Earth preparation date: Friday, Dec. 20, 2024
Invite to the 2024 vacation prepare for Curiosity! This year we’re covering 14 sols to last us through the Earth brand-new year. And this is my 4th year running Mastcam throughout the vacations (throwback to 2023 Marsmas!). I currently understood to anticipate a long day, so I got my lunch prepared– blew Mars a kiss in the pre-dawn sky– and headed to operate at 0600 Pacific time to begin preparing preparation. Thankfully my group got a running start on Mastcam images by consisting of a complete 360-degree panorama, post-drive, last strategy, so I simply needed to complete some spaces and cover some buttes with our higher-resolution video camera. In overall we’re just preparing about 438 images this vacation, which is a quite light haul if you can think it! We likewise didn’t pass SRAP to unstow the arm (once again) today, which is a disappointment for science however typically makes my task simpler because Mastcam does not need to stress over where the arm may be throughout our imaging. One instrument’s coal is another instrument’s present!
We’re doing things a little cool this vacation. We’re preparing science on the very first, seventh, 13th, and 14th sols– with a drive and a soliday! The hardest part of this strategy was keeping everything directly in our heads.
With no contact science prepared, MAHLI went on vacation early (in fact, she’s been out all week!) and APXS just needed to babysit a climatic combination, which does not need any arm movement. ChemCam has 3 LIBS and 4 RMI mosaics prepared, which is absolutely more than normal. Really, the greatest series count for today goes to Mastcam! Our typical limitation is around 20 series for intricacy factors, however today I provided 34 overall series. Of those 34 series, 10 are for tracking surface area modifications from wind, 7 are for determining the climatic opacity, 3 are ChemCam LIBS documents, 3 are for recording our area post-drive, 2 are big mosaics of Texoli and Wilkerson buttes, and 2 are for noctilucent cloud browsing (our very first efforts to discover clouds this Martian winter season!).
With any luck, we’ll begin passing SRAP once again in 2025 after another around 58-meter drive (about 190 feet). Till then, Earthlings– Merry Marsmas and Happy Earth New Year!
Composed by Natalie Moore, Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems
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