(ORDO NEWS) — We started this morning with the news that the Curiosity rover’s previous trip did not go as planned.
Sand in the area caused the rover to veer slightly off course, causing the right side of the rover to hit the edge of a large rock.
When the onboard safety system sensed that the wheels were hitting a larger object than intended, Curiosity stopped in mid-traffic to await further instructions.
Fortunately, the operators on Earth have seen that there is nothing particularly dangerous in this area, so in today’s work plan we have allowed Curiosity to continue to the area in the Marker Band valley, which has a very different texture in orbital images.
As a result of the right middle wheel being on the rock, we didn’t want to risk shifting the rover’s center of gravity by detaching the hand arm today.
As a result, we filled the plan with a large number of remote sensing observations. We will make observations with the ChemCam LIBS and also take Mastcam photo mosaics of the rocks around the rover, which we named “Las Lajitas”, “La Esmeralda” and “Cumana”.
We will also take a photo mosaic with the ChemCam RMI tool at a long distance in another area of the marker strip and make some observations with the environmental monitoring tools around us.
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