Sols 3812-3813: Tiny Sticks Poking Out at Us

I am ‘shadow’ Geo science team lead (GeoSTL) today, helping a new colleague to learn the details of the role. It’s so amazing that we train the next generation, in year 11 of our mission. I still remember my own training, as I wasn’t part of the initial cohort of GeoSTLs. Inspired by watching my colleague doing a great job, I went back through my notebook, and found out that one of the earliest sol plannings I have notes from are sols 1412 and 1413! What a nice coincidence, and looking back at Ken’s blog and my notes, those actually have the same target names all lined up. Coming back along memory lane from 2016 to today’s reality, we’ve got a busy two sol plan with some terrain features that keep the engineers well awake without the need of any caffeine!

Above, you can see parts of the terrain in front of us: we have sand, and we have rocks that were described as ‘poky-sticky’ when describing all the little protruding features. Of course, that makes it harder to place our contact instruments than a smooth surface would be. But those features are also very interesting as they often indicate a difference in hardness between different parts of the rocks. This could be a result of water-rock interactions depositing different minerals in different parts of these rocks. And that’s clearly of great interest to the team in our quest to understand the environmental conditions at the time the rocks formed. The engineers who place our arm are clearly awake as they managed to find us a spot on which we can safely use our DRT, the dust removal tool. And that’s despite all those little protruding features. Well dusted off, APXS and MAHLI will investigate the target ‘Armero,’ which is a bedrock target. ChemCam tries to cover the variability of the area by investigating a different target, namely target ‘Dona Juana.’ After the drive, ChemCam will also perform a LIBS investigation for which the rover picks the targets by itself before we see the end of drive images here on Earth. Those are known within the team as AEGIS. (Something we also did back in sols 1412 and 1413!)

There is, of course, a lot of imaging going on as the area is so interesting and we are still on the lookout for the transition between two units that is indicated by different rock textures. We see the difference in the appearance of the rocks around us to the rocks at a distance, but the many boulders and the nature of the terrain mean that we cannot see all the details until we are right there. So, lots of images and also a MARDI sidewalk it is. If you’ve never seen that term, here is what that means: normally MARDI takes one image when the rover has stopped after its drive. This is to document the terrain the rover is standing on. In a MARDI sidewalk, the rover takes many images along the way, resulting in one continuous strip of ground images – think of it like a panorama, but of the ground under the rover wheels instead of the landscape around it. That will help us see any changes that might occur during the drive.

Mastcam is very busy these sols, with a multispectral image on the APXS target ‘Armero,’ a documentation image on the ChemCam target ‘Dona Juana’ and two small stereo mosaics on ‘Awalapa’ and ‘Almerina Scour’ as well as a larger mosaic called ‘Almerina region.’ Of course, we also have atmospheric investigations in the plan, busy as always!

The drive should get us into an area with the other rock textures, but given the bouldery terrain, which also has lots of sand patches, the rover cannot just beeline to where we want it to be. Instead, the engineers will carefully evaluate every turn of the wheels to avoid pointy rocks and also slipping on the sand. As a consequence, it is hard to judge from our current vantage point where exactly on the rover’s tortuous path the rock features will change. We shall stand by in anticipation until we see the images. Exciting times climbing in a canyon on Mars … comfortably from my office chair!

Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University