Curiosity update: Quick change artist

Sol 2079, June 11, 2018, update by MSL scientist Michelle Minitti: Over the weekend, an error cropped up during a regular test of the high gain antenna actuators, leaving the antenna unavailable for uplink of today’s plan, but otherwise healthy. The team instead will use Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to uplink a brief suite of activities to the rover, including the commands to recover the high gain antenna for use tomorrow. The MRO uplink window is hours later than our usual HGA uplink window, so with less time in the plan, we had to postpone our drill-related activities until tomorrow’s plan. We did get confirmation that we are ready for the next step of drill-related activities: dumping the “Duluth” sample for analysis by APXS, MAHLI, ChemCam and Mastcam. For today, the… [More at link]