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I’m David Oh, lead flight director for the
Mars Curiosity rover and this is your Curiosity

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rover report.

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Over the past seven days, we‘ve been doing
checkouts of the arm instruments including

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the MAHLI imager, which is a very versatile
instrument that can focus on things that are

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close-by and very far away.

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The imager has generated some spectacular
shots of the underbelly of the rover and its

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wheels, of a 1909 Lincoln penny that we mounted
on the rover for calibration purposes so we

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can check that the camera is operating properly.

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And its also been used to generate a nice
self-portrait of the Mastcam on the rover,

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a portrait that’s taken by the arm looking
back, the same way you would take a picture

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of yourself using a cell phone.

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We’ve also been testing the APXS instrument,
an instrument for doing contact mineralogy

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science.

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It generates spectra that allow us to identify
the minerals that are present in a rock.

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When the checkout of the arm is complete,
we’ll be continuing our drive to the scientific

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target, Glenelg, but we’ll be stopping along
the way to take some video of the Martian

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moons, Phobos and Deimos, passing overhead.

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We control the rover from Earth, but we have
to operate it on Mars time.

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A Martian day is 39 minutes longer than an
Earth day.

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So every day, the whole operations team comes
in 40 minutes later, every single day, to

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send commands to the rover.

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In the month after landing, my whole family
joined me on Mars time and we got to jump

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a time zone a day for 30 days going all the
way around the clock.

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As we did that, we got to explore Mars here
at JPL and to explore Los Angeles at night,

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and it was a great adventure for the whole
family.

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This has been your Curiosity rover report.