Curiosity was still at the ice cream shop for planning today, with the delicious feast of rock flavours still at arm’s reach and begging to be sampled. In the previous plan, one such flavour, captured in today’s blog image and perhaps most analogous to Rocky Road (not only given that Curiosity drove over this rock causing it to fracture, but also arguably the appearance as well), caught the eye of the operations team. There was desire to place APXS on this target, “Convict Lake,” in the previous plan but the team ultimately did not have the image data available that would permit Curiosity to safely do so at a suitably close distance for APXS. Not to be discouraged, Monday’s operations team pivoted and utilized part of the plan to acquire images of Convict Lake that would enable better APXS placement in today’s plan.
