Emily Lakdawalla

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epsl.2016.08.028

  9.6 References 347

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  Epilogue: Back on Earth

  That Curiosity is still operating on Mars more than 5 years after landing is testament to the dedication and focus of a huge human team that keeps it safe and productive. The science

  team has over 500 members scattered around the world. Nearly 100 people are “on shift”

  on any given day of mission operations, including the engineering teams at JPL and the

  external scientists (Figure 10.1). Over the course of its development, launch, cruise, landing, and surface operation, more than 7000 different people from at least 33 of the United

  States and in 11 other countries have been involved in the mission.

  Since landing, numerous members of the engineering and operations teams at JPL have

  moved on to other projects. Many of the people who were key to development are now

  working on the mission’s descendant, currently known as Mars 2020, which will reuse the

  designs of the cruise stage and entry, descent, and landing architecture to deliver a

  Curiosity-like rover (though with a different science package) to collect samples on Mars

  for a hypothetical future sample return mission.

  Like most robotic missions sent to Mars, the gargantuan effort summarized in this book

  has one purpose: science. As of October 2
017, the mission counts 250 peer-reviewed pub-

  lications by team members and 157 by non-team members using mission data. The pace

  of publication of scientific results appeared slow to outsiders, especially to people accustomed to the rapid work of the Mars Exploration Rovers, but Curiosity’s science has much

  more in common with NASA’s other flagship exploration missions like Cassini and Galileo

  than it does with Spirit and Opportunity.

  Curiosity performs long “cruises” from science field site to field site, interspersed with

  weeks-long periods of intensive data gathering. While at the field site, there is only time to verify data quality. The analytical laboratory instruments actually do most of their

  work while traversing from site to site. The SAM team, in particular, has to do significant lab work on Earth to understand results from Mars. Initial scientific analysis of data and

  publication of results happens mostly within instrument teams, so the first papers typi-

  cally focus on results from one instrument at one site. Comparison across sites and

  © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

  349

  E. Lakdawalla, The Design and Engineering of Curiosity, Springer Praxis Books,

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68146-7

  350 Epilogue: Back on Earth

  Figure 10.1. A portion of the Curiosity team at JPL on October 11, 2016, with the testbed rover. JPL-Caltech/Dutch Slager.

  instrument teams takes more time, and synthesizing all of that into coherent geologic

  history takes longer yet. For all these reasons, publication of papers addressing the geo-

  logic history and habitability of each field site may happen years after Curiosity has left it. And it’s only as Curiosity crosses major geologic boundaries that the science team is

  beginning to get a picture of the evolution of the whole Gale crater system over time. The

  payoff from the environmental instruments REMS and RAD increases, the longer that

  they gather data.

  Understanding how the rover and mission work is a necessary prerequisite to under-

  standing the mission’s science results. Those have been the focus of this book. The scien-

  tific story of the Curiosity mission – the geologic setting, traverse, field sites, and science results – is beyond the scope of this book. You may read that story in the next book,

  Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work.

  When this book was submitted for publication in late 2017, the rover had just climbed

  onto Vera Rubin Ridge, seeing for the first time into the valley beyond. It paused to take a self-portrait on sol 1943 (Figure 10.2). The ridge and valley represent new rocks and new history for Curiosity, embodying a 500-member science team, to explore.

  Epilogue: Back on Earth 351

  Figure 10.2. Curiosity self-portrait atop Vera Rubin Ridge, sol 1943, or January 23, 2018.

  Behind the rover is Mount Sharp. Credit: NASA/JPL- Caltech/MSSS.

  Appendix: Curiosity Activity Summary

  Following is a condensed historical summary of the Curiosity mission from sol 0-1648.

  Columns include:

  • Area: A general descriptor of the mission phase, color coded: drives (white),

  engineering activities (orange), contact science (blue), scooping (pink), drilling

  (purple). These are not formally identified; rather, they were categorized by the

  author.

  • Noon UTC: Time UTC corresponding to Curiosity noon LMST for the given sol.

  Calculated using the Mars equation of time by Joe Knapp.

  • Sol: elapsed Martian day of mission.

  • RS: Indicates if remote sensing activities were performed with science instruments, where C = ChemCam and M = Mastcam, with lowercase indicating fewer observations and uppercase indicating more. Based on Planetary Data System Geosciences

  Node records of numbers of data products per sol for these instruments. Intended to

  provide a qualitative estimate of how intense was the remote sensing activity on a

  given sol.

  • Arm: Contains one-letter codes summarizing most arm activities, organized alpha-

  betically roughly in the order in which they are typically performed at sample sites:

  A = APXS measurement; B = Brush; C = sCoop; D = mini-Drill; F = Full drill; I =

  Inspection of pre- and post-sieve sample volume; P = self-Portrait; S = dump pre-Sieve sample; U = dUmp post-sieve sample; X = CHIMRA cleanout; W = Wheel imaging. Cells for sols during which drill or CHIMRA contain sample are colored

  in gray. MAHLI activities other than self-portraits or wheel imaging are not

  included in this column for clarity, because there are too many. Based on rover

  activities as recorded in spacecraft images, SOWG and Mission Manager reports

  and Historical Overview notes from the Planetary Data System Geosciences Node;

  MAHLI Principal Investigator's Notebooks; and APXS team records of activities

  courtesy Mariek Schmidt and Lucy Thompson.

  © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

  352

  E. Lakdawalla, The Design and Engineering of Curiosity, Springer Praxis Books,

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68146-7

  Appendix: Curiosity Activity Summary 353

  • Activity summary: includes one-sol drive distance; rover site/drive, change in

  elevation (in meters) from landing site, and total odometry (in meters) at end of

  drive; and comments on engineering activities, contact science targets, and other

  notable events. The column's account of contact science targets is complete, but it

  is not complete as to mobility or arm faults or runout sols because of a lack of pub-

  lic information. Sols known to have been lost to runouts or anomalies are colored

  in gray. Same sources as for Arm column.

  • Ls: Solar longitude, a proxy for season (0 = autumnal equinox, 90 = winter solstice, 180 = vernal equinox, 270 = summer solstice.) From the "Historical Overview"

  summaries available at the Planetary Data System Geosciences Node.

  • T: Minimum daily temperature from REMS ground temperature sensor, in kelvins.

  Obvious outliers have been removed, but these data are noisy. Color coded from

  blue (relatively cold) through white to red (relatively warm). Intended to allow you

  to tell, at a glance, through cell color, whether the season is warm or cold. Raw data

  courtesy Mark Lemmon.

  • P: Maximum daily pressure from REMS pressure sensor, with same warnings as

  for temperature data. Color coded from dark green (relatively low pressure) to

  white (relatively high). Raw data courtesy Mark Lemmon.

  • Tau: atmospheric opacity calculated by Mark Lemmon based on Mastcam solar

  imaging. Where multiple measurements exist for a sol, they have been averaged.

  Color coded from yellow (clear skies) to smoggy brown (dusty).

  354 Appendix: Curiosity Activity Summary

  Area Noon UTC

  Sol RS Arm Activity Summary

  Ls

  T P Tau

  Bradbur 06 Aug 02:09

  0 c

  Landing!

  150.1

  y Landing

  07 Aug 02:49

  1

  HGA deploy

  151.2

  08 Aug 03:28

  2

  HGA point to Earth, Mast deploy

  151.7

  09 Aug 04:08

  3 M

  HGA test, instrument checkouts, FSW transition prep

  152.2

  10 Aug 04:48

  4

  FSW transition prep

  152.7

  11 Aug 05
:27

  5

  FSW transition

  153.3

  12 Aug 06:07

  6

  FSW transition

  153.8

  13 Aug 06:46

  7

  FSW transition

  154.3

  14 Aug 07:26

  8

  FSW transition

  154.9

  15 Aug 08:06

  9

  Instrument checkouts

  155.4

  16 Aug 08:45

  10 C

  Instrument checkouts

  155.9 197 776

  17 Aug 09:25

  11

  Instrument checkouts

  156.5 197 779

  18 Aug 10:04

  12 C

  Instrument checkouts

  157.0 197 778

  19 Aug 10:44

  13 cM

  Instrument checkouts

  157.6 199

  20 Aug 11:24

  14 cm

  Arm unstow, sampling system checkouts

  158.1 197 781

  21 Aug 12:03

  15 c

  Steer wheels

  158.6 196 783

  22 Aug 12:43

  16

  Dr 7m to 03/0050 · el+0m · 00007m · for first drive! Drill feed retraction

  159.2 197 786

  Begin driv

  23 Aug 13:22

  17 M

  RCE maintenance

  159.7 197 786

  24 Aug 14:02

  18

  RCE maintenance, SAM atmos

  160.3 198

  e to Glenelg

  25 Aug 14:41

  19 CM

  Mastcam checkout

  160.8

  26 Aug 15:21

  20 M

  Mastcam checkout, APXS atmos overnight

  161.4

  27 Aug 16:01

  21 m

  Dr 5m to 03/0084 · el-1m · 00011m · toward Goulburn Scour

  161.9 198 788

  , complete commissioning

  28 Aug 16:40

  22 C

  Dr 15m to 03/0106 · el-2m · 00027m · toward Glenelg, autonav checkouts

  162.5 199 787

  29 Aug 17:20

  23 M

  Mastcam checkout, ChemCam anomaly

  163.0 198 788

  30 Aug 17:59

  24 M

  Dr 22m to 03/0266 · el-2m · 00048m · toward Glenelg

  163.5 200 788

  31 Aug 18:39

  25 M

  Chemcam anomaly cleared, HRS maintenance

  164.1 198 790

  01 Sep 19:19

  26

  Dr 30m to 03/0378 · el-2m · 00078m · toward Glenelg, visodom & drill checkouts, CheMin empty 164.7 199 790

 

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