Now that Curiosity has her driving and science software installed and is ready to proceed, I figured it was time for a new thread. Please keep sol 0-8 discussion in the previous thread (including discussion of the full-frame MARDIs, as they come down), and post new stuff here.

Things to look forward to: a Mastcam pan of the top of the mountain to be uplinked in the next sol or two; testing of the steering actuators on sol 13; first drive on sol 15. This period, which Grotzinger told me would take "no fewer than 6 sols," will be followed by an "Intermission," during which the science team may choose to drive to a new site (not very far away) for Commissioning Activity Period 2, when they'll commission the arm and its instruments.

Also, an admin note: we allowed a lot of chit-chat in the landing thread because we were all so excited about the successful landing But as we move forward, I'd like to ask people to be mindful of forum rule 2.2. The strength of this forum is in its high signal-to-noise ratio; avoid posting things that just say "wow, awesome" or "I agree." Please keep chit-chat to the chit-chat forum.

Will that Mountain Pan be with Mastcam 34 or 100 or both?

Do we know the extent of the pan? A narrow field of view capturing the peak and nearby foot hills, or a full sweep capturing edge to edge?

As we look forward what will the bottlenecks to reaching the primary science target be? It seems there are a few:

- available power
- ability to get data back from the rover (limited number of overflights), one set of commands per day
- limited ability to operate autonomously
- "distractions" from other science targets
- wheel speed

Any others? Which one is the biggest limitation?

Anomalies. From my initial analysis it seems that the area is pretty benign both in terms of slopes and in terms of obstacles, therefore we will be able to drive "blind" most of the time and use autonav to extend the drives beyond what we can see. We don't have a good sense on how far we can drive per Sol yet.

Paolo

Wow, some images just came in from ChemCam and NAVCAM that were taken just 4 hours ago on sol 10 (that's to-sol). Curiosity and its relays firing on all cylinders.

How do you get to the Sol 10 page from this basic link - it doesn't indicate any images beyond Sol 3?

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/

There is a link where you can view images by sol vs. by camera in the upper RH corner.

What are we looking at with the new ChemCam-RMI images? There seems to be circles passing before it? These some sort of filters or similar tech that it will end up using, or taken with the cap on?

A boatload of images coming in right now--some beautiful mastcam shots from sol 3 (sure is a hazy place though) and about 90 MARDI shots of the ground under Curiosity right around the time of the landing.

Here's a link to my browser app right now, but bear in mind the list scrolls down as new images come in:

curiositymsl.com

Its calibration target.

http://www.msl-chemcam.com/index.php?menu=...sup&art=207

The Navcam images taken at the same time provide context. The Chemcam is located above the left Navcam, so look at the center of the left Navcam images and you'll see the Chemcam cal target.

I know that this is obscure in terms of imagery, but here's the ChemCam Sol10 calibration target images (inset with flight spare).

Click to view attachment

About an hour and a half to today's (Friday) Curiosity Rover Teleconference
I hope this information is correct. I am posting early just in case someone wants to correct me!

NASA To Host Curiosity Rover Teleconference Aug. 17
10:30 a.m. PDT (1:30 p.m. EDT, 1730 UTC), Friday, Aug. 17

Apparently it will NOT be on NASATV - it WILL be streamed on the Curiosity Cam Ustream channel
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl

Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are checking out Curiosity's subsystems
and 10 instruments. Curiosity is in the opening days of a two-year mission to investigate whether conditions have been
favorable for microbial life and preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life.

Mission team members are "living" on Mars time. A Martian day is approximately 40 minutes longer than an Earth day,
meaning team members start their shift 40 minutes later each day. The scheduling of this teleconference and other Curiosity
media events is determined by their availability.

Visuals will be available at the start of the teleconference at: http://go.nasa.gov/curiositytelecon.

The audio itself will be right here ; http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

Visuals are up. Very interesting...

EDIT: started....

Based on the imagery, looks like "Glenelg", where the 3 terrain units meet just east of Curiosity will be the first target.

Also based on this caption.

John Grotzinger: "~1-1.5 months to get to Glenelg, ~1 month of science at Glenelg, ~end-of-the-year start drive to base of Mt. Sharp".

1.5 months for a 500m drive? Isn't that a bit slow compared to MER?

I thought I heard upto 2 months? I guess that includes possible science stops.

Yeah, Oppy at its best did that in a day or three. Of course the terrain there was even better, and they knew there were no science targets at all.

Neither MER was traveling 100m/sol for a long time after landing (not even during the primary mission IIRC). They're talking ~10m/sol, which will probably be (IMO) an average of some sols of stationary observations/science alternating with some sols of moderate, 10s of meters, driving.

I have lost a few sentences. do they plan to do anything at Goulburn Scour?

Imaging with all cameras and laser-blasting with Chemcam. That's probably it. They're worried about the drill being damaged on those rocks.

Interesting that they will only be drilling after their first big review. The drill's their crown jewel and it looks like they're being really careful with it.

ChemCam is so cool. Roger implied they hoped to find out something about the composition of the "dessert varnish" that covers rocks on Mars (and Earth). I've wondered if Earth varnish has anything to do with bacteria. The 276K temperature recorded suggests a similar possibility on Mars may be possible (though, of course, highly unlikely.)

Can the ChemCam wear out? I'm not sure if this is a silly question, but one of the replies in the Telecon seemed fairly specific in terms of the maximum number of pulses that they'd be using in the coming weeks. I looked through Wiens et al. and couldn't find any specific indication, but was interested to see that they were only allowed to fire 4500 pulses during the depth profile tests.

From http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1500.pdf -- "However, the instrument was limited to 30 analyses per sol, realistic for its expected laser lifetime of ~20,000 analyses."
I'm not sure this applies to the flight unit but I would expect the laser to have some finite lifetime.

I'm wondering about the drill's longevity myself. I know Spirit's wore out a lot faster than Oppy's because of the difference in rock hardness, and so had to limit themselves to very interesting targets.
Will we have to wait until a drilling is done to see how much wear and tear it can take?

Listen to Emily here: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...-curiosity.html
They've got 2 more spare once the first one will be out

Edited: or read here: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs...rs-1-tools.html

I heard this as referring to the design criteria, i.e., the minimum it should be able to do.

I got the impression that they were not so much afraid of the drill getting damaged, but that the rock at the rocket impigment site wouldn't be good to drill into. It has been suggested that it may be duricrust. Would that be too fragile to get a good sample out of with the drill?

Also I think it was mentioned that the first sample to go into the labrotary kits would be dust or some other fines that is scoopable.

I think it's just not a good first sample to drill. They're going to want something that has a horizontal surface and that is a piece of rock that looks homogeneous, not a conglomerate of chunks of rock that may be more or less strongly cemented together by something else.

Also sounded like we will be waiting a while before the photos of the top of Mt. Sharp will be takend and transmitted. Originally, I believe it was hoped to get them in during the past few days. (If my memory is correct?)

Here's a circular version of the full navcam pan:

Click to view attachment

And this is the middle bit with labels to put our newest names into a more maplike perspective:

Click to view attachment

Phil

The spares are not there because they worry the drill will wear out. They're there in case the drill gets stuck.

We'll actually have to wait a very long time to see the absolute summit. From here we can only see the northern part of the central mound.

The sun is in the south a lot, so they have to be super careful not to point at the sun with the normal filters. Also they seemed to indicate they wern't sure of the exposures needed. I am am sure Mike Malin will sort it all out.

There would be a Big Problem if ChemCam inadvertently pointed at the Sun. No more ChemCam.

If they really want to exercise the laser pointing, they should try writing "JPL" on N165. It's basically the landing reference, so a little commemorative grafitti seems in order.

My suggested name for N165: Zero Pebble.

Yeah- there are some serious flight rules about sun-pointing the mast. You can do it for a few minutes, but then you have to turn away and let the ChemCam unit cool down. It's a big-ol reflecting telescope in there , and even at 1.5au - the sun can still do damage when you focus an area of its power.

At approximately 11:30 in today's press conference, Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator, said that ChemCam's "benchmark qualification" was the ability to do 14,000 analyses.

You can replay the press conference on ustream here.

I have to say that it took me a little bit of googling to find the replay website. A reference to that url on the media announcements would have been helpful, or even just a mention that the replay would be hosted on ustream.

TTT (It's probably a sign that I'm past my "sell by" date, but ustream is not a site that's in my brain's short-term RAM, or a term that I would have thought to have included in searching for NASA press conferences. Of course I know better now, but still ....)

Recording teleconferences to UStream is brand new for JPL. They've streamed TV conferences there for a long time, but the audio-only ones are a new thing.

We're in the southern hemisphere, so the sun is in the north a lot. Maybe that's what you meant? Playing with Mars24 is instructive.

AFAIK sun avoidance shouldn't be a huge factor in imaging the summit, though it does have to be checked.

Some of us would appreciate it if you said "MSSS will sort it all out" instead of ascribing the entire operation of the instrument to one person

Im trying to imagine sunrise with Mastcam100

I'm not sure we'll ever see it. I hope I'm wrong, but looking at it with Google Mars, I rather think that the actual summit will always be hidden from Curiosity's view by the lie of the land. Once she starts her ascent of Mt Sharp, heading for the light toned unit, the peak will be over the top of what she can see. So we might never get to see Mt Sharp as a mountain.

Regarding the REMS instrument, Grotzinger says yesterday in the press conference, it it is the first measurement of temperature since Viking back in 1982, but I´m not sure about that.
I think the Phoenix lander has its own canadian built weather station onboard and it could measure temperature as well.
Pathfinder - i dont know.

Rob

I think he was about to say that, but then caught himself and said "longterm" measurement. You're right, both Phoenix and Pathfinder had weather monitoring, but both only lasted a short time relative to the ~3 Mars years for Viking 1. REMS will be the first series comparable to that.

Stu (and all), can you please point out what you think will hidden our view?I'm trying to find the maximum altitude we'll see in order to match this with a similar view on Earth. It is actully difficult to find a view with ~ 5500m altitude difference, so if the real difference is much less, it'll make search easier and comparison real.