Sol 2076-78, June 8, 2018, update by MSL scientist Rachel Kronyak: Today we planned a weekend’s worth of activities for Curiosity. For our weekend plan, we have two main priorities: perform another analysis with CheMin on our Duluth drill sample and continue our campaign of dust storm monitoring.
Earlier in the week, our environmental science theme group (ENV) expert Scott Guzewich gave a nice summary of the dust storm developing on the other side of Mars. In response, the ENV group planned a suite of activities to monitor how the amount of dust in the atmosphere will change over the next few sols. To measure dust in the atmosphere, we’ll first point Mastcam towards the sun and take a tau measurement, which lets us determine the optical depth vertically. Then we’ll take a Mastcam image of the crater rim to determine line-of-sight extinction… [More at link]