Sol 2283, January 7, 2019. The rover’s Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) shot a three-frame composite of a rock (St Cyrus) that appears laced through and through with bright veins, plus a few large dark fragments.
At right (top), the RMI view of a target dubbed Gometra, plus the Hazcam view forward. Click any image to enlarge it.
THEMIS Image of the Day, January 8, 2019. Today’s VIS image shows part of the eastern side of Maunder Crater. This crater has a unique form, with a large amount of fill on the eastern half of the crater floor, and a valley between the crater rim and the crater fill.
It is possible that a large landslide may have occurred in this region of the crater. In this image, multiple gullies are located on the west-facing side of the valley. Maunder Crater is located in Noachis Terra.
Sols 2281-83, January 7, 2019, update by MSL scientist Vivian Sun: Today we are continuing the drill campaign at our red Jura target “Rock Hall.” The focus of this weekend’s plan is the dropoff of the Rock Hall sample to the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instrument, which will occur on Sol 2281. During the delivery process, Curiosity will open one of the SAM inlet covers (pictured above) and the rover arm will deposit a portion of the fine rock powder from the drill bit. SAM will then incrementally heat the sample up to very high temperatures and the gases released by this heating process will be analyzed to better understand the chemical and mineralogic components of Rock Hall. The SAM results will be extremely important for complementing the chemical observations from APXS and ChemCam, as well as the recent mineralogic results from CheMin… [More at link]
Ejecta margin near Ares Vallis. The objective of this observation is to examine the margin of a crater’s ejecta. The ejecta on this side looks different than on the opposite side. Ares Vallis is an outflow channel, likely carved by fluids in the distant past.
Beautiful Mars series. [More at links]
[Ed. note: Opportunity captured this Martian dust devil as it twisted through the landscape below her vista point high on Knudsen Ridge on March 31, 2016.]
January 6, 2019: Opportunity Still Silent, Team Still Hopeful: The Mars Exploration Rovers team and colleagues at NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) continued reaching out and listening for Opportunity throughout December, but all they heard was the sound of silence, again. It’s now been more than six and a half months that the longest-lived robot on another planet has been incommunicado.
After Opportunity sent a downlink June 10th, the “mother of all dust storms,” as some team members have described it, blotted out the Sun and stopped the solar-powered rover and the MER mission in their tracks. Shortly thereafter, the robot presumably shut down and went into a kind of hibernation as the massive storm pummeled Endeavour and then blustered its way around the planet.
Since then, DSN engineers have sent out more than 448 recovery commands and gotten not so much as one ‘beep’ back.
“Hopes remain high, the team remains vigilant, and we’re going to keep trying,” MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, told The MER Update not long before the New Year rang in. “Opportunity is a tough rover and has pulled through a lot of tough things before. We’ll see what happens.”
As it stands now, NASA officials will consider the ops team’s next recommendation and reassess recovery efforts at some point in January. (…)
Summer continues to shine on Endeavour Crater and Opportunity’s site in Perseverance Valley. That means it’s still dust storm season. The good news is that no new threatening storm popped up in December and the dusty haze lingering in the sky over the 22-kilometer (13.7 mile) diameter crater was estimated as “about normal” for this time of year. The bad news is that the seasonal cycle of winds tucked within the greater dust storm season – which historically have served to clear accumulated dust on the rover’s solar arrays – either haven’t arrived in Perseverance or haven’t cleared enough dust from the rover’s solar arrays or something else has happened.
For now, it remains a waiting game.“There’s just no new news on Opportunity,” said MER Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University St. Louis. (…)
Once they do make contact with Opportunity, if they are able to do so, the MER engineers will have to address a mission clock fault, a low-power fault, and an up-loss timer fault. They are well prepared for that and just about anything else imaginable, except a broken part.
The ops team continued routine planning as they have since Opportunity checked into hibernation. “We’re still building the plans so all the tools still flow and the team stays in the routine of operations,” said Herman… [More at link]
THEMIS Image of the Day, January 7, 2019. Today’s VIS image shows a small part of the south polar cap. The layering of the cap is easy to see.
The layers record the seasonal deposition of dust and ice over the course of 1000′s of years. This image was taken during summer at the pole.
Layered deposits in the northern mid-latitudes. The objective of this observation is to examine layered features in an irregularly shaped depression and a nearby crater. Some researchers have suggested that the shape of mounds in large craters may be due to the wind. With this image, wind directions may be studied to see if they caused the irregular shape.
Beautiful Mars series. [More at links]
Get the scoop on the latest missions at Mars. This lecture will bring you up to speed on all things Mars, including: The biggest dust storm in a decade, rolling (and drilling) on “Vera Rubin Ridge,” a new rover under construction, and a recent arrival on Mars preparing to get down to business.
Speakers:
Dr. Abigail Fraeman
Mars Scientist, NASA-JPL
Dr. Elizabeth Barrett
Science/Instruments Operations Engineer, NASA-JPL
Locations:
Thursday, January 10, 2019, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
Friday, January 11, 2019, 7pm
Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium
1200 E California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
[More at link; the Thursday lecture will be streamed live here.]
Sols 2279-80, January 4, 2019, update by MSL scientist Claire Newman: The holiday planning completed successfully and included 10 sols of five-hour-long morning meteorological observations by REMS, during the period when more complex activities were precluded. The main goals for the Sol 2279-2280 plan were to catch up on our other regular atmospheric monitoring activities, which were largely on hold over the holidays, and to prepare for drop-off of the “Rock Hall” red “Jura” drill sample into SAM for analysis.
A dust devil 360° image search and 30-minute movie pointing to the south-west were added in the late morning on sol 2280, with REMS covering the same time period; this allows us to see if any of the dusty vortices found by imaging coincide with vortex-like (sharp, short-lived) pressure drops in the REMS pressure data. In addition, the atmospheric column opacity, as well as the amount of dust between Curiosity and the crater rim, were measured in the morning and afternoon, with morning and afternoon ‘cloud search’ movies added too, plus regular RAD and DAN passive measurements… [More at link]
Bedrock exposures in Terra Sabaea. Terra Sabaea extends from the Hellas impact basin to Utopia Planitia. It covers 4,700 kilometers at its broadest extent.
Beautiful Mars series. [More at links]
