{"id":219,"date":"2014-10-19T19:40:55","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T19:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2014\/10\/19\/19th-october-2014-sol-783\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:28:37","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:28:37","slug":"19th-october-2014-sol-783","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2014\/10\/19\/19th-october-2014-sol-783\/","title":{"rendered":"19th October 2014 Sol 783"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today marks the closest approach of Comet Siding Spring to Mars. \u00a0Curiosity will be pointing MastCam and ChemCam towards it, and have been practising targeting \u00a0at stars like Spica. \u00a0Its a tough targetting \u00a0job but ChemCam might be able to get molecular information about the composition of gases in the comet&#8217;s coma from passive spectra. \u00a0One of the challenges of the targetting is that we dont really know for sure how large the comet is.<\/p>\n<p>To date the most detailed information we have got about the composition of comets has been from the Stardust mission. \u00a0That brought back to Earth micron-size solid grains from the Jupiter Family Comet Wild2. \u00a0 However, Siding Spring is from much further out in the farthest parts of the Solar System &#8211; the Oort Cloud, 1000&#8217;s AU away from Mars, so this is a particularly special (and very close) encounter.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile on Mars , Curiosity is finishing analysing drill dump piles and rock and vein targets at the Confidence_Hills drillsite in Pahrump Hills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today marks the closest approach of Comet Siding Spring to Mars. \u00a0Curiosity will be pointing MastCam and ChemCam towards it, and have been practising targeting \u00a0at stars like Spica. \u00a0Its a tough targetting \u00a0job but ChemCam might be able to get molecular information about the composition of gases in the comet&#8217;s coma from passive spectra. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}