I'm SOWG Chair today, so I called in to enough of the operations planning teleconferences on Saturday
to ensure that I was familiar with the goals for Sol 887. Most people
don't like working on weekends, but
I definitely felt that it was worthwhile to do as much as possible
while MSL is active on the surface of Mars. The activities planned for
Sols 885-886 went well, and we received images showing that the plasma
"plumes" created by the ChemCam laser blew holes
in the pile of drill tailings (e.g., just right of center in the image above ).

The Sol 887 plan focuses on delivering some of the
new drill sample to SAM and performing a SAM evolved gas analysis of
it. This requires so much power that we can't do much else on Sol 887,
and Sol 888 activities will be limited by the
availability of power. by Ken Herkenhoff

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

After successfully
drilling the target "Mojave2" on Sol 882, the next step is to deliver the
sample to CheMin for analysis. We
acquired some great Mastcam and MAHLI images of the drill hole and mini drill hole, and we’re looking forward to
learning more about the composition of this sample.

The main activities
in today’s plan are to transfer, sieve, and drop-off the sample to CheMin, and
also to acquire APXS on the drill tailings.
The plan also includes a few additional frames to fill in the MAHLI self
portrait.

And even though
today is a Friday and we would normally be planning 3 sols to cover the
weekend, the team has decided to take advantage of some Saturday operations to
maximize our number of planning days. A
big thanks to those team members who volunteered to work tomorrow! The rest of us will be traveling to Pasadena
this weekend for our team meeting next week.
I’m sure there will be a lot of new data to discuss! By Lauren Edgar

--Lauren is a
Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of MSL
science team.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

On Sol 882 Curiosity
completed another full drill hole on Mars.
The target was "Mojave2" and it proved to be much more stable than
"Mojave" (our previous attempt at doing a mini-drill at Mojave resulted in
breaking the rock apart). This time
everything went smoothly and we have a beautiful new drill hole to analyze.

The main activities
in today’s plan are ChemCam, Mastcam and MAHLI observations to characterize the
drill hole and tailings. First we’ll
acquire several ChemCam LIBS observations of the drill tailings to study their
composition. Then we’ll image the drill
hole using all of the Mastcam camera filters.
Overnight, we’ll acquire a number of MAHLI images to characterize the
drill hole and tailings. Looking forward
to learning more about the composition of this interesting target! By Lauren Edgar

--Lauren is a
Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of MSL
science team. Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

The mini-drill activities planned for Sol 881 went well, so we are "go" to drill and acquire a new sample on Sol 882! I helped plan the Sol 881 MAHLI images, so was particularly happy to see them this morning. One of them was taken of the intended full-drill target --it shows tailings from
the mini-drill hole, which will not interfere with more drilling. So
the Sol 882 plan starts with higher-resolution MAHLI images of the drill
target, followed immediately by drilling the
full hole. Then images of the new drill hole will be taken before the
rover sleeps overnight. by Ken Herkenhoff Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

Well, we’re certainly hitting the ground running after our
flight software upgrade! Today we received some very nice MAHLI images of the
target "Mojave2" that the rover brushed on sol 880. We also got the results of
our "preloading" test, where the drill is pushed against the rock to make sure
it isn’t going to shift as we drill. Mojave2 looks nice and stable, so the main
activity in the 881 plan is to do a "mini-drill" in this location. Last time we
tried mini-drilling at "Mojave", we broke the rock apart, so we’re all waiting
eagerly to see if Mojave2 is better behaved. Other than the mini drill and
various documentation images, the main activity for sol 881 is an overnight
APXS measurement of the drill hole.

I was on duty today as "Keeper of the Plan" (KOP) for the
geology theme group, which means I help the geologists on the team translate
their desired science into a set of activities scheduled at specific times.
Usually, the plan for a sol has a "science block" where the science team can
put any observations that will fit. Today was a little different: because we’re
doing the mini-drill, there isn’t any room for a science block, so it was an
easy day to be KOP. If the mini-drill goes well, there won’t be any science
blocks in the sol 882 plan either, since we will be busy doing a full drill
hole, but if the mini-drill breaks the rock again, the full drilling might be
canceled. If that happens, we need to have a plan for what else to do, so that
was what the geology group focused on today. This way, we will make the most of
sol 882 even if we can’t drill! by Ryan Anderson --Ryan is a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of the ChemCam team on MSL. Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

