Curiosity's low-gain and high-gain antennas in this view looking northeast at the rim of Gale Crater.
Photo Credit: NASA JPL
Tomorrow is a big day for Curiosity, because JPL's engineering team can start checking out the Mars Science Laboratory's instruments, having finished loading Curiosity's surface-optimized software over the last 4 sols.
Over the past few sols, JPL painstakingly reprogrammed both of its CPUs' radiation-hardened, electrically erasable programmable read-only memory, or EEPROMs, with new operating systems, testing each one carefully to make sure nothing went awry. The software was uploaded to Curiosity en route to Mars, so it's been waiting for the initial post-landing instrument checkouts to be completed.
We're well into Curiosity's Characterization Activity Phase (CAP), the month-long process of testing each part of the rover. Now comes the instrument checkout with the new software. Curiosity's instruments will each be turned on to make sure that data comes back looking the way it should. The Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) and Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument will both be powered up—APXS for a second, 20-minute test, DAN for the first time. DAN has an active and passive mode. In active mode DAN is capable of firing neutrons, but for now DAN will only be tried in passive mode. The Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence instrument will get a checkout as well. Curiosity's radiation assessment detector (RAD) was already powered up shortly after landing.
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