Curiosity sol 43 update: First science stop

It's now the early hours of sol 44, and JPL held a phone briefing today with the latest news from Curiosity. Before I hit the high points, I learned a new word today: "solorrow." When you're living on Mars time, it's confusing to use "tomorrow" to mean "the next sol on Mars" when that sol starts at some time totally unrelated to the time at which today becomes tomorrow on Earth. So if you're talking about Earth days, it's yesterday, today, and tomorrow; if you're talking about Mars sols, it's yestersol, tosol, and solorrow.

OK, here's the summary of the last and next few sols:

• Curiosity has been driving, driving, driving; the odometer stands at close to 300 meters now.
• They've been observing Phobos transits (on sols 37, 38, and 42), and a Deimos transit on sol 42. Not many of those images are down yet; I'm going to wait to write about those until I have more data to play with. Opportunity has also been imaging Phobos transits, but at a lower frame rate. (Oppy gets one frame per 3 to 10 seconds, while Curiosity gets 2 frames per second with her right eye and 3 with her left.)
• The target of the most recent (sol 43) drive was a pyramidal rock that has been named for Jake Matijevic (read more about him here).
• Jake Matijevic will be the first rock target for APXS and MAHLI. It's dark and is most likely an example of Mars' ubiquitous basalt, a bit of ejecta thrown from some distant crater. Since we know what this stuff looks like, it's a good first target for the science instruments.
• Solorrow will be a "restricted sol," where the planning time is shorter than usual because of the timing of the communications pass. They'll do a little arm work but nothing fancy.
• On sol 45, they'll bump to Jake Matijevic. "Bump" is a term that the rover missions use to describe the final approach to an interesting rock target. I presume that after the bump they'll take a bunch of photos with various cameras to document the work volume. "Work volume" refers to the region that Curiosity can reach with the arm and its tools.
• On sol 46, they'll do an APXS measurement on the rock -- Curiosity's first APXS of a Mars target -- and also take MAHLI images. If time permits, they'll use Chemcam as well. If not, the Chemcam measurements will happen on sol 47.
• They will not use the brush or any other turret tools on Jake Matijevic.
• When they're done with Chemcam, the next sol will see them on the road toward Glenelg again. Curiosity has crested a small rise so can now see Glenelg with her cameras.
• There is still much work to be done to prepare the soil sampling tools for their first use, and once they've found a suitable target (John Grotzinger suggested a little windblown sand drift would be perfect), it'll take them roughly three weeks to work through that.

I've updated my sol-by-sol summary with these notes.