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Emily Lakdawalla

It's a writing day today! It's been a long time since I've paid close attention to activities, so today my goal is to orient myself to time and place on the mission. In this thread I'll share the resources I use to figure that out.

Mar 17, 2023, 04:01 PM·Public
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Emily Lakdawalla

My first book gave a very brief overview of the mission up to sol 1648, at which point the rover had crossed the Bagnold dune field and was headed to Vera Rubin Ridge. At JPL's "Where Is the Rover Now?" page I can see a dynamic map of the rover's position and past route. It's now sol 3771.
mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/wher
The pics here are from my book and a screencap from the JPL website.

Figure 3.4 from my book "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity." It shows the route of Curiosity across the floor of Gale crater from Yellowknife Bay to Murray buttes, then across the Bagnold Dunes. The route changes from solid line to dotted right before it reaches Vera Rubin Ridge, indicating what was the future route after the book was published. The caption reads: "Figure 3.4. Route map for the mission to sol 1800. Bold text denotes drill or scoop sites. Map by Emily Lakdawalla on a base image of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CTX mosaic colorized with Mars Express HRSC image."
A screen cap from JPL's "Where Is the Rover" page. It shows part of the rover rout from Ogunquit Beach at the south side of the Bagnold dune field, across Vera Rubin Ridge, to the base of the Greenheugh Pediment, around a dark blot of sand dunes, and then up into the knobby hills of Mount Sharp, with a little symbol indicating the rover's current position as of sol 3771.
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Emily Lakdawalla

My next stop for information on rover activities is the Analyst's Notebook, a browse tool to landed spacecraft data hosted by the Geosciences node of the Planetary Data System, which is located at Wash U. St. Louis. Do you like data from space? Check this out. I love the Analyst's notebook for how it provides an interface to a whole data collection together.
an.rsl.wustl.edu/

This part may take me a while as I swim in

an.rsl.wustl.eduAnalyst's NotebookThe Analyst's Notebook is a web application that integrates sequence information, engineering and science data, and documentation from NASA's landed missions on Mars and Earth's Moon.
#space#scicomm#CuriosityBook
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Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, I'm super lucky! The mission delivers its data to NASA's Planetary Data System in large chunks three times a year (March, August, and December). The most recent release was YESTERDAY. So if I manage to finish my manuscript before the summer, all of the data that the book can cover is already out. It goes through sol 3644, early November last year. Woohoo!

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Emily Lakdawalla

The "mission overview table" is the first thing I download from the Analyst's Notebook, on the "Mission" Tab. It has one line for each sol, with a terse summary of the sol's activities, and importantly, the Earth date corresponding to the sol. I use this table a lot when reading papers -- I can search target names from papers, quickly find the corresponding sol, and follow the links in the table to where I can download the data & read mission manager notes.

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Emily Lakdawalla

The last thing I need to orient myself is a sense of the big phases of the mission. I'd already written down that sol 2302 was when the rover drove off of Vera Rubin Ridge, into the valley of clays that they named Glen Torridon. To figure out big "phase changes" on the mission, I head to the mission newsroom for the press releases. A release dated 19 Oct 2022 says they reached the sulfate unit with a drill site at a place named Canaima. mars.nasa.gov/news/9281/curios

NASA Mars ExplorationCuriosity Mars Rover Reaches Long-Awaited Salty RegionAfter years of climbing, the Mars rover has arrived at a special region believed to have formed as Mars’ climate was drying.
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Emily Lakdawalla

This week the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is happening near Houston. It's the reason the data release is timed for mid-March, giving team members free rein to talk about the most recent data possible. I searched the abstracts there for the Canaima drill target, and found this one that tells me the mission considers sols 3052 to 3572 to have been spent in the clay-sulfate transition region. (PDF at link) hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2023

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Emily Lakdawalla

So now I know the scope of each of the final chapters of my . In each chapter, I'll talk about the routine challenges of driving on Mars, the decisions about what to explore, and the Mars science that we learned from it.
Vera Rubin Ridge (sols 1726-2302)
Glen Torridon (sols 2302-3052)
Clay-Sulfate Transition (sols 3052-3572)
Into the Sulfates (Sols 3572-3644 and beyond)

And now, it's time for me to read lots and lots and lots of papers.

#amwriting#science#scicomm
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