Limited Resources, Productive Planning: A Journalist’s Insights into Rover Activities on Sol 513

As the Chair of SOWG for Sol 513, I had a full day of planning ahead of me. The main focus of the day was to capture a comprehensive set of MAHLI images of the rover’s wheels. To achieve this, I planned short drives between each image capture to ensure that the entire surface of the wheels was imaged.

However, due to the power requirements of these activities, we had to be careful not to drain the rover’s battery too much. This meant that we had to include only post-drive scientific tasks in the plan. These included an active measurement of hydrogen below the surface using DAN, a cloud search using Navcam, and imaging necessary for targeted observations on Sol 514.

Despite this constraint, we were still able to make it a productive day. The planning process started earlier than usual as command sequences needed to be sent to the rover by 5 PM Pacific time. Although it wasn’t as early as my commute to work on Sol 512 when it was still dark out, it was still a busy and productive day planning for the rover’s activities on Sol 513.

As I reviewed my notes from the day, I couldn’t help but feel proud of what we were able to accomplish with such limited resources. With every mission like this one, we are taking one step closer to exploring Mars and understanding its mysteries better.