This image was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4219 (2024-06-19 02:22:26 UTC). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
After successfully drilling at “Mammoth Lakes 2,” the Curiosity mission team developed a strategy for using energy to Mars research, integrating environmental observations and remote sensing into weekend activities.
All our patience was rewarded, because the NASA The Curiosity rover team on Mars was greeted with the news that our “Mammoth Lakes 2” drilling attempt was successful! You can see the drill hole in the image above, as well as the first spot we attempted just to the left (see image below). The actual drilling is just the beginning: we want to see what we’ve drilled. We’re starting that process this weekend by using our laser spectrometer (LIBS) to check out the drill hole before delivering some of the drilled material to CheMin (the Chemistry and Mineralogy X-ray Diffraction Instrument) for its own investigations.
This image was taken by the left navigation camera aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4210 and captures the block that hosts our potential drilling target, “Mammoth Lakes.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The next step in a drilling campaign is usually to continue analysis with SAM (the suite of sample analysis instruments on Mars), which tends to be quite power intensive. Therefore, we want to make sure that we approach the next plan with enough power for this. This means that even though we have a lot of free time this weekend, with three sols and CheMin only taking up the first night, we had to think carefully about how we were going to use this free time. Sometimes when science teams present our plans, we are too optimistic. Sometimes this optimism is rewarded and we are allowed to keep the extra science in the plan. Today we had to strategize a bit more, and the midday Science Operations Working Group (or SOWG, as it’s called) meeting turned into a brainstorming session, where we determined what could move and what we should put aside for the moment.
An unusual feature of this weekend’s plan was a series of brief change-detection observations of “Walker Lake” and “Finch Lake,” targets we’ve looked at in previous plans to observe the movement of Martian sand driven by wind. These were spread out over the plan’s three sols, to see any changes over the course of a single sol. Although these are relatively short observations—only a few minutes—we have to wake the rover to do them, which eats into our power. Fortunately, the science team took this into account and categorized the observations as high, medium, or low priority. This made it easy to discard the less important ones, saving some power.
This low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows the vehicle at the site where it descended to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Another energy-saving strategy is to think carefully about where observations are directed. A weekend plan almost always includes a “morning ENV science block”—time dedicated to morning environmental and atmospheric observations. Typically, this block occurs on the last sol of the plan, but we already had to wake up on the morning of the first sol for CheMin to complete its analysis. This meant that we were able to move the morning ENV block to the first sol, and Curiosity had a little more time to sleep at the end of the plan.
These changes allowed us to not only complete the plan with enough power for Monday’s activities, but also to carry out many science activities remotely. This included a number of Mastcam and ChemCam mosaics of past targets such as ‘Whitebark Pass’ and ‘Quarry Peak’. We also had two new LIBS targets: “Broken Finger Peak” and “Shout of Relief Pass”. In addition to our morning block, ENV was able to make a few additional observations: a film of dust devils, and a line of sight and tau to keep an eye on changing dust levels in the atmosphere.
Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York University
