Curiosity update: Duluth at our feet… er, wheels

Sol 2054, May 16, 2018, update by MSL scientist Abigail Fraeman: Our sol 2054 plan was limited by a small morning downlink. Occasionally, the flight paths of the Mars orbiters over Gale Crater don’t have favorable geometries for relays with Curiosity, and this means our data downlink passes are smaller than average. Today we received only 1.6 MB (Megabytes) of data at the start of our planning day. This was just enough to tell us the drive executed successfully and the rover was healthy, but not enough to include any new images from our current spot. We did get another (also small) downlink several hours into planning, which gave us the first view of our drill target smack in the middle of our workspace – a rock we are calling “Duluth.”  [More at link]