Sol 923: Getting out of Dodge

11 March 2015

The plan for today, as our SOWG (Science Operations Working Group) chair put it, is to “get out of Dodge”! We will be driving to a location where we can do “full MAHLI wheel imaging” in the coming sols.

During the drive, the rover will stop long enough for Mastcam to get an image of the drill tailings to document where we placed the APXS overnight. We’ll also get a Mastcam image of a wind-blown ripple to see what the grain sizes are. After the drive, we have Mastcam observations of the candidate contact science target “Garden City” along with routine post-drive images from Navcam. There will also be several standard environmental monitoring measurements.

Tomorrow I’m on duty as the “Keeper of the Plan” for the geology and mineralogy group and it looks like there will be time for lots of remote sensing science from our new location, so it should be a busy day!

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.