DONT MAKE ME SING IT...


"You put your haz cam in, you put your hazcam out, in out in out haz cam all about..."

Doug

Looks like the old girl when nuts going around a rock


Doug

Good stuff Pando

It's a whole new mission now really

Doug

HOLY CRAP - HILLS!!

Going to have amazing power in the morning with that slight backward tilt

Doug

Bit of a net-fart courtesy of the hosting company - the site was apparantly over it's daily bandwidth budget ( which is 2gb ) for a few hours

Just checked when it came back online - and it's not 2gb, ikt's 20mb

Normal service resumed

Doug

I think the conjunction will mean a stand down of a week, maybe two - somewhere. It also, of course, means a stand down for MEX, MO2k1 and MGS

It'll be hellishly nerve wracking for the rover teams ( and us ) - but hopefully they can put them into a safe configuration for the duration.

Doug

Motion passed.



Doug

Blue sky is just a symptom of the auto-gain on the image when they're taken on board. If we knew how much they'd been played with, we'd know how to process them better. The sky isnt blue though

Doug

There will be once Huygens lands

Doug

Think I should add a Cassini forum? I'll be waving a little Union Jack when Huygens touches down, as the Surface Science Package is UK built Typical - 7 1/3rd years in space - and the PDF's show that there will be about 3 minutes of Surface Science time available!! Hopefully - we'll get a little longer than that


Doug

I'm still here

I guess we're all waiting for Spirit to actually GET there, and Opportunity to dive into the Crater

Doug

What a cool shadow

Doug

Good Afternoon, it's Friday May 28th and this is the Flight Director Update for the Mars Exploration Rovers, my name is Chris Lewicki and I'm working on Spirit today.

I'ts sol 143 at Gusev crater and Spirit has finished its first of four driving sol quartets that it repeats. Yesterday we drove about 60 metres to the Columbia Hills and that brings our odometry total to 2650 metres and we have just another 620 metres to go. Today we're doing some pre drive imaging before we drive today on a target called Degwood Sandwich a very interesting thing we ended up at yesterday. So we'll be looking at that in most of our camera filters today before we drive off about another 70 metres. We still expect to get to Columbia Hills by Sol 160 so it's not too long now.

On the other side of the planet at Meridiani Planum it's sol 122 and Opportunity succesfully executed our second Deep Sleep of the mission and we survived the night just fine with that and it saved the energy we expected to. More importantly our Mini TES intrument we put in danger with the Deep Sleep operation did survive the night and we hope it will survive more of these but we're getting dangerous close to the cold temperatures which it isnt able to survive thru. On the evening of sol 123 we're planning another deep sleep and again that is to ensure we have more power for more operations while we continue to study Endurance Crater.

And that's what happening on mars today

Hello, it's Thursday May 27th,and this is the Flight Director update for the Mars Exploration Rovers. My name is Chris Lewicki and I'm working on Spirit today.

It's Sol 142 on Spirit and we've caught up with our science activities from the last few days and recovering from our anamoly over the weekend and we're backing up now and observing the trench infront of us. Tomorrow will include some more driving, we're starting the first of our four driving quartets and we'll drive about 60 metres and after that luck at the sun for a while to update our attitude. And that's whats going on on Spirit

On Opportunity it's Sol 121, and we are still at Endurance Crater survey position number 2, and we're finishing up there with a heavy day of Mini TES observations and tonight we'll be exercising Deep Sleep overnight to save a lot of the power that we end up using on our IDD heater. So heavy on Mini TES, Tonight we should be deep sleeping, the sun will wake us up at about 7 in the morning and tomorrow we're looking forward to some more APXS and Mossbauer work at Barberton rock. We probably wont deep sleep tomorrow, but the day after we'll probably be doing it again, we'll be doind deep sleep more often than we have in the past.

Back on earth we're just starting with our testing in the test bed to verify that the rover can drive into Endurance and we're learning a lot about the rover caperbilities at a site like Endurance crater with doing that testing and we'll find out if we can drive into endurance soon

And that's what's happening on Mars Today.

The very long and thin black and white one I did ends on the 'left' edge of Columbia Hills - so that's not where the colour one finished. I think it's more likely to be a view to the west perhaps?

Doug

I was thinking of putting together a sol by sol account of what each rover has got up to, and then updating it. Any takers? Worth doing? From the pictures, the flight director reports and the press confs. it should be fairly easy to string together exactly what they got up to sol by sol

Doug

Hi I'm Jeff Favretto and this is the Spirit Flight Director Report for May 26th 2004. You're probably all wondering when the spacecraft are ever going to move again - we are to! They seem to be both sitting in the same place, they're both healthy but on Spirit we're still examining the trench we dug a few days ago and on Opportunity we're still taking a long range scan of the Endurance Crater. Spirit will drive tomorrow on Sol 142, we'll get away from the trench and we'll carry on toward Columbia hills.

And that's the Flight Director Report for May 26th.

You make a good point Perhaps it's the one marked on the left - the angles would make more sense

Doug

The one you marked on the right is correct i think

Doug

Hello, This is the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director Report for May 18th 2004. I'm George Chen, Flight Director of MER-A Spirit.

Today is Sol 133 on MER A, we are back on the road again in our drive toward Columbia Hills, at least we hope so. Back on Sol 131 we had a spontanious reboot of the flight computer and further investigation revealed that this was due to a flight software task writing to an inadvertantly write protected area of memory and the Operating System didnt know how to deal with that so it rebooted the computer and put the spacecraft into a safe state and waited for further instructions from the ground. We've determined that the spacecraft is healthy and we can pretty much start to drive again. Flight Software Engineers have determined there was only a very small window of vulnerability when this error could have occured of about 3 microseconds, so it looks like we were pretty unlucky that this problem occured and we dont think it'll happen again.

On the other side of the planet we just completed sol 112 on Mer B - Opportunity. It was an unsuccesfull day today - we had a problem with the DSN antenna. It was not configured properly for the uplink so the spacecraft never recieved any instructions from the earth on what to do on Sol 112. So we have the problem squared away at the antenna so we're hopefull that tomorrow, Sol 113, we'll be back in business. However we're probably going to have to charge the battery for a little longer on Sol 113 because some of the action we were going to take on Sol 112 to reduce the energy consumption were unsuccesfull as well

And that's what's happening on Mars today.