Sol 3906: “Hoping for Frost”

Earth planning date: Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Today we wrapped a single-sol plan for sol 3906. Our planning for this sol was primarily constrained by power. We had attempted to conduct a frost experiment over the weekend which failed, and so we are striving to save power to be able to attempt the experiment again on Wednesday’s plan. The blog post for that weekend’s plan gives an excellent description of the experiment, but in summary, we are searching for the presence of water frost on the Martian surface. We attempt this experiment every Martian winter by taking ChemCam measurements of the soil at dawn when the ground is coldest, then taking measurements of the same spot later in the day to see any spectral differences. The hope is that we could detect any water vapor in the atmosphere that deposited overnight under the cold winter conditions.

Besides power conservation, our goal for this sol’s plan was to make as much driving progress as possible. Our expected drive distance is under 15 meters which is reasonable for us in this very rocky terrain, but our power constraints also contribute to not making it a longer drive. The image I’ve included today gives you a good perspective on the up-close of what Curiosity has to deal with on Mars. Those poor wheels are taking a lot of damage from all the rocks and sharp edges they have to come into contact with! That’s why rover drivers spend so much time carefully navigating the terrain, minimizing the amount of wear on the wheels. Besides the drive, we also are planning a contact event on our “Kefalonia” representative target with some DRT brushing and Mastcam inspection. We will also take some Mastcam imaging for stereo documentation of different fractured stones and rocks, in addition to Jau crater inspection. Mastcam will additionally perform some atmospheric observations to measure optical depth and study aerosol scattering properties.

After our drive (the part of our plan which we call the “mobility backbone”), we will take some Navcam cloud altitude observations to search for clouds and determine wind direction near the zenith (directly overhead above the rover). We will also use Mastcam to take “PDI” (“post drive imaging”) which will be a systematic observation of clasts and soils along our traverse path. Stay tuned in future mission updates to see if we were successful for our next attempt at the yearly frost campaign experiments!

Written by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory