10 January 2013 I was MAHLI/MARDI uplink lead again for Sol 153 planning, but there were no MAHLI or MARDI observations in the plan, so I focused instead on advance planning for Sol 154. Now that the duration of the daily tactical process has been reduced to 11 hours, part of the science team spends a couple hours each afternoon getting a head start on planning the next sol. This avoids having to start the tactical process much earlier in the morning every day. We are planning a lot of arm activities on Sol 154, including a bunch of MAHLI close-up images.

Ken Herkenhoff is a ChemCam RMI specialist. An archive of Ken’s past updates can be read at http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/news/.