Post-Conjunction at Home Plate North, Getting ready to leave Options

[jamescanvin]

Conjunction is over, so it is probably a good time to start a new thread.

I just saw this update from Scott via Twitter

Out of solar conjunction & planning to drive Spirit again. Woo-hoo! Come on, little hill-climber, you can do it!

[sci44]

I was wondering - as you know, Spirit is trying to climb up a fairly steep slope. Looking at the direction of the dust streaks as it appears to "clear", could that be consistant with mechanical vibration aