Coming into planning today, it looked like it was going to be smooth riding. Before planning began, we received an email from our localization team informing us that Monday’s short drive away from Kings Canyon appeared to have completed successfully, so everyone was ready to start poking around in our new workspace. It wasn’t long before we realized that we were facing a bit of an unusual situation. Although the drive completed, we were missing almost all of our post-drive imaging. When a drive completes, we take a set of Navcam, Mastcam, and Hazcam images of our new location that we then use to determine the targets that we want to perform contact science and remote sensing on and to plan our drives. Without those images, there are very few activities that we can plan. Fortunately, we did receive one Navcam image near our new workspace (which you can see in the cover image above), so the geology and mineralogy (GEO) team had something to work with, though their ability to select targets was still severely limited.
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