on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera photo taken on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Mast Camera Right image taken on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager photo taken on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity Chemistry & Camera image acquired on Sol 2663, February 2, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL
Curiosity Chemistry & Camera Remote Micro-Imaging (RMI) camera photo taken on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager photo taken on Sol 2662, February 1, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Left B Camera image taken on Sol 2661, January 31, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2661 duties.
Curiosity’s recent drive successfully moved uphill and closer to the “Greenheugh” pediment, reports Michelle Minitti, a planetary geologist at Framework in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Image captures a geologic six pack, six targets under study by Curiosity.
“The rocks around us were a riot of shapes, colors and textures, making it difficult to limit ourselves to which ones we would look at,” Minitti adds. “The team is trying to understand how (or if) the bedrock chemistry changes as we move closer to the Greenheugh pediment, as the pediment marks a change in rock type from the majority of rocks we have encountered through the clay-bearing “Glen Torridon” unit.”
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 2661, January 31, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
As such, many of the rover targets are dedicated to the bedrock.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 2661, January 31, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Free of veins
The robot’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) are slated to analyze “Cullivoe” and “Bogmill Pow,” the former after it has been brushed by the Dust Removal Tool (DRT).
“Cullivoe represents the flatter, smoother areas of the bedrock free of veins or other erosion-resistant features while Bogmill Pow is one of the rough, multicolored areas of the bedrock,” Minitti points out.
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) photo produced on Sol 2660, January 30, 2020 shows results of Dust Removal Tool.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam ) is to analyze a similarly complementary pair of targets.
The goal is for “High Possil” to represent the background bedrock in this area, while “Duncairn” specifically focuses on an erosion-resistant feature that appears to be emerging from its host bedrock.
Spectacular feature
“Veins were a particularly spectacular feature of the workspace, often exhibiting white interiors and thin, gray exteriors,” Minitti explains. The most notable example is the bright, linear feature given the name “Tilicoultry,” with a gray slab broken off and sitting on the sand to the right of the vein, named “Hastigrow.”
“This pair, and the bedrock and sand surrounding them,” Minitti says, “will be imaged using the Mastcam multispectral technique, which ought to help uncover the differences among the bedrock and the parts of the vein.”
Higher elevations call
Curiosity will intersperse observations of the sky among all those of the ground.
Mastcam will acquire early morning images to measure the dust load in the atmosphere, and Navcam will acquire late afternoon movies to look for clouds and dust devils.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 2661, January 31, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) and Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) maintain their steady watch of the weather and radiation environment in Gale, and the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) will seek signals of hydrogen from under the rover both before and after the rover’s drive.
“Yes, as hard as it will be to leave this spot, higher elevations call! We will drive to the highest accessible bedrock exposure just below the pediment in hopes that we can interrogate its chemistry over the weekend,” Minitti concludes. “Surely, more excitement awaits!”
Credit: Southern Launch
Southern Launch is an Adelaide-based space company and is moving ahead to develop the world’s largest privately operated rocket test range near Koonibba, in the far west of South Australia.
Australia’s Koonibba Test Range will extend out over uninhabited national park, and is located on Aboriginal land north-west of Ceduna. The site provides the ability to recover rockets and do further testing and systems validation. The test site is on the land of the Koonibba Aboriginal community of roughly 200 people.
Trial location
The Koonibba test range will be used as a trial location for companies before launching rockets into orbit from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex near Port Lincoln.
Southern Launch is aiming to have a demonstration launch as soon as possible, according to the group’s website. This launch would not orbit a payload but prove that once again that Australia can launch rockets.
History
Australia’s first satellite, WRESAT, rocketed into orbit from Woomera in November 1967.
Credit: IAF
Australia was the 4th country in the world to successfully launch a satellite into space with the WRESAT satellite in 1967 and the Prospero satellite in 1971.
Both were launched from Woomera in South Australia. Australia has not launched anything into orbit from its soil since then.
For more information on Southern Launch, go to:
ESA Moon base design.
Credit: ESA/P. Carril
The European Space Agency is studying multiple techniques for 3D printing of structures on the Moon, including solar sintering and ceramics.
Credit: ESA
A 1.5 ton hollow cell block made from simulated lunar dust has been produced using a binding salt as “ink.”
The structure was made during an initial feasibility project on lunar 3D printing. It is on display in the laboratory corridor of ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in the Netherlands.
ESTEC is the European Space Agency’s main technology development and test center for spacecraft and space technology.
These finely-detailed ceramic parts have been 3D printed using simulated lunar regolith as part of an ESA-led investigation into how 3D printing could be used to support a lunar base.
Credit: ESA–G. Porter, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Moon settlement
In an earlier ESA statement it was noted that work was underway in designing an advanced printer that could complete an entire building in a week.
3D printing works best at room temperature but over much of the Moon temperatures vary enormously across days and nights lasting two weeks each.
Mosaic of the lunar south pole from images acquired by ESA’s Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART-1) that flew 2003-2006.
Credit: ESA
3D printing works best at room temperature but over much of the Moon temperatures vary enormously across days and nights lasting two weeks each. For potential settlement, the lunar poles offer the most moderate temperature range.
