Sols 4350-4351: A Whole Team Effort
Curiosity Navigation
Curiosity Home
Mission Overview
Where is Curiosity?
Mission Updates
Science
Overview
Instruments
Highlights
Exploration Goals
News and Features
Multimedia
Curiosity Raw Images
Images
Videos
Audio
Mosaics
More Resources
Mars Missions
Mars Sample Return
Mars Perseverance Rover
Mars Curiosity Rover
MAVEN
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Mars Odyssey
More Mars Missions
The Solar System
The Sun
Mercury
Venus
Earth
The Moon
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto & Dwarf Planets
Asteroids, Comets & Meteors
The Kuiper Belt
The Oort Cloud
2 min read
Sols 4350-4351: A Whole Team Effort
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Right Navigation Camera on sol 4348 — Martian day 4,348 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Oct. 29, 2024, at 14:20:08 UTC.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024
Just like you and me, the Curiosity rover has a few idiosyncratic tendencies — special ways that the rover behaves that we, the team on Earth, have come to understand to be harmless but still throw a curveball to our planning.
Unfortunately, the set of activities that were planned to execute on Monday behaved in one of these special ways — leaving the rover’s arm down on the ground without completing the planned set of activities, including the remainder of our contact science, remote sensing, or drive.
When this happens the whole team gets together to review the information Curiosity sends to us, and we ensure as a team that we understand the quirky way the rover acted and that we are good to proceed. While not ideal for keeping up with our scientific cadence, I appreciate these moments because they remind me of all the experts we have evaluating the rover’s health and safety day in and day out.
So for today’s plan — we completed the contact science observations of “Reds Meadow” that had been planned on Monday and picked up a second suite of contact science measurements of “Ladder Lake.” Both of these are bedrock targets and the APXS and MAHLI observations we make will continue our characterization of changes in bedrock composition and morphology in this area. We also repeated the remote sensing observations planned on Monday that did not execute.
With a fresh set of Rover Planner eyes, we reassessed if the drive planned on Monday was still the best we could do and, impressively, today’s RP agreed. So the drive remains the same, making excellent progress toward our next imaging waypoint.
The remainder of the plan contained our usual atmospheric measurements!
We’ll see what Friday holds!
Written by Elena Amador-French, Science Operations Coordinator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Share
Details
Last Updated
Nov 01, 2024
Related Terms
Blogs
Explore More
2 min read
Sols 4348-4349: Smoke on the Water
Article
1 day ago
2 min read
A Spooky Soliday: Haunting Whispers from the Martian Landscape
Article
2 days ago
3 min read
Sols 4345-4347: Contact Science is Back on the Table
Article
3 days ago
Keep Exploring
Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…