Emily Lakdawalla
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epsl.2016.08.028
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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