The Shackleton area at the south pole of the Moon comes with an illuminated peak located 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) from the Shackleton rim. This “Peak of almost Eternal Light” could be used to supply electricity via solar panels to a future base.
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Right B image taken on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020. The rover is analyzing the bedrock target “Lost Valley.”
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is wrapping up Sol 2659 tasks.
Curiosity is heading for the bench reports Catherine O’Connell, a planetary geologist at University of New Brunswick Fredericton in New Brunswick, Canada.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“The bench is an area that we are very interested in,” O’Connell explains, “as it marks a potential contact between the mudstones and sandstones that we have been driving over and a ‘capping’ rock, which looks quite different.”
As the robot drives, O’Connell adds, Mars researchers are looking for changes in chemistry and sedimentary processes, which can help them understand one of the big questions they are wrestling with right now: “Why are these buttes here?!!”
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Bedrock targets
On the plan, a short science block using the rover’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) and its Mastcam, as well as contact science with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) and use of the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Following is a drive towards the bench along the side of
“Tower Butte.”
APXS and MAHLI are analyzing the bedrock target “Lost Valley,” whilst ChemCam and Mastcam are analyzing two other bedrock targets “Balantyre” and “Aberdeenshire.”
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Up the hill
“Mastcam will also image a very intriguing rock, “Hill of Stake” outside of the range of the other instruments, and further imaging of the “Greenheugh” pediment, which we hope to climb onto before this year is out,” O’Connell says.
Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Once these activities are complete,” O’Connell continues, “we start to climb further up the hill towards Tower Butte, hoping to end up with more bedrock in our workspace for a more complete compositional picture.”
Environmental activities
The environmental theme group (ENV) crammed activities into the short sol too, including “full tau” and “crater rim” observations, which allows the ENV group to quantify dust in the crater and overhead in the atmosphere.
Curiosity Mars Hand Lens Imager photo produced on Sol 2659, January 29, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) is slated to acquire temperature, pressure, humidity, and UV radiation measurements.
The robot’s Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) experiment continues its search for subsurface hydrogen, with frequent passive (utilizing cosmic rays as a source of neutrons to measure hydrogen) and also taking post-drive active (actively shooting neutrons from the rover) measurements, O’Connell concludes.
Artist’s view of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in space, up and operating tackling a full agenda of space science conquests.
Credit: Northrop Grumman
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the planned successor to the Hubble Telescope. Costs for the project have already increased by 95% and the launch date has been delayed by more than 6.5 years.
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report flags the fact that technical challenges have caused schedule strain and may increase costs. For JWST there is little margin for error and there are challenges with integration and test work ahead.
Rescheduled launch date
Technical issues with certain JWST components in 2019 have made it unfeasible for the project to launch by its goal of November 2020. Instead, the project is working towards its official rescheduled launch date of March 2021. But a recent cost and schedule analysis for JWST that GAO recommended in its last report, found the project unlikely to meet this date.
The GAO report notes that the JWST project has made significant progress since its last report in March 2019, such as completing testing of the observatory’s individual elements and integrating them together in August 2019.
JWST’s combined science instruments and optical element recently completed 100 days of thermal vacuum testing inside NASA Johnson Space Center’s Chamber A. Engineers are seen by the hardware shortly after it emerged from the huge test facility on December 1, 2017.
Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
New technical challenges
“However, new technical challenges have required the project to use more schedule reserve—extra time set aside in the project’s schedule to accommodate unforeseen risks or delays—than planned.”
As of October 2019, the JWST project had used about 76 percent of its available schedule reserve and no longer plans to launch in November 2020. The project is now managing to a March 2021 launch date but estimates only 12 percent likelihood that this date will be achieved.
NASA plans to reassess the launch date in the spring of 2020.
For more information on this GAO document — JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE: Technical Challenges Have Caused Schedule Strain and May Increase Costs go to:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/704078.pdf
A hightlights overview of the report can be read at:
Curiosity Right Navigation Camera Right B image taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Chemistry & Camera Remote Micro Imager (RMI) photo taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL
Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B image acquired on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Navigation Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Navigation Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Navigation Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Navigation Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 2658, January 28, 2020.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just begun Sol 2659 operations.
Reports Ken Herkenhoff, a planetary geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, a Sol 2657 drive by the rover went well, “so we have new bedrock exposures to explore on Sol 2658.”
The goal is to get good chemical and remote sensing data in this location before proceeding uphill toward the south.
A “touch-and-go” sol is planned, starting with a short Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) integration on a bedrock slab named “Marchmont.”
The rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) is slated to take some images of Marchmont, and then the arm will be moved out of the way for Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) observations of Marchmont and “Inverness Shire,” a darker block sitting on the bedrock surface.
Curiosity’s Right Mastcam is scheduled to then take images of the ChemCam targets and “Whitelaw Moss,” another slab of bedrock.
Mastcam will also acquire a 13×3 stereo mosaic of the west side of Tower Butte to examine its sedimentary structures.
Herkenhoff explains that after a rover drive of 75 feet (23-meters) and the usual post-drive activities, ChemCam will use Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) to automatically select a bedrock target in the rover’s new location.
Finally, the robot’s Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) is scheduled to take an image during twilight.
