Home Space Sols 4261-4262: Drill Sol 1…Take 2

Sols 4261-4262: Drill Sol 1…Take 2

August 1, 2024

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Sols 4261-4262: Drill Sol 1…Take 2

A grayscale panorama of the Martian surface showing terrain covered in many small rocks in the foreground. The middle ground consists of smooth dunes, curving from a low point in the center of the image, upward toward the left and right edges of the frame. In the background, another hill at center, with uneven ground that looks like the top of a frosted chocolate cake.

This image was taken by Right Navigation Camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4258 — Martian day 4,258 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on July 29, 2024, at 03:26:02 UTC.

Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 31, 2024

As Cat mentioned on Monday, today’s plan is a second attempt at our Drill Sol 1 activities. We’ve shifted the target on Kings Canyon a little bit, but the activities remain the same — a preload test to ensure that we’re able to safely drill here, and contact science to get a preview of what composition we might be dealing with in this target.

Around these pre-drilling activities, we still had some time left over for more typical science activities. Power wasn’t as much of a concern as it will become as the drill campaign progresses, but we did have to do some rearranging due to timing constraints. There are some activities that need to go at particular times, whether that be for lighting, heating, or to coincide with other observations. If you put enough of these together, there can be a lot of swapping back and forth and moving things around to get the perfect position for everything. It’s a bit like choreographing a big dance — activities have to come in at just the right time so they don’t step on anyone’s toes, and all the pieces come together to make a cohesive whole.

In this metaphorical dance, our first movement is a short solo from ChemCam — just before the preload test we were able to squeeze in LIBS (laser spectroscopy) on a darker area of bedrock called “Blacksmith Peak.” The rest of the company joins ChemCam on the second sol. Mastcam comes in first to check out “Sam Mack Meadow,” an area of crushed material, followed by a quartet of environmental activities — a suprahorizon cloud movie, a tau and line-of-sight to see how dusty the atmosphere is, and a dust devil movie. It’s then back over to ChemCam, with LIBS on Kings Canyon and a long-distance observation of the yardang unit. Mastcam brings the dance to a close with their own documentation of Kings Canyon. For an encore, Mastcam makes one last appearance later that evening to do a sky survey.

Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York University