Sol 1462: Drill Troubleshooting and Remote Sensing

16 September 2016

Unfortunately the Sol 1461 drilling activities did not complete as expected, so the Sol 1462 plan was focused on trying to understand the problem while also doing some remote sensing. The plan starts off with Mastcam multispectral observations of the target “Ekunha” on the nearby butte. ChemCam will analyze the targets “Cuasa” and “Cuimba”, and then Mastcam will document those targets and take an 8x3 mosaic of the butte, along with a change detection observation at “Goantagab”.

In the afternoon, Mastcam has a mosaic of the target “Karasburg” to help with planning contact science, and then in the morning of Sol 1463 Mastcam has another mosaic of the nearby butte, under different lighting, and Navcam has at atmospheric measurement. Throughout the whole plan, there are also a number of joint Navcam and Mastcam photometry observations of the same location at different times of day to help understand how sunlight scatters off the surface.

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