Two Years of Operations of the ChemCam Instrument onboard the Curiosity Rover at FIMOC, the French Operations Center for Mars Instruments

摘要

Following the successful landing of the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater, on August 5, 2012, science Operations started at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) right after turning on the instruments minutes after landing. During the first 90 days of the mission, all operations took place at JPL. On November 8th, 2012, ChemCam engineers were officially the first team to operate the instrument remotely from FIMOC, the CNES Operations Center located in Toulouse, France. The instruments have been operated remotely since that day alternating weekly with the Los Alamos National Laboratory Operations Center for ChemCam. This paper will give an overview of how ChemCam teams interact remotely with JPL in a unique way to operate instruments on Mars: monitoring the instrument health, analyzing received data products, preparing the daily Rover activity plans, and generate instrument sequences to be delivered to JPL. It will also present the instrument status after nearly two years on Mars, and how FIMOC operations can benefit future space missions to Mars.