Sols 3977-3979: Taking a Rain Check

Earth planning date: Friday, October 13, 2023

It's been an exciting week in space – Conor already mentioned the news from OSIRIS-REX on Wednesday and just before I logged on for my shift this morning the Psyche spacecraft launched. But the week isn't over and weekends on Mars have lots of room for excitement.

Wednesday's pre-drilling tests on target 'Sequoia' (shown in the image above) mostly went smoothly, but the preload test failed. That meant we needed to make a slight adjustment, moving the drill target a couple centimetres. Even such a slight change meant we had to redo drill sol 1 – no drilling for us this weekend. Instead we'll be trying again on Monday on a slightly new target, 'Sequoia 2.'

This reminded me a bit of the Psyche launch. It was originally planned for the 12^th, but weather conditions meant the launch was delayed. It's not weather delaying us, but we're still taking a rain check on drilling. We're no strangers to things getting shuffled around and moved back – Curiosity just had to readjust its position to reach our current drill target. I even started writing this blog all ready to talk about drilling this weekend! Of the many things I've learned from Curiosity over the years, it's how to react to changes. Ultimately, taking the weekend to redo drill sol 1 will mean that we're in an even better position to drill next week.

The weekend isn't entirely given over to evaluating our new drill target though. That will be done on the second sol, which is more or less a repeat of Wednesday's drill target characterisation with APXS and MAHLI (but no DRT). The other two sols have plenty to occupy our rover as well. Navcam and Mastcam are starting photometry experiments, which look at how light scatters off the surface at different times of sol. Four of these experiments are planned for the weekend, with more to come in the following sols. The first sol also sees ChemCam and Mastcam examining a nearby block, 'Grey Pass,' as well as a Mastcam solar tau.

The third sol sees a nice long science block, with a 360 degree dust devil survey and a suprahorizon cloud movie as well as ChemCam LIBS on another block 'Bubbs Creek' and a long distance mosaic on Kukenan. A bit later in the afternoon we're also getting a cloud altitude observation, which lets us use cloud shadows to estimate cloud altitudes. We’re quickly approaching the end of the cloudy season on Mars, so it's always great when we can get some cloud watching in. We wake up early on our final morning for our weekly morning ENV block, where we do some more cloud watching (zenith and suprahorizon movies and a phase function sky survey) as well as some dust characterisation with another Mastcam tau and a 4x1 Navcam line of sight observation.

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University