NEWS | January 1, 2014
Clues from Orbit Aiding Exploration
OPPORTUNITY UPDATE:
sols 3520-3534, Dec. 18, 2013-Jan. 01, 2014
The rover's activities have been relatively uncomplicated over the holiday period. On Sol 3521 (Dec. 19, 2013), the robotic arm was used to collect a Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic, followed by an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) placement for multiple sols of collecting information about composition. A similar activity using both instruments was performed on Sol 3530 (Dec. 28, 2013). An outage at an antenna station of the Deep Space Network prevented uplink of a remote sensing plan, but that plan was recovered in subsequent sols.
Some small but welcome dust-cleaning events occurred during sols 3533 and 3534 (Dec. 31, 2013, and Jan. 1, 2014). As of Sol 3534, solar-array energy production improved to 371 watt-hours, with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.569 and an improved solar array dust factor of 0.566. Just prior to these cleaning events, solar-array output per sol was about 35 watt-hours lower, and the dust factor was about 0.50. Perfectly clean solar arrays would have a dust factor of 1.0, so the larger the dust factor, the cleaner the arrays.
Total odometry is 24.07 miles (38.73 kilometers).
