NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
By Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer, NASA-JPL
Earth preparation date: Friday, Oct. 30, 2026
Today’s strategy covered 3 sols, 5060, 5061, and 5062, as we take a couple of charging sols before returning to our regular drilling activities. As you might understand if you have actually been following the blog site carefully, we remain in the middle of a drilling project on our target called “Nazca.” We’ve currently drilled the hole, defined the tailings from the drill hole with ChemCam, and have actually now done a number of sample dropoffs, both to our SAM and CheMin instruments within the tummy of the rover. We still have a variety of activities delegated do as part of the project, consisting of another dropoff to SAM for a various sort of analysis, and drilling clean-up activities. Among those activities is called “RAGE” (Rotate to Agitate for Granule Expulsion, an extremely enjoyable acronym) where we basically shake the drill to get any staying sample out of it. We’ll likewise make certain to take great deals of imaging to continue file the drill hole and tailings.
In any case, those activities are really power-hungry for our rover! Today’s strategy actively did not have a lot of activities in it so we might get a great couple of power favorable sols before we get back to drilling. Each of our 3 sols had a basic early morning science block, with an additional amazing new activity on 5061 (more on that soon!).
Over the 3 sols, we carried out remote science with ChemCam active and Remote Micro-Imager mosaics on some intriguing targets (“Titicaca,” “Pampas,” and “Salta”some Mastcam imaging of our calibration target and our drill target, a number of Navcam dust devil research studies and Mastcam tau observations, and golden imaging. In spite of this strategy being recharging/waiting, we got in great deals of interesting science to continue to study the Nazca crystal developments and the close-by layered rocks and bedrock.
On 5061, we likewise carried out a new engineering activity to evaluate parallelism over among our downlink interactions windows. As the rover ages and our power output gradually reduces over the length of the objective, we are constantly searching for brand-new methods to carry out activities with less power usage. Among our techniques is parallelism – having 2 activities carry out at the exact same time will conserve power due to the rover being awake for less time. We require to veterinarian sets of activities ahead of time to guarantee they are safe to run together. This is a test of among those sets – running our CheMin “Get Data” activity at the very same time as we are sending out information to among our orbiters. CheMin Get Data is a high CPU activity which moves science information from the instrument to our flight computer systems. The test appears to have actually worked out, however we’ll need to wait to hear back from our engineering group to evaluate the outcomes!
In general, it was an interesting strategy loaded with fantastic remote science as we wait to be able to conclude our drill project. Stay tuned to hear more about how the remainder of the Nazca project went!
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