system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the average day in the life of Curiosity made up of ?

What does he do all day and who controls him ?
gpt
Rover operator here.  

A typical sol on Mars often starts with what we call a "slip assessment," which is just a series of photos taken by the hazcams that are compared to those from the previous sol to assess whether wind or settling caused a change in attitude or orientation.  At about 10AM local time on Mars, we get a "Direct-to-Earth" or DTE communication from the Rover's high gain antenna, which serves as an indication that the rover is awake and healthy and ready to start its planned activities.  This usually starts with a few minutes worth of housekeeping of the rover's file systems -- things like deleting old data products, etc, but then we get into actual science!

The bulk of the day-to-day activities vary depending on what we're doing on a given day, but usually there is a detailed plan of operations involving mobility (when we actually drive from one place to another), imaging (a typical day involves dozens of photographs, especially when you consider that we like to take before and after photos of things like drill locations or laser targets), or even just sitting still while the rover uses some of its daily power allocation on running experiments (analyzing soil samples, processing data, etc).

The excitement is typically broken up about 4 times per sol, when the rover takes time out from science (or time out from sleeping, in the case of early morning passes) to relay its on-board data products back to Earth via the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.  We prefer this method of communication because it's more power-efficient and allows for much higher bandwidth than trying to beam everything back to Earth with the rover's own transmitters.

Sometime in the evening, the rover goes to sleep and we do it all again the next sol.