Unanticipated Discovery Drives Scientific Breakthrough at Mars Rover

The Sol 26 drive was a success, and the resulting images revealed fascinating outcrops in front of the rover. However, with the focus on the first sampling of Mars’ atmosphere by the SAM instrument on Sol 27, there was little time left for other tasks. Nevertheless, ChemCam was back in operation and the top priority was to obtain better observations of its calibration target. Initially, 77 minutes were allocated for this task, but when a new outcrop target was discovered, the science team wanted to take pictures and use ChemCam’s laser on it.

Steve Squyres, the Mineralogy Science Theme Group Lead for the day, approached Pauline Hwang, the Tactical Uplink Lead, to request additional time for scientific observations. Pauline, who had previously worked on Mars Exploration Rovers missions, approved an additional 40 minutes for the science team. Mastcam and ChemCam observations of the outcrop were then included in the plan to be sent to MSL.

Although not scheduled in a tactical role for the day, I found myself drawn to spend most of my time at JPL due to my excitement about MSL mission operations. I took advantage of this opportunity to catch up on various tasks such as processing new MARDI images to determine optimal compression levels for geologic interpretation. Additionally, I reviewed older ChemCam RMI images taken in the MSL testbed to experiment with image compression techniques. This analysis is critical in maximizing our use of data received from MSL via Mars orbiters and ensuring efficient data utilization in future operations.