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2 min read
Written by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 15, 2025
Today we uplinked a three-sol weekend plan with lots of exciting activities - to support both the science and engineering teams!
While usually our science activities take front and center stage, we often also do engineering maintenance activities as well to maintain the mechanisms and engineering health state of the rover. On Sol 4631, we planned a maintenance activity of our Battery Control Boards (BCBs) which are electronic control boards attached to the rover's batteries and are what let us interact with the batteries as needed. This maintenance is done periodically to correct for any time drift on the BCBs, so we get as accurate of data as possible.
On this sol, we also did a dump of all of our parameters - these are essentially variables set onboard the rover which serve as inputs to a variety of functions. Occasionally we send a list of all these variables back down to the ground so we can verify they match as expected. We don't want to have set a value and then forget about it!
