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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Sol 1688: Sand between our grousers
The images for panorama obtained by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 30,000 pixels width, includes 122 images taken on Sol 1688 (May 5, 2017).
Today was a Friday so we put together a three day plan to cover the weekend activities, or in Mars-speak, sols 1688 - 1690. We've been getting some really interesting data down from our investigation of a large sand drift (megaripple), so we packed in many more observations to assess the full variability of the sandy materials before driving away and continuing our climb up Mt. Sharp.
Over the weekend, we are planning to take APXS and MAHLI observations that focus on the materials inside the area of sand that was scuffed by the wheel ("Little Notch"), and also some bright undisturbed materials ("Cold Ledge"). We will also take MAHLI only observations of different undisturbed portions of the megaripple at "Schoolhouse Ledge" and "Man of War Brook". In addition to contact science, we will take many Mastcam images, including a full 360-degree mosaic, a mosaic of our future drive target ("Buttermilk Brook"), a multispectral observation of some vein targets ("Eddie Brook"), and images of a handful of interesting nearby rocks ("Little Harbor Brook", "Bubble Brook", and "Marshall Brook.") We're rounding out remote sensing observations in the plan with ChemCam observations of "Stanley Brook", "Chasm Brook", and "Denning Brook", and a post-drive automated ChemCam AEGIS activity. The environmental theme group also included a dust devil survey, measurements of dust in the atmosphere, and horizon movies.
For tactical planning today, I was again staffed as a Surface Properties Scientist (SPS), so I worked closely with the rover planners (RPs) to help plan the drive to an interesting location ~20 meters away. We can see in the Mastcam images that there are some rocks that have colors and textures different from the typical outcrops we've been seeing during the majority of our ascent, so the science team is eager to drive over and check out this area up close. I look forward to seeing our new location Monday morning when the data come down.
Abigail Fraeman
Planetary Geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Other panoramas of Mars by Curiosity rover:
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
