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Mark is the dude who made this cool autonav stuff happen (as well as VO, which I talked about in my previous post). You should really circle him.
Tim Campbell's profile photoMike Charbonneau's profile photoMarta Rauch's profile photoScott Maxwell's profile photo
Gee, I hope they use the AutoNav most frequently; it seems pretty tedious going manual.﻿
Does the rover communicate with Earth during the martian night?  e.g. is it relaying via the MRO satellite or does it wait until martian day to get a direct communication path?﻿
+Mike Charbonneau We use autonav relatively rarely: the slow CPU in the rover means driving that way is ... let's say, pretty gradual. The lower-level commands mean the rover moves faster -- and that way is more fun! Since autonav can extend a drive, though, as the rover goes slowly into areas we can't see well enough to command the low-level style of driving, we'll use it more when we're flooring it to Mt. Sharp and trying to get as much distance per sol as possible. There, the style is to blind-drive (as we call it) up to the limit of our imagery, and turn it over to autonav after that.

+Tim Campbell We don't have any insight into the rover in real time: we give it its instructions, it does stuff, and we hear  afterward what it did. We generally have two communication passes per day, getting a snapshot of the rover in the morning and again in the afternoon; it's mostly between those morning and afternoon passes that it does what we told it -- and we hope that what we told it is what we wanted! :-)﻿
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