Sol 1450-53, September 2, 2016, update by USGS scientist Lauren Edgar: Curiosity had a nice ~78 m drive on Sol 1448, which set us up for a lot of great science over the long (4-sol) weekend. Unfortunately a problem with the Deep Space Network caused an entire Odyssey pass to be lost, so we didn’t receive the workspace images that we would have needed to do contact science. Without those images we didn’t feel safe moving the arm. But the team did a great job putting together a full weekend plan.
The first sol starts with several Navcam observations to search for dust devils and monitor the atmosphere. Then we’ll acquire a Mastcam mosaic to document the beautiful buttes that we’ve been driving through, followed by ChemCam observations of the targets “Benguela” and “Gabela” to assess the composition of the local bedrock. Later in the afternoon… [More at link]