Moons and the Open Road; Sol 38 update

Weird title for a post right? Let me explain myself.

Let's start with the open road, Curiosity is on the move again! The road to Glenelg beckons us once again and nothing short of a mechanical failure can stop the gal; the rover completed a 32m drive towards its target, bringing its total odometer to 142m.

Rear hazard camera view after sol 38's drive (NASA/JPL)

Okay on to the 'moon' part. Curiosity observed the martian moon, Phobos, transit across the solar disk on sol 36.

Phobos measures approx 22km in diameter and orbits Mars twice in 1 sol (Commons)

This is by no means the first time this has been done. Spirit and Opportunity, the previous rover missions have imaged such transits (see the example in the video below) along with a host of other similar astronomical observations.

The first images have started to come down but they are all thumbnail images which helps the team decide which images in the rovers memory is useful/interesting for downlink. This is because the communication time and bandwidth constraints restrict the amount of data that can actually be obtained (other ways of managing data size includes compressing images into JPG format or downsizing images before transmitting them).

Now the transit observation is actually our promised video with a frame rate similar if not lower than the one that the MARDI instrument had (4fps) and video frames will take time to downlink. So far only one full frame has been downlinked:

The solar disk is lower centre. The others are internal reflections (NASA/JPL/MSSS)

The image was taken at 5:14am GMT about a minute before the transit started. The mastcam views the sun via a neutral density filter which blocks out most of the light coming from the sun, allowing solar disk observations which is useful for transits, atmospheric dust monitoring and navigational purposes.

That's it for sol 38. There was a test conducted during the arm commissioning of the CHIMRA instrument which will sort out sample materials for analysis. I'll write about it some other time (procrastination is murder!) just for the sake of being thorough as it involves talking about the sampling process which takes some lessons from previous missions.

Onwards!