March 20th 2013 Sol 221

On April 18^th there will be a Mars solar conjunction, when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun.  This occurs every 26 months ie the length of the Mars year.  That means that although the rover’s memory is fixed, we will not be able to do our normal full science activities for much of April.  Normally MSL communicates with ‘X-band’ ie 10 GHz radio waves sent via Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and Mars Express for a few hours per day returning up to 250 Megabits of data.  However, we now have a lot of data to use in papers for planetary science journals so we will busy.

At the moment many of the team (including me) are at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston to present some of our results to the wider science community. I am presenting data with teams looking at the compositions of rocks and fluvial conglomerates that we have analysed.