Thanks pando for this information !

It's a relief for two reasons: we are moving at all and the mars-to-earth
communications seems to be intact !
Thats the most importat thing.

Hoping for a detailed update soon ..

It's simply not true that "it would take NOTHING for someone at JPL to post a few paragraphs per day about that's actually happening..." It takes time, it takes effort... and we are operating deep within an extended mission where money and staff are cut to the bone with constant pressure to make do with even less. Everybody is overworked. If one person is off sick, or on vacation, or just given another higher priority task to complete on a short deadline, then lower priority jobs just get put off. Let's be realistic about this.

Phil

Picture update at JPL, 538 new pictures: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html

Opportunity hasn't moved though - they had the IDD out on sol 443. It's parked in front of a very large dune/drift...... lots of berries still on the ground .

I'm a slow typist. It takes me a few minutes to type out a few paragraphs.

There are many paragraphs written PER DAY documenting just about everything that goes on with the rovers. And I mean EVERYTHING. To see some summaries of that just browse the MER Analyst's Notebook to see some of that data generated. There are detailed reports and minutes from each SOWG meeting, sol planning and execution summaries, daily and weekly mission manager reports, etc, etc. Many emails are going back and forth between the scientists and the rover engineers; they are sharing an incredible amount of detailed data in the computer networks between JPL and the universities, on and on and on. Most of that data is just raw numbers, which are mostly meaningless for most of us mere mortals.

You have to remember that this is a government agency responsible for a billion-dollar mission, and the primary objective is to generate as much data as can possibly be generated as long as those little machines keep on working. Technically, all the things you ask for - detailed daily maps or status reports generated by scientists actually exist in a very raw, technical, form, which are not ready for general public consumption. Would you be able to understand a report that says something like "ARB/ACM faults clear, PMA az/cam el/mtes nom, S/C att coarse, DP in Flash (D-3305) 4096, Pre ODY PCAM cal target P1424123 04, MTES_NAIF_SCLK: MTES SCLK = 1/05243365663.091..."??! Probably not.

So, before it gets released to the public, it must be toned down, summarized, etc, so the public can understand what they are actually talking about. Any news that gets posted by JPL is technically a press release, and before it's posted to any official JPL website, it must be cleared through their PR department and get proper approval. Normally that takes time. Also, associated with any press release is a flood of questions from all corners of the globe from other press agencies, and they have to be prepared to handle all that and answer those questions. I don’t think scientists themselves have the authority or the clearance to post the mission reports themselves in some open website out there, nor do they have the time to summarize extremely technical data for general public every day. They have to juggle between the rover operations, analyzing the data, their schedule in their university and with their students, etc., and that's tough work.

When there is no news for a while, there usually is a reason, and the simplest reason is that there is no additional information available to anyone! We’re talking about a piece of hardware 100 million miles away. So if there is a slight problem with something on the rover, it’s just that -- a problem. Of course we all want to know immediately what the problem is, what it affects, etc. The thing is that they want to know all that as well, but they can’t until the proper personnel is actually available to analyze it, communicate with the rover, run tests and try them out here in the sandbox, and that is not instantaneous. So, often what you see in the news a week later is a report that also has the answer along with it, after many hours of work analyzing that problem and finding some kind of conclusion.

Overall though I think JPL (compared to others such as ESA) has been quite responsive to the public in posting reports of the rovers. Dr. Steve Squyres himself offered to post weekly news at the Athena website and I think this is an incredibly generous gesture from him to satisfy the curiosity and interest for us Mars fanatics who continue to be so obsessed with the MER mission. Let’s be very thankful for what we have here, and how much we actually know, without which there wouldn’t be such a large fan base for those two incredible little machines.

I hope I cleared up some things for ya...

New update from Squyres on the athena website. Oppy sure is unlucky these days:

"After yestersol's drive, all six wheels we're dug pretty deeply into a large ripple. We've gotten dug in before and gotten out just fine, so this isn't cause for immediate concern. But we're likely to be here a little while, taking our time to get our wheels back on top of the soil again"

Damn!





Hope he is right about it not being a concern

Yikes.....I don't think i've seen the wheels on either of the rovers so deeple entrenched in the soil.

Also...while trying to move, they may have sunk slightly deeper:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DGP1223L0M1.JPG

Let us all pray this is not gonna be Oppys final resting place

Suddenly Victoria seems so far away

Erebus seems far away right now....whats going to make getting out of the sand even more tricky is the inability to turn the right front wheel.

Funny thing is that it was able to plow that much into the dune without the slip-o-meter kicking in.

When Squyres said they had dug in before, is he then talking about on the road to Burns Cliff in Endurance Crater?

Pando,

Thanks for the dose of reality.

oh, oh .... that's going to be tough with only 5 working wheels and software problems

if only we could reach the etched terrain, which seems to be only a few hundred meters away: from what is known from the orbiter images, that terrain
would probably offer gaps of rocky, more driveable floor between the dunes

a few weeks ago I was already concerned when spirit got stuck with the front wheel on its way up the hill:
http://mitglied.lycos.de/user73289/misc/sp..._f453_wheel.jpg
Spirit got free aparently with now great effort ... but this time it does look
worse ...

But I think with 5 (independantly moveable ?) wheels and the
combined brainpower of the JPL team I'm hoping this is not the end of the drive
... hoping for a little bit more scenic final resting place

RE: images in Reply#37. Interesting how the soil is cohesive and clings to the tread of the wheels. I wonder if this is not the "last gasp" of the Blueberry soil unit before it thins to the etched terrain. The physical appearance of the soil has been changing as Oppy heads south.

What is the exact nature of the steering motor problem? Is the motor/gearbox seized, is the motor not responding to commands, does the wheel not lock into the commanded position, or what? The descriptions of the malfunction, as I recall, have been general.

--Bill

When they command it to move the motor simply stalls, just as if something was obstructing it. I seem to recall that they could get some small movement out of it when they were diagnosing the problem though. But I would believe they are not gonna move it now since it is in the "least worse" position for driving.