Sols 2747-2748: Driving to ‘Glasgow’

The Curiosity rover is about 20 meters lower in elevation than its highest point near the “Edinburgh” drill hole. With the commands being uplinked today, the rover should arrive at the next candidate drill site. The purpose of this drill location is to sample the fractured intermediate unit, which is the last major (known) geological unit left to be sampled in the clay-bearing unit that Curiosity has been exploring over the last ~440 sols. The team has selected the name “Glasgow” for this candidate drill site. Glasgow is the name of the largest city in Scotland. For trivia buffs, this is to be the fourth drill site starting with a “G,” after “Greenhorn” (silica alteration site, Sol 1137) and “Glen Etive 1 and 2” (drilled earlier in the clay-bearing unit, sols 2486 and 2527).

Today we built a two-sol plan including a 4x4 ChemCam raster on target “Troon” and a 1x10 raster on “Buttery.” Mastcam will take images of those two targets as well as a follow-up image of the ChemCam AEGIS targets from the weekend, a 6x4 mosaic of the planned drill area, and a stereo 2x5 mosaic of target “Alpin.” MAHLI will get a full suite of images (25 cm, 5 cm stereo, and 2 cm) on “Troon.” A very short drive of ~4.5 meters is planned to arrive at the candidate drill site. There are DAN passive and active observations and post-drive imaging, including a MARDI observation. On the second sol, ChemCam will take a passive sky observation and will do several passive calibration activities. With that, we expect Curiosity to be set for the “Glasgow” drill campaign.

Written by Roger Wiens, Geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory