Likely another false carrier lock. Like I said with DSN Now above, take anything Oppy related with a grain of salt. To be honest, I'd just pretty much ignore the Opportunity DSN status twitter messages because of the high potential for false locks with other orbiting assets.

Just for curiousity (the mental attitude, NOT the robotic craft), what help could the currently-orbiting assets be to this effort? They all have there regular jobs to do, and limited capabilities, and limited time in view of Opportunity, but their one-over-R-squared advantage is significant over earthbound resources......

DTE LGA passes have been used in the past and the DSN is well capable of detecting and carrying those passes. Either the rover has enough energy to start a comm pass or it does not, it is binary, not analog where the transmitted power varies according to the energy level.

Paolo

This has been discussed several times in this thread, look for "UHF".

The bottom line is that in this particular fault it doesn't help very much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowdrift
If there is any wind when the dust is being deposited, then perhaps it would depend on the local topography, like a snowdrift. Some kind of barrier that abruptly slows the wind might form a relative drift. For example, if the rover deck were tilted in the windward direction, then it might receive a lot of dust.

You are correct, the local topography greatly affects the dust deposition but your example is backwards, I think. The side facing the wind sees the highest pressure and wind speed, therefore lower dust deposition. As an example, if you remember the dune field we have traversed before and after Victoria, had an asymmetric dust deposition. Even when the crest was about 20cm taller than the trough there was a noticeable difference in dust. This is why we were usually driving on the West side of the trough, and why the Sol 833 embedding happened (Jammerbugt).

In fact, the current rover position is probably one of the best possible to expose the deck to cleaning events. If you look at the surface (before the PEDE) there wasn't much dust drifts around.

Paolo

Probably a public announcement on JPL or NASA sites. Also, if you see me heading for the liquor store, that might be a good sign.

Paolo

That's what I figured, but the trouble is that there are seemingly so many ways the news of Opportunity waking up could be disseminated: could it be a rover team member's social media account, a press release from NASA/JPL as you said, some lucky person looking at DSN Now at the right moment, or a 'leak' to a space news reporter?
There's no technical disclaimer on the DSN Now interface, and I'm not sure what the NASA PR rules are about private social media accounts apart from 'opinions are my own'. The chance of false alarms are still too high...

As far as I know the automated DSN twitter account is basically getting the same information as DSN Now. Many of us have said over and over again that this is not a reliable source of information with regard to the Opportunity recovery, and you can appreciate that there might be a certain amount of frustration when these caveats are ignored.

I've tried to figure out what an unambiguous detection might look like on DSN Now, but the initial contacts will likely just be beeps (carrier only) and with just this, my criterion of actually seeing data flowing at 10 bits/sec will never be met. Read https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/MER...cmp20051028.pdf 5.1.6 X-Band Carrier-Only Beeps for more information. It may be that once the recovery is well underway, DSN Now will be a viable way of seeing how it's progressing, but not initially.

The bottom line is that an official announcement is the only reliable way to know if something has been detected. AFAIK, team members are not supposed to be unofficially posting status information on social media. I don't think the team will sit on the news for any length of time, but it has to be coordinated with JPL PIO so I wouldn't expect it to happen over a weekend.

Perhaps one way of ruling out false contacts might be to look at the Local Solar Time at the Opportunity location for when they occurred. As an example, if my calculations are correct, the 3 most recent candidate "beeps" occurred at 13:28:42, 12:50:19, and 13:45:57 LST. (I assumed the times given by the twitter reports were Pacific Time.) If the onboard clock were still working, then (according to the fault protection documentation) the spontaneous beeps should be at 11:00:00 LST.

The clock has almost certainly faulted, and even if it hasn't, I don't think one can presume anything close to the level of accuracy that you're suggesting.

The fact that there is no public source that says how long a particular signal is in carrier lock makes it impossible to tell a short transient from a longer, more plausible actual contact.

I see people are still trying to use DSN Now as some way of detecting an Opportunity recovery. Some of these points have been made earlier but just so people are clear....

https://twitter.com/dsn_status
This is an unofficial bot written by the awesome Russ Garrett. It says so right in the accounts profile. It is not a NASA account. It is simply a bot posting every time it detects a change to the XML file that drives the DSN Now website.

I get it - we all want to hear from Opportunity - but believe me, you've not going to figure it out with DSN Now. I worked on it for years, and it is a victim of many idiosyncrasies in how the DSN operates, how the network reports its status internally and - to be brutal - a lack of resources to engineer a level of robustness into its pipeline to avoid all those idiosyncrasies.

Seriously people - I know watching DSN Now like a hawk may feel like a way of getting ahead of an official press release, but you're largely wasting your time.

The way we're going to hear that Opportunity has been heard from is via a NASA and/or JPL press release. Not an overly enthusiastic fan reading too much into DSN Now.

ADMIN MODE: This thread has become beyond overheated, and we're turning the flames down right now. Three particularly inflammatory posts hidden.

New info/rules for this discussion to continue:

1. It has been stated. And stated. And stated. REPEATEDLY...that the DSN Now interface cannot be considered an authoritative source to determine whether or not any sort of signal has been received from Oppy. Therefore, there will be no more excited future posts claiming to have seen such a signal nor passionate defenses of one's 'find'.

2. There has also been an exhaustive explanation from persons in positions to know the many technical reasons why this is, as well as the various possible failure modes that are causing the silence (all of which are at this stage possibilities, not confirmed hypotheses). Nobody else here is in a position to question their opinions.

3. Unless and until NASA/JPL makes an official announcement that Oppy has been heard from we will not know anything at all. If anyone begins claiming some sort of conspiracy about this they will be immediately and permanently banned.

Most of all, let's keep it civil. Many people here are, naturally enough, emotionally invested in this situation. Let's please not let that concern and frustration overwhelm our good sense (and I really don't wanna hear any "but s/he started it!" cries of protest--just knock it off. Now.)

Back to our regular programming.

Bravo Zulu nprev. Not before time.

My relationship with JPL media has always been difficult at best. I'm pretty sure that if I made an anouncement before they did, it would be my last post as a JPL employee.

I am also sure that JPL/NASA would not hide or delay such news. Yes, there will likely be some handshake with teh rover to make sure she's still up and running. Mars works slowly. Be patient, and watch where I'm heading ;-)

Paolo