September 12 teleconference summary

Okay, here is my round up of the conference's main points (in anachronistic order):

1. They'll be aiming to observe Phobos (Mars' largest and closest moon) transit the sun tomorrow (13th of September) at 0515 GMT.
2. Arm commissioning should wind up in a day's time before they command Curiosity to continue her journey to Glenelg.
3. This teleconference was all about the MAHLI and APXS instruments. APXS did an overnight integration on sol 34 on its basaltic calibration target (when dealing with such energetic radiations you need a way to cool the instrument down so that's primarily why they usually do these things at night although Curiosity has pipes to direct that heat to its radiators). They displayed the data on a graph below:

NASA/JPL/University of Guelph

Now what we see here are the X-ray 'counts' or signals against the corresponding channels that the instrument detects. A particular count at a particular channel signifies a particular element. Depending on the amount of time used for integration, the instrument can detect anything from a half-percent down to 100 parts per million. The basaltic target has a well known composition (which are indicated in the graph in black). So they found sodium (Na), magnesium (Mg), aluminium (Al), silicon (Si), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), titanium (Ti), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), nickel (Ni) and zinc (Zn), all known components of the target. The ones in blue are not part of the target (argon [Ar] is a component of the atmosphere whose composition was analysed by SAM a couple of sols back when the instrument sucked in a sample of Martian air via it's vents on the rover's right side and zirconium [Zr] which is part of the instrumentation).

What about the ones in red? Well they are components of the dust coating the target and every other exposed piece of rover hardware.

Further integrations were done during the day to see the APXS's performance in warmer conditions. Worked like a charm!

There were plenty of pictures to go by. The best I think were these: the first shows the testing of the inlets' lids that will allow samples into the SAM and CheMin instruments.

NASA/JPL

The next one shows a view from MAHLI peering in to one of the inlets. You can see a screen that will prevent particles that are too big for the analysis instruments to process. This is all part of practising the 'teach point' arm positions that Curiosity will use when depositing samples in to one of these inlets.

NASA/JPL/MSSS

This image is special because it combines multiple images with different foci that were combined and processed in to this image by the rover before beaming back to Terra. This shows you the superiority of having an instrument like MAHLI with auto-focusing capabilities.

It's now 8am on sol 37 at Curiosity's site. Stay tuned