Hi, I’m Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project
scientist for the Curiosity rover and this
is your Curiosity rover update.
A lot of what this mission is about is figuring
out the possibility that ancient Mars was
a habitable environment.
But we’re also studying the present environment.
Two instruments that help with that are the
RAD instrument and the REMS instrument.
The RAD instrument is a radiation assessment
detector.
It measures the high-energy radiation coming
up from the cosmic rays and the sun.
That radiation is changed as it goes through
Mars’ atmosphere to where we detect it on
the surface.
By measuring the radiation at Mars’ surface
Curiosity is helping prepare for human missions
to Mars.
Another instrument that Curiosity has that
measures the modern environment is called
the rover environmental monitoring station.
It’s basically our weather station.
We measure a lot of things including pressure,
and humidity, temperature and wind.
It’s been seeing little dips in pressure
around noon that seemed like the signature
of dust devils.
Only thing is our pictures haven’t turned
up any dust devils.
Spirit and Opportunity saw lots of dust devils
moving across the horizon.
Our best guess at what’s going on is that
Curiosity is seeing dust devils go right over
it, only thing is we’re not seeing the dust
devils.
So what we think is happening is the same
sorts of vortexes, driven by convection are
occurring on Mars at the Curiosity’s site
but just not picking up dust.
Another thing that REMS has been measuring
is winds.
Turns out we’re in a pretty interesting
place inside of Gale Crater.
We’re right at the base of a 5-kilometer
high mountain to the south of us and then
there’s a pretty tall crater rim to the
north of us and we’re sitting in kind of
a flat depression between the two.
The winds blow up and down the mountain as
the temperature changes during the day and
up and down the crater slopes and then along
the depression where we’re at.
So right now we’re trying to figure out
from the REMS data exactly which parts of
that wind field we’re measuring.
With Thanksgiving coming up we’ve been preparing
a few days worth of commands to send up to
the rover to keep it busy while people here
take some much needed time off.
The rover will be acquiring a big panorama
of our surroundings while we’re away.
I’m Ashwin Vasavada and this has been your
Curiosity rover update.
