Mars Curiosity Reveals its First ‘Living Color’ Mars Surface Panorama
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
August 9, 2012
Curiosity awoke from her “beauty sleep” today to the toe-tapping tune “Good Morning” from the musical “Singing in the Rain,” feeling healthy and refreshed and ready for a busy day of continued health checks and imagery. The rover continues to perform very well. Today’s Sol 3 morning and afternoon passes by NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft provided a plethora of new data, including more high-resolution black-and-white 360-degree and deck panorama images from her Navigation Camera, or Navcam, which revealed some small pebbles deposited on the deck during landing, which should pose no problems for mission operations. Curiosity also returned 130 low-resolution thumbnail images from the color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, providing scientists and engineers with their first color panorama glimpse of Gale Crater.
Curiosity’s day began with a “beep” from its low-gain antenna, telling the flight team that their master sequence of activities for that sol was successfully activated from the ground. The flight team then uploaded files to the rover’s remote electronics unit memory in preparation for the upcoming Sol 5 upgrade of Curiosity’s software to optimize Curiosity for surface operations. Curiosity’s backup computer was then powered on and successfully checked out. The Radiation Assessment Detector instrument is operating as planned and collected additional data on surface radiation. The Mastcam is operating as planned and successfully executed its 360-degree and calibration target observations. In addition, early checkouts of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), Chemistry & Mineralogy Analyzer (CheMin), Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), and Dynamic Albedo Neutrons (DAN) instruments were all successful. The mission’s science team began creating a geological map of about 150 square miles (about 390 square kilometers) within Gale Crater, including the landing area.
Curiosity is “go” for its planned Sol 4 activities.
