Curiosity's pit crew readies the rover for Mount Sharp

Curiosity's pit crew readies the rover for Mount Sharp:

Curiosity's robotic arm and tool array

Three weeks after landing, Curiosity's engineering team has figured out how to squeeze more surprises and more bandwidth out of the rover while wrapping up a very long list of checkout tasks. A few items remain, but for the most part, the rover is ready to forge a two-year trail up into the foothills of Mt. Sharp.

A voice from the darkness

An interesting thing occurred to the Curiosity engineering team while they were testing what has developed into a Mars orbital communications network. They needed some data to test the system, so why not relay a human voice?
On Monday afternoon, Dave Lavery, the MSL program executive, played back a recording of Charlie Bolden's voice, which became the first human voice transmission from another planet. Relayed up to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter via UHF and then to NASA's Deep Space Network via X-band, Bolden's packetized voice made its way through space with remarkable clarity, about 4Mb of data. Not surprisingly, Bolden's message was primarily one of congratulations.

The Curiosity engineering team has found a way to optimize uplink transmissions for higher data volumes than were previously possible.

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