Written by Conor Hayes, a graduate student at the University of York

Earth Plan Date: Friday, May 23, 2025

In Wednesday's mission update, Alex mentioned that past Monday's plans included a 45-meter (148-foot) "marathon" drive. Today, we found ourselves nearly 70 meters (230 feet) from Wednesday. This is our longest drive since the real 97m (318ft) drive on the SOL 3744.

Today’s plan looks a little different than our usual weekend plan. The team will gather on Tuesday as Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, so additional sols must be cured in the weekend plan. This extra sol is mainly used in our next drive (about 42 meters or 138 feet), which means that all the science we plan today can be "targeted" that we know exactly where the rover is. As a result, instead of filling our scientific time with remote sensing activities that are more distant, we can use instruments on our arms to poke close to the specific targets of the wanderer.

The power demand of the rover continues to dominate the plan. Although we have passed the Aphelion a month ago (Mars is the farthest distance from the sun is from the sun), and so now we are getting closer and closer to the sun, we are only about a week away from the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere. This is the time during which the strong wind craters get the least amount of light from the sun, causing particularly cold temperatures even during the day, so more power is needed to keep the wanderer and their instruments warm. From the coldest time of the year, this means we only have warmer sols to look forward to!

Given the need to strictly adhere to our allocated electricity budget, everyone has done an amazing job to ensure we can adapt as much as possible to the plan. Overall, we have over four hours of directional and remote sensing activity and over 12 hours of overnight APX integration.

MastCam spent most of his time looking away today, especially focusing on the potential structure we wanted to drive towards. These structures obtained two dedicated mosaics, with a total of 42 images between them. Mastcam will also observe “Mishe Mokwa” (a small lilac about 15 meters or 49 feet south of us) and some bedrock troughs in our workspace and will require two Tau observations to characterize the amount of dust in the atmosphere.

Chemcam has only one observation of solo imaging in this program: Dexoli Butte's RMI mosaic along our east. Chemcam will work with APX to perform some passive spectral observations (i.e., without LIB) to measure the composition of the atmosphere. MASTCAM and CHEMCAM will also jointly study the observations of LIBS activities. The plan includes a luxury three rupees on “Orocopia Mountains”, “Dripping Springs” and “Mountain Center”. Both MastCam and Chemcam have a set of "dark" observations designed to characterize the performance of the instrument without illuminating its sensors, which is important for correctly calibrating its measurements.

One of our set of ARM activities includes APX, DRT and Mahli activities on "Camino del Mar" and "Baden-Powell" which are all bedrock targets in our workspace.

Of course, I can't forget to mention the collection of NavCam observation sets that we have in our plan to monitor the environment. These include a 360-degree survey of the dust devil, two line-of-sight activities to measure the amount of dust in the air in the strong winds, and three cloud movies. As always, we also have typical collections of REM, RAD and DAN activities throughout the process.