State from Sol 22

• The rover is in good health, and all functionality is available. Power is still available to keep the Mini-TES warm and alive provided UHF transmission is limited.
• This is a 70m antenna Sol. DTE this Sol is 11.06 megabits, UHF is limited to a total of 24.5 megabits. Data remaining on board is 5 Megabits from previous Sols

Sol 23 is an Approach Sol:

The mission manager is contemplating allowing a reduction in the engineering data rate to increase the DTE available on these remaining end of mission Sols. This will depend on the health of the vehicle and will be decided on a Sol by Sol basis.

This Sol's main objective is to drive to a target called Black Lab and attempt to position the rover to permit IDD operations on the target on Sol 24 or 25.

Sequence Development:

• After consultation with the Test Director, the flight rule limiting us to a maximum 3.0m drive without hazard avoidance on is being waived by the Mission Manager for this Sol. The rationale is that we are towards the end of the mission, power is rapidly decreasing, we have a significant amount of history with this rover's drive ability, and the engineering consensus is that there is high confidence that there are no hazards anywhere in the conceivable path of the vehicle even with a major discrepancy in the actual versus predicted rover path.
• We sequenced a 3.3m traverse to a position approximately 1.02m away from Black Lab. There will be a 50% chance that we will be in the IDD workspace after this drive. Our expectation is that there would be a further 95% chance of a traverse on Sol 24 getting us within the IDD workspace.
• The uplink was approved with 8 minutes to go.

Sol 24 Considerations:

• First and foremost,did we succeed with the approach? If not, respond to what we failed to do. Also evaluate the success of the direct drive of over 3.0m (i.e., the flight rule waiver results).

Cumulative Comments:

• It is important for the theme groups to sequence their requested observations, and in particular they should sequence their highest priority observations first. On Sol 15, the highest priority Pancam was not sequenced by the theme group, but the second and third were.
• Given extra time during sequence development, it is worthwhile to review the science priorities as well as to review, in sequence order, the visualizations of the image and remote spectroscopy requests.
• The modeling for IPS points needs to be updated. Ground testing should be performed to determine the duration of IPS measurements as a function of coadds. In addition, the modeling for Navcam images needs to be updated, since they appear to take up twice as much space in the resource modeling as they should at 16:1 image compression after a 12:8 pixel compression.
• The tools do not provide a means to determine the actual length of planned traverse segments. Furthermore, there are no good estimates with uncertainty of the meters per minute that the rover (with hazard avoidance on) can traverse as a function of the terrain type. Finally, there is limited information on the dead reckoning capability of the rover on gyros with respect to heading errors. Overall, there was no way to estimate the traverse duration or error based on the traverse design and terrain expectations, other than the experience of spacecraft team eyeballing the situation. This would not be acceptable in a real mission.
• We need to request a change control board to adjust the Hazcam data volume in the command dictionary from 2.1 to 1.05 Mbits.
• Clarification from PI: we have a mission success location if a) use two out of three in situ instruments, and b) the PI is willing to advocate that the science is new and different enough to make it a location.
• We need a ruling from the test director on whether we need Hazcam from one meter back and Hazcam at the current location in order to perform an arm operation. This may be affected by FIDO's ability to implement a stop one meter short after a long traverse. If not, we may not ever be able to do targets of opportunity after a long traverse.
• We have a test director flight rule to not use approach moves (hazard avoidance off) for total moves of more than three meters. Note that this is a Flight Rule that can be waived per Mission Manager (and has been on Sol 23).
• Before this Sol, we have completed the requirement for 3 locations, one trench (actually two), and have driven approximately 199 meters. After this Sol, we will have traversed approximately 202.2m. There are three Sols left.

Special Notes:

• Starting on Sol 16 and on all subsequent sols, the afternoon sol will begin at 12:15 PM with all subsequent events shifting later by 15 minutes.

Updated sequence development schedule starting at 0900 and 1415:

• 70 minute Sequence Design
• 10 minute Sequence Validation
• 10 minute Sequence Approval

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