Science!

The next day, we went ashore to deploy the rover on some Devonian age (~400 million year old) rocks. I was part of the "science" group. In a real rover mission, scientists sit in a room in Pasadena and figure out what the rover should do. There are pretty well-established ways of planning what to do and what kind of images and other data to ask for. This was more of a pretend mission to give us all practice in bossing a rover. To make things a bit realistic, we weren't allowed to look at the site where the rover was deployed, so we would have to practice seeing through the rover's cameras. The first thing we learned about rovers is that they're very slow. I had plenty of time to take pictures between strategy meetings
Finally, we finished our last instruction to the rover, so we could go over to the rover area and take in the action.