Sol 1405-1408: Bimbe Conglomerates

20 July 2016

After a busy weekend plan, we are back to “restricted” sols this week, planning two days at a time. Monday’s planning for sols 1405-1406 started off with a discussion of whether we wanted to do some brief contact science before driving, or just drive straight for the block deposit called “Bimbe”.

In the end, we decided to keep the contact science in the plan, so sol 1405 included some MAHLI imaging of the target “Guri”. Mastcam had a multispectral observation of Guri as well as “Galo” to look for evidence of hematite. Mastcam also had an observation of an outcrop of possible conglomerate rock. ChemCam had measurements of the bedrock targets “Cela” and “Dala”.

After that we drove toward Bimbe. On sol 1406, we had a Navcam atmospheric observation and a ChemCam AEGIS target. I also advocated for a long-distance RMI mosaic on sol 1406 to make up for the one that was lost when the rover went into safe mode, but the orientation of the rover after the drive made it difficult so it ended up being pulled. (It would have caused ChemCam to slew past the path of the sun in the sky while focused, and we like to avoid any risk of pointing the telescope at the sun). So I’ll have to advocate for that observation some other time.

The sol 1406 drive went perfectly, so this morning we found ourselves in an awesome place to study the blocks and conglomerates at “Bimbe”. Sol 1407 starts with ChemCam observations of the targets “Lucala”, “Cabamba”, and “Bungo”, followed by a Mastcam stereo mosaic of the Bimbe rocks. MAHLI then has several observations of the workspace and a closer look at the target “Sonneblom”, and APXS has an overnight observation of Sonneblom.

On Sol 1408, we have a morning block of atmospheric observations from NavCam and Mastcam, followed by a Mastcam multispectral observation of the target “Tumba” and stereo mosaics of the southern part of Bimbe as well as some rocks in an area called “Balombo”. ChemCam will also observe Sonneblom and Balombo.

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