Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2792 duties.

Reports Michelle Minitti, a planetary geologist at Framework in Silver Spring, Maryland: “Akin to a road trip where you want to make good time but do not want to miss the notable sights along the way, Curiosity is fitting in scientific sightseeing along her drive east toward sulfate-bearing horizons identified in Mt. Sharp long before Curiosity started exploring Gale crater in 2012.”

 

Stop-worthy attraction

The stop-worthy attraction on Sol 2790, Minitti adds, was an apparent landslide, which littered the slopes up to the “Greenheugh pediment” with a variety of dark gray blocks from that bedrock layer.

“To learn more about how the pediment, and the bedrock it once covered, eroded through time, the team planned two Mastcam mosaics from the base of the landslide,” Minitti explains. “One large mosaic will cover the landslide itself, dubbed ‘Munlochy,’ and the second, smaller mosaic will capture ‘Cowie Harbour,’ layered outcrops on lower flanks of a butte that was once connected to the Greenheugh pediment.”

Pebble-lined troughs

The plan also scheduled Mastcam to image a collection of large blocks (“Yamspath Law”) sitting among pebble-lined troughs dividing the bedrock of this part of the Glen Torridon region, further contributing to the investigation of how the terrain the rover is driving on evolved to the state the robot finds it today.

With all of the Mastcam imaging, there was only time for one Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) raster on the target “Muness,” one of the dark gray blocks brought downhill by the landslide.

“Fortunately, we knew we got additional chemistry data from the bedrock covered by the landslide in the two post-drive automated ChemCam rasters from the previous plan,” Minitti notes.

Sand patch

“We will get two more such automated ChemCam rasters after our next drive, which will take us slightly north around a sand patch that stands in our way of direct progress east,” Minitti points out.

“Before and after the drive, we will acquire numerous images and movies of the skies above us to monitor the amount of dust in the atmosphere and look for clouds and dust devils,” Minitti concludes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New road map

Meanwhile, a new rover road map shows the route driven by Curiosity through the 2788 Martian day, or sol, of the robot’s mission on Mars (June 10, 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 2786 to Sol 2788, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 273.85 feet (83.47 meters), bringing the rover’s total odometry for the mission to 13.91 miles (22.38 kilometers).

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