In spite of missing a command uplink due to a temporary outage at one of the Deep Space Network sites early last week, the flight software transition went well and the MSL operations team is back to planning science activities! Lots of good observations were proposed, so many that some ChemCam and Mastcam activities had to be deleted from the Sol 880 plan to ensure that the rover batteries maintain enough charge to allow the drill-related activities planned for Sol 881. But Mastcam images of areas previously disturbed by the rover are planned, to look for changes caused by winds. The focus of the Sol 880 plan is to brush a potential drill target dubbed "Mojave2" and image it with MAHLI. The drill assembly will then be pushed against Mojave2 to determine whether the rock is thick enough to drill. After sunset, MAHLI will use
its LEDs to take higher-resolution pictures of the brush spot and the
chunks of rock thrown out of the Mojave mini-drill
hole. Previous MAHLI images show that images taken at night often provide useful complementary information when compared with daytime images of the same target .
Finally, the APXS will be placed on the brushed spot for overnight integration. by Ken Herkenhoff
Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

The flight software
transition is going well, and Curiosity is doing a test run of the new
version. Both the prime and backup rover
computers are on track to commit to the upgrade by this weekend. However, this means that it’s a pretty quiet
week in terms of science operations. In
the meantime, the team is focused on all of the new MAHLI images that we’ve received
of the latest drill hole and the surrounding rocks that were broken during
drilling .

Speaking of new
software, we’re looking forward to testing out the new OnSight software
developed by a JPL team in collaboration with Microsoft. The software uses holographic computing, and
will allow scientists to study Curiosity’s worksite from a first-person view. It sounds like this will provide a great new
perspective and will be very useful for future planning! For more information
on OnSight, check out the recent press release . By Lauren Edgar

--Lauren is a
Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of MSL
science team.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

by Ken Herkenhoff

There won't be any MSL science planned this week
because the rover's software is being upgraded. I was scheduled as SOWG
Chair today and tomorrow
in case the software transition had to be aborted, but so far it is
going well so the science
operations personnel have been released. While I'm a bit disappointed
that we won't be planning new scientific observations and related
activities, I'm glad that the software transition is going well.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

Today’s plan for sols 871 and 872 is our last chance to get
some science done before we begin a week of no activity while the engineering
team upgrades the rover software. The plan is to do two ChemCam "rasters" on
targets "Funk Valley" and "Rainbow Basin". Each raster will analyze three
closely-spaced spots on the target. Funk Valley is our latest candidate
mini-drill target (our last mini-drill ended up breaking the rock , so we’re
trying again), and Rainbow Basin is a rock with some interesting
erosion-resistant knobs. Mastcam will take supporting images of these targets
and then we will be spending a pretty big chunk of time doing some data
management for Mastcam, transferring less-compressed versions of some images
from Mastcam’s internal memory over to the rover prior to the flight software
update. The last activity on sol 871 will be an overnight analysis of the chunk
of rock that our first mini-drill dislodged, using APXS. This is a rare chance
to do APXS on a target with a fresh, non-dusty surface!

On sol 872, ChemCam will do some passive observations of the
sky to measure how much oxygen, carbon dioxide, and dust is in the atmosphere
and Navcam will do some routine atmospheric measurements. There are also a
bunch of Mastcam images of the same locations at different times of the day.
These are part of a photometry experiment, which is trying to understand how
the sun scatters off of the martian surface at different angles. There are also
a handful of Mastcam images as part of a change monitoring campaign. The long
break for the software update will allow us to look at the same locations in a
couple weeks and see if any sand has been moved by the wind.

If all goes according to plan, there won’t be a lot of rover
activity over the next week, but the team will be busy poring over the latest
MAHLI images of our drilling area and the chunks that were dislodged during our
first mini-drill! by Ryan Anderson --Ryan is a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of the ChemCam team on MSL. Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

This morning the MSL
operations team realized that the results of the MAHLI activities
planned for Sol 870 will not be received until Saturday. Therefore, if
there is a problem on Sol 870 that halts the sequence
while the MAHLI dust cover is open, the cover would remain open through
the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. To eliminate the risk of such a
situation and possible effects on the software upgrade planned for next
week, the team decided not to send the
Sol 870 command sequences to the rover. Unfortunately, this means that
the brushing and drill target investigations planned yesterday will not
occur, but they can be done after the software has been upgraded. The Sol 869 activities planned yesterday will not be affected by this change, and should be completed today.

Meanwhile, many of the MAHLI self portrait images
acquired on Sol 868 have been received. When all of them have been
returned to Earth, they will be assembled into the latest rover
"selfie." by Ken Herkenhoff

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.