Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Curiosity Front Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B image acquired on Sol 3409, March 10, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is now performing Sol 3410 duties.

The rover continues to face difficult terrain.

Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reports that recent Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) AEGIS work has automatically identified an interesting rock near the rover by itself.

Curiosity Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera Left B photo taken on Sol 3406 March 6, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

AEGIS stands for Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) – a software suite that permits the rover to autonomously detect and prioritize targets.

Furthermore, there’s been a bonanza of atmospheric monitoring activities, as the rover had power to spare.

“This included 7 dust devil movies with 4 different cameras: Mastcam, Navcam, and the front and rear Hazcams,” Guzewich adds.

Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera image taken on Sol 3406, March 6, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The robot has viewshed views as it wheels to the north from its current location on the Greenheugh Pediment, which provides good opportunities for dust devil searches.

Slow-going

In an earlier report, Ashley Stroupe, a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reports that the rover is continuing to slowly move through very challenging terrain.

Over the last weekend, Curiosity made it about 13 feet (4 meters) before the drive stopped when the rover sensed more difficulty.

A recent challenge the robot and controllers faced was dealing with the drive stopping early, in a place that scientists didn’t expect.

“Given the difficulties of driving in this area, this was not a huge surprise,” Stroupe says. With the rover not being in the expected orientation, Curiosity would not have been able to see Earth to receive a recently uploaded plan (the line of site was again occluded by the terrain).

European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter.
Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Relaying of plans

Instead, researchers ended up relaying the plan via Europe’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) orbiter.

“Due the timing of the relay, we shifted our plan to cover sols 3409-3410 instead of 3408-3409. Once we knew we could get the plan to the rover, we were able to move forward with the day. We won’t see the results of this plan until Friday morning, but that gives us more time in our plan for targeted observations on the first sol and allows us to drive on the second sol,” Stroupe adds,

ChemCam has done a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) observation of “Achvarasdal,” a dark toned target in the rover’s workspace, and a 10-frame long-distance Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) mosaic of the Gediz Vallis Ridge.

Curiosity Left B Navigation Camera Sol 3407 photo acquired on March 7, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We also took several Mastcam mosaics, including the ChemCam targets as well as a large 16-frame mosaic to look at pebble sorting and an extension of our prior drive direction imaging,” Stroupe notes. “All of these Mastcam images will hopefully provide a 3-D reconstruction of the formations in this area, which can tell us something about how the materials were deposited.”

Safety checks

Unlike previous drive faults by Curiosity, “we ended in a place that we could safely unstow the arm for contact science. The target named “Skaw Granite” is one of the larger pieces of bedrock within reach,” Stroupe says.

With the extra time, the arm rover planners were able to incorporate a brush of the contact science target (for which they did not have time in the original plan).

The mobility rover planners had a big task, Stroupe explains, “to figure out how to continue to make progress in this very challenging spot. They ended up putting in a lot of extra safety checks and some conditional sequencing in order to try to account for many different possibilities.”

Tricky area

“We’re trying to follow the same route we have planned before, which should take us along this valley to where we might be able to view the pediment and better assess the safety of driving there, as well as to find a good place to climb up,” Stroupe continues. “Hopefully, when we get the results of the drive, this tricky area will be in our rear view mirror. After the drive, we also did a lot of environmental observations with Navcam, including a lot of movies/surveys for dust devils.”

Curiosity Mast Camera Left image taken on Sol 3406, March 6, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSS

Stroupe concludes that the Curiosity team took their time to sort things out and get things right, “which did make for a slow start to the planning day, but we got everything in the plan and did complete our process without going too late.”