As discussed in the previous blog, we’ve had some drive faults recently due to the tricky terrain we are on. After the drive on sol 3592 faulted, on sol 3594 I planned the drive as the mobility Rover Planner. I was so happy to log into my workstation this morning to see that the drive worked and put a really cool rock into the robotic arm’s workspace that the scientists had been aiming for!

We start out sol 3596 with a remote sensing block full of ChemCam and Mastcam goodies. We start with ChemCam using its laser on “Marshall Falls” which will also be a later robotic arm target. ChemCam will also image Bolivar in the distance. After that, Mastcam will image Bolivar, Marshall Falls, Orinoco, “Pirai Pond” cobble, “Joao Gama” bedrock, and “Agua Blanca.”

Next up is the first set of our robotic arm activities for the sol. Today I was the arm Rover Planner, although I had a trainee, Changrak, shadowing me and he was the one writing up the arm commands while I was double checking his work. It was his first shift for operating the robotic arm! He recently received the mobility Rover Planner certification so next up is working towards the robotic arm Rover Planner certification. He got a trial by fire as the science team asked for a lot of robotic arm activities today, including two brushes with our Dust Removal Tool! Usually, we’ll only do one brushing activity because of planning constraints like time or power available for rover activities, but the science team was incredibly excited about this rock and we have abundant time and power in this plan, so we were able to get in the two brushes, one on Marshall Falls and another one on “Corona Falls.” Corona Falls is a darker section of the rock and Marshall Falls is a lighter section of the rock, so the scientists want to investigate the differences between the two areas. We will also take extensive MAHLI imaging of both targets. This first group of arm activities ends by placing APXS onto Corona Falls for an evening integration. A bit later in the evening, we reposition the arm to place APXS onto Marshall Falls for another set of integrations. Later in the night we’ll stow the arm so we’ll be ready to drive on the next sol.

On sol 3597, we begin with some ChemCam and Mastcam observations. ChemCam starts by using the laser on Corona Falls, then images an inverted channel in the distance. Mastcam will then take multispectral imaging of Marshall Falls and Corona Falls. As you can see, we are using a lot of the rover’s instruments to study Corona Falls and Marshall Falls! Taking observations with multiple instruments help the scientists reveal more information, since each instrument can provide a different data set that when combined can reveal more information about the rocks. Mastcam will also image the rover deck to keep an eye on how dusty the rover is. Navcam will also look for any Martian dust devils and monitor dust within Gale Crater.

Once all of that is done, we’ll drive! We’ll be driving about 12 meters to another interesting rock the scientists hope to analyze in the next plan. During this drive we’ll also be taking a MARDI video to watch the terrain change below the rover. Today’s plan has what we call a small decisional pass, in that we will not get a lot of data down after the drive that will help guide the next arm or drive activities. The scientists and engineers work closely to prioritize the data to try and make sure the critical imaging will come down that will hopefully enable robotic arm activities and more driving in the next plan. Sometimes these passes can overperform and give us more data than we anticipated, so we’re crossing our fingers for this to happen and give us a better chance of having all the information we need.

Later in the afternoon of sol 3597, we’ll take a zenith movie to look for clouds in the sky. In the evening we’ll take a picture with MARDI to see the terrain again below the rover in different lighting and shadows from the end of the drive movie.

Sol 3598 contains a lot of Martian atmospheric observations with a Mastcam atmospheric dust opacity measurement, a ChemCam autonomous laser activity and some imaging of the sky, and Navcam imaging of the sky and a dust devil search. The entire plan also contains a lot of background REMS, RAD, and DAN observations to characterize the Martian environment.

As Dr. Abigail Fraeman noted a couple weeks ago, Curiosity is navigating through terrain that is difficult to traverse. At the start of today's planning cycle, Curiosity's operations team received data that informed us that our previously planned drive came up short, only completing 36 cm of a planned ~7 m drive. Curiosity remained surrounded by a mix of large rocks and sand, neither of which are overly amenable to swift Mars driving. In the case of the prior intended drive, Curiosity terminated mobility activities autonomously, prompted by the effects of having the right-rear wheel in sand and the right-middle wheel perched on a sizable rock.

The plan today focused on backing Curiosity out of this configuration, and re-re-attempting the intended drive. In terms of science in the plan, our mobility goals were complemented by DAN activities before (passive) and after (active) our drive. Prior to the drive, Curiosity completed Mastcam and ChemCam imaging activities before unstowing the arm to acquire MAHLI images of the raised-fin target "Tiger Pond" and a vein-like target "La Mata."

Curiosity is back on the road! The arm (seen above while conducting science activities on sol 3583) is good to go, so the team planned a full day of activities. Curiosity has been sitting in the same place for a few sols, so the team has been taking advantage of that to get extra observations in this area. One Mastcam observation is an extension of a mosaic (“Parai Pond”) that was started last week. Additionally, there is a Mastcam multispectral observation in the plan to capture bedrock that shows color variations. We will get a closer look at a feature in the distance that is thought to be an inverted channel with a ChemCam long distance RMI. ChemCam will also target the “Kurupung” block in the workspace. The ChemCam team is taking advantage of spending several sols in one location to build up their statistics of the geochemistry in this area. By targeting multiple rocks in the scene, we will get a better understanding as to whether everything has the same chemistry or if there are small variations. Contact science is back in the mix, with a MAHLI observation of an interesting pink pebble in the workspace called “Piabas.” We also get back on the road in this plan, with a short seven meter drive that will take the rover to the edge of the next area of interest. Onwards!

Curiosity is back to planning after an issue with the rover’s arm in last weekend’s plan. The engineers are still making sure we understand what happened before doing more contact science or driving. That means that today’s 3-sol plan is focused on remote sensing and environmental monitoring, and there is a lot to see in this area! Curiosity is in a beautiful valley with intriguing buttes in every direction, some interesting bedrock blocks in our workspace, and windblown fines scattered throughout. The diverse landscape can be seen in the above Navcam image.

I was on shift as SOWG Chair today, and the team planned a lot of great science observations. On the first sol, GEO planned ChemCam LIBS of a bedrock block, as well as a Mastcam multispectral observation, and some imaging of loose sediment to look for changes. The plan also includes Mastcam imaging of sedimentary structures and diagenetic features, and bedding within the Chenapau butte and adjacent channel. GEO also planned a MARDI image to look for changes in the past week. The second sol includes two long distance ChemCam RMI mosaics to investigate the stratigraphy at a butte named Deepdale, featured in the above Navcam image. The third sol includes another LIBS target on a bedrock block, and a Mastcam mosaic to assess bedrock weathering. In addition to characterizing the geology and geochemistry, ENV is going to keep the rover busy looking at the sky. The team planned observations to monitor dust in the atmosphere, search for dust devils, monitor clouds, and search for cosmic rays. Looks like a busy weekend on Mars!

It is tempting to list off the multitude of science observations the Curiosity team planned for the four sols that cover the Labor Day weekend in the US - an astonishing 15 targets, hundreds of Mastcam images, dozens of RMI images, and more than 2 Gb of science data collected. But rather than writing my usual summary of our activities for a plan, it feels more apt given the holiday to focus on the people who made it happen - the kind of people who have been showing up for 10 years to make all the science Curiosity does possible.

Downlink leads like Trinh and Matt, and localization scientists like Tim and Scott give us the data to make any new planning possible. They figure out things like: just where did our drive end up? what rocks can we reach with the arm? what targets are safe for ChemCam to shoot? where can we drive next? These folks quite literally set the scene for the plan ahead.

Scientists like Aster, Amelie, and Lucy show up to see the new scene, quickly digest what is there: what matters to building our understanding of this place? what is interesting? what is new? They suggest observations to capture those targets. Scientists like Bill and Alex show up that have been keeping track of the structures and buttes around us for hundreds or even thousands of sols. They suggest observations that build on previous ones, digging into features and structures we only now see as we approach this topography. Scientists like Mike and Mark show up to ensure our dedicated watch on the Martian atmosphere and environment continues, creating a systematic dataset of surface conditions that builds a modern climate record for Mars. Led by our science theme leads Jeff and Claire, everyone has to rapidly triage and prioritize their observations, and make trades against how much time and power are available in the plan.

The uplink leads like Deirdra, Natalie, and Cindy are magic mixtures of scientists and engineers that know how to make the most out of their instruments’ observations and write the commands to make them happen. They work hand in hand with the scientists to idealize all the desired observations to idealize their desired observations: is this at the right time of day? is this enough coverage? are these images of sufficient resolution? Often, multiple iterations are required to plan a scientifically-valuable, practically-executable observation. The uplink leads translate science desires to camera parameters and laser settings, and translate camera parameters and laser settings to code that travels through the Deep Space Network for the rover to execute.

Rover planners like Evan and Ashley are the engineers who design every motion of rover hardware. They figure out how to position the DRT, MAHLI, and APXS - located on a 50 kg turret at the end of a 2 meter long robotic arm - mere centimeters over a rock target. They figure out how to drive safely across jumbled, rocky terrain with wheels that have holes you could put your hand through, and end up in the next scientifically interesting spot. They model and remodel and tweak and change a dizzying array of arm angles, slip limits, and drive paths that ultimately give Curiosity life and motion on Mars.

All of it is buttoned up by the uplink team at JPL, who keeps tabs on everything related to rover health and functionality from our communication passes with the orbiters, to battery and current levels, to the amount of data storage available. Witnessing Nicky, the Science Planner in charge of checking and confirming every action in the plan during our main planning meeting today, was like watching a track athlete in a 5000 meter race - perfect, unrelenting pacing resulting in victory (a successful plan).

I could only list a small fraction of the names of those on shift today to build Curiosity’s weekend plan. Please know, though, that every time you visit the MSL website, or see images from Curiosity on Twitter or Insta, that a team like today’s was responsible for them. It is our collective labor of love, executed on a mountain in a crater on a planet a hundred million miles away.

We kicked off Curiosity operations this morning with the news that our previous drive did not complete as planned. Some of the sand in the area caused the rover to veer ever-so-slightly off course, which then caused the right side of the vehicle to just clip the edge of a large rock. When the onboard safety check sensed the wheels were climbing a feature larger than anticipated, Curiosity stopped mid-drive to await further instructions. Fortunately, the human operators back on Earth could see there was nothing particularly dangerous about this terrain, so in today's plan, we asked Curiosity to continue towards an area in Marker Band valley that has a very different texture in orbital images.

As a result of the right middle wheel being perched on a rock (see image above), we did not want to risk shifting the rover's center of mass by unstowing the arm today. As a result, we filled the plan with lots of remote sensing observations. We'll take a ChemCam LIBS observation of a nodule we named "Rio Negro," as well as Mastcam mosaic of cool rocks around the rover that we named "Las Lajitas," "La Esmeralda," and "Cumana." We'll also collect a long distance ChemCam RMI mosaic of another area of the marker band, and several observations to monitor the environment around us.

After a successful 13 meter weekend drive, Curiosity finds itself in the middle of “Marker Band” valley. The underlaying bedrock has changed dramatically over the last week, from dark and nodular to light-toned and relatively smooth. This area has been of interest to the science team since Gale crater was first selected as the landing site, 10 years in the making! The orbital mineralogical information suggests the presence of Mg-sulfate bearing rocks in this area. Today’s two sol plan provides our first opportunity to measure the dust-free chemical composition of this new type of bedrock with our APXS instrument, the team chose the target “Micobie.” In addition to Micobie, MAHLI will image “Jacamim,” another bedrock target. We’ll also take a ChemCam LIBS measurement of the bedrock target “Jacamim.” These measurements will help place our orbital measurements into local context and help us piece together the story of how the chemical composition of Mt. Sharp has changed over its history.

Beyond studying the local bedrock, we are taking advantage of the fantastic 360 degree view around us to image exposures of the marker band on top and west of the “Bolivar” butte, as well as the stratigraphy expressed on the “Orinoco” and “Kulenan” buttes using Mastcam and ChemCam.

We will also continue our regular cadence of environmental monitoring measurements.

Our drive will take us another 14 or so meters into Marker Band valley as we investigate how the orbital indicator of Mg-sulfate is expressed in the bedrock at the rover scale over the next week.

Today you could hear the excitement of the scientists as we’ve approached an area with a different type of rocks! There are lots of scientific goodies in the plan as a result.

We start off sol 3575 with a big block of science activities! First is a ChemCam activity on “Nova Estrela” which we will later look at with the robotic arm, followed by a ChemCam mosaic in the distance. Then Mastcam will take pictures of Nova Estrela, “Candado”, some of our recent rover tracks, some scouting images for a potential drill location nearby, and some of the Orinoco butte nearby. Finally, that block of science observations will end with an atmospheric monitoring activity. After that the rover will take a short nap, and mid-afternoon wake up to take a Mastcam sky observation. We’ll take another nap before beginning the robotic arm activities in the late afternoon.

Today I was the arm Rover Planner, so I was responsible for the arm commanding. We are taking a look at three targets with the arm. First, we’ll take some MAHLIs of the “Los Rosos” target and a 1.8cm offset of it, then some MAHLIs of Nova Estrela, then finally some MAHLIs of “Enamuna” before placing APXS down on Los Rosos for an APXS measurement. Later in the Martian evening we’ll re-place APXS on the Los Rosos offset target to get a slightly different measurement. Later in the night we’ll stow the arm to prepare for the drive on the next sol.

On sol 3576, we begin with a Mastcam of Bolivar, a ChemCam observation of Enamuna and a ChemCam mosaic, before following up with a Mastcam of Enamuna. After that, we’ll drive about 12m to a rock for robotic arm work in the next plan. After the drive we’ll do a DAN active activity.

For the third sol of the plan, 3577, we have a midday science observation set with ChemCam autonomously selecting a target and a slow of Navcam atmospheric observations. After a long nap, the rover will take a single MARDI image along with a cosmic ray survey. Overnight we will also have an APXS atmospheric observation. Curiosity will awake quite early in the morning of sol 3578 to do a Navcam pre-dawn cloud survey and slightly later in the morning another block of Navcam and Mastcam atmospheric observations.

We also have a lot of passive DAN measurements and background REMS and RAD observations in the plan.

It was a busy day for the Curiosity uplink team! After our arm activity and data volume restrictions described by Lucy Thompson from last plan, we came in today with ~120% downlinked data performance and full permission to use MAHLI and APXS for contact science. Our small, ~11 m drive from Sol 3572 was successful and we arrived in front of some dark-toned, nodular rocks; our last chance at studying this material before heading into an area of lighter-toned, smoother rocks. Take a look at this Sol 3572 Navcam image showing the sandy transition between these nodular and smooth rocks. Today my role was on MAHLI/MARDI uplink, which includes putting together imaging sequences for the MAHLI/MARDI cameras, making sure our cameras are safe, and our images are being planned with best lighting in mind.

Since our arm workspace was filled with bumpy rocks, using the Dust Removal Tool to get dust-cleared arm targets wasn’t available. Instead, we planned for the arm to study two undisturbed targets named “Wadakapiapue” (from Venezuela) and “Kanuku” (from Guyana). The Wadakapiapue target is on a piece of dustier bedrock so MAHLI decided to take images up to ~6.9 cm away, but no closer since the dust cover makes it hard to measure grain size. The Kanuku target looked less dusty and more nodular from our Sol 3572 post-drive imaging, so MAHLI decided to try for a Quantitative Relief Model (QRM) imaging activity involving five images of the target from slightly different offsets to get a high-resolution model of the target topography. MAHLI's closest image of Kanuku will be from ~3.9 cm away. APXS liked the Kanuku target better as well and is planning to sniff the chemical composition of both targets, but Kanuku gets sniffed later in the evening which is best for minimizing thermal noise.

The arm itself is also a target today with ChemCam planning to use their Remote-Micro-Imager (RMI) to get super-close images of the drill bit before our next drill campaign (stay tuned for more details!). Here’s an example ChemCam RMI of the Sol 3572 “Isla Cangrejo" target.

The rest of our two-sol plan includes lots of remote science thanks to Mastcam, Navcam, and ChemCam; the trio of instruments living together on our mast ~2 m above the ground. Mastcam is planning higher-resolution mosaics of two distant areas: an 11-frame mosaic of a rubbly-looking ridge in our drive direction and a 15-frame mosaic of the base of “Orinoco" off to the east. They’re also planning an 8-frame mosaic on some near-field rock textures, a 3-frame mosaic of a rock we drove over last time (and may have broken), and a multispectral image of a possible meteorite in true color plus 12 other wavelengths of light which make a low-resolution reflectance spectrum plot to help confirm it’s really a meteorite. Meteorite fragments are more common on Mars due to its thin atmosphere and absence of tectonic activity. We sometimes find them on our traverse through Gale Crater: throwback to Sol 1505 when we found “Egg Rock”.

Navcam is conducting an exciting survey to search for cosmic rays in the middle of the night, ChemCam is shooting their laser at a target named “Paloma” (close to the APXS/MAHLI Kanuku target), and on Sol 3574 we’re hoping for another successful drive across the sand into the lighter-toned area described above. If all goes well, we should see a MARDI image of the lighter-toned stuff beneath the left-front wheel at twilight.

Last bit of good news for our Martian explorer: we’ve successfully passed through the shadows of “Bolivar" and “Deepdale” (named "Paraitepuy pass”) which made communications and image lighting harder to plan. This plan the sun will set behind Bolivar ~2.5 hours later than Paraitepuy pass to give us better image quality and ability to drive later in the day. Another exciting saga is ahead for Curiosity as we slowly turn southwest through the valley and continue to search for the sulfate-rich area hinted by orbital data.

We are almost through Paraitepuy pass, an area between two large buttes that has made for tricky driving while dealing with communication challenges, sand and broken-up rocks. But the end is in sight as we near an area identified from orbit as probably containing hydrated magnesium sulfates, in contrast with the clay-bearing unit that we have been transitioning out of. Before we get there though, the team noticed that there is an area that appears quite different from what we have been driving over, and the upcoming, potentially sulfate-rich area. The broken-up bedrock is characterized by numerous, relatively large, resistant features. Although we had these rocks in front of the rover today, because of a low data volume downlink from the previous plan, we did not have the imaging necessary to safely place the arm and the MAHLI and APXS instruments on the rocks. As the APXS strategic planner this week, I advocated for trying to get APXS compositional data on these rocks before we drive away. We therefore prioritized driving in this plan to put us in a good position to do contact science on one of these interesting rocks in tomorrow’s plan. Given that these “nodule-rich” rocks occur in the vicinity of the “sulfate-bearing” area mapped from orbit, the team decided that it was important to fully characterize them. They could provide insights into the processes that occurred in the rocks as we change from clay-bearing to sulfate-bearing.

Although we could not do contact science, we took full advantage of our remote sensing instruments to investigate the rocks immediately in front of the rover, as well as attempting to place them in context with outcrops exposed in the surrounding buttes. ChemCam will acquire compositional data on an exposure of the nodular bedrock, “Isla Cangrejo,” which will also be imaged with Mastcam. Mastcam images will also be obtained of “Kulishiri,” “Jiboia,” and “Altana Creek” to further document textures. We also planned a Mastcam mosaic of a section of the Bolivar butte to look at possible exposures of the nodule rich material, and the relationship with underlying and overlying strata. To fully document the terrain around and below us, a Mastcam starboard mosaic and MARDI image were also planned.

The environmental science team were also busy and planned several observations to continue monitoring changes in atmospheric conditions. These included: a Navcam large dust devil survey and cosmic ray survey. Standard REMS, DAN and RAD activities round out this plan.