Curiosity update: Planning for the holidays

2263ML0121040030804964E01_DXXX-br2Sol 2265-75, December 19, 2018, update by MSL scientist Lucy Thompson: Planning today revolved around making sure that Curiosity has enough power after the Christmas holidays to be able to continue analyzing “Rock Hall,” the red Jura sample that we successfully drilled last weekend. We planned and uplinked 1 sol (sol = martian day) of science and diagnostic activities and 10 sols of REMS to take us through to the end of December. Tomorrow, our final day of planning before the MSL team takes a break for the holidays, we will plan Sols 2276 – 2278 to execute on Mars before the team here on Earth returns to nominal planning activities.

The priority was to facilitate diagnostic testing of the B-side computer to help assess the rover anomaly we experienced a few months ago (see this description of the anomaly). The diagnostics require Curiosity to be awake for long periods of time, which drains her battery, and does not leave much power for other activities. Because of this, although we had tentatively planned some ChemCam LIBS and RMI observations of rock targets in the workspace, as well as some Mastcam and Navcam… [More at link]

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