Sol 2243-44, November 26, 2018, update by MSL scientist Lucy Thompson: Curiosity was happy and healthy after the Thanksgiving holiday, but experienced a minor post-holiday hiccup during a test of delivering sample portions to the workspace. The rover’s robotic arm tripped a safety limit such that the activity did not quite go to completion. We should be able to easily recover the rest of this activity in our plan tosol. This should set us up to dump the “Highfield” drill fines later this week, so that we can analyze their chemistry and appearance with APXS, ChemCam, MAHLI and Mastcam, and compare these findings with those from the mineralogical and compositional analyses by Curiosity’s internal instruments, CheMin and SAM.
As well as recovering the arm activity, we were able to plan a number of science observations to further characterize the bedrock in this workspace, continue our search for meteorites and monitor changes in the wind and sediment movement. ChemCam will analyze the composition of two typical grey bedrock targets, “Kingseat” and “Grampian,” as well as a potential meteorite fragment, “Kerrera,” identified from Mastcam multispectral images… [More at link]