Sol 1146-1147: A View of Meeteetse

26 October 2015

The weekend drive was successful, placing us nicely on an overlook of the “Meeteetse” area. The focus for Sol 1146 is to get some good color stereo images of the whole area, including “Big Sky,” “Greenhorn,” and “Meeteetse”. Mastcam will take a 16x3 mosaic of the Meeteetse area, plus a 12x1 right-eye mosaic of some nearby resistant ridges. It will also measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere by looking at the sun, and take a documentation image of the target “Belle Fourche” after ChemCam analyzes it. ChemCam also has a “passive sky” observation, where we use the ChemCam spectrometers to stare at the sky and measure the abundance of gases in the atmosphere.

On Sol 1147, the main activity is to deliver some of the material sampled at the “Greenhorn” drill hole to the SAM instrument, and then run a SAM evolved gas analysis and tunable laser spectrometer (EGA/TLS) experiment on the sample. This involves heating the sample gradually and measuring the gases that are produced as it breaks down.

By Ryan Anderson

-Ryan is a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of the ChemCam team on MSL.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.