Sol 69 images show a successful dig at a third site at the 'Rocknest' drift.
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| Sol 69 navigation images now show 3 trenches (NASA/JPL) |
There aren't as many images coming down (apart from the less memory-hungry thumbnail images sent as previews) because the rover's main high data-rate relay, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has suffered a glitch and has gone into safe-mode where only the most basic of spacecraft functions are running. So that means the rover has to make use of the older orbiter, Mars Odyssey, for data relay. And as you can imagine it's not all that fast.
Looking at the images of the scooped up sample, you can see they have managed to grab a bit of the sparkling stuff that has been puzzling the team for some time (previously it was a question of whether it was native to Mars or a piece of rover hardware) and will probably analyse it with SAM and CheMin.
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| Mastcam image from Sol 69 (NASA/JPL/MSSS) |
Images from sol 70 show that they are actually making use of the rover's observation tray which can receive material processed by CHIMRA for detailed analysis by the APXS and MAHLI instruments on the rover's arm. Again these are only sub-frame images due to communication constraints.
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Observation tray with sample, sol 70
navigation image. The b/w squares
are for probably for length calibration
during imaging. |
We may hear more about at tomorrow's teleconference. It's now 7:39am, sol 71 at Curiosity's site on Mars. Stay tuned!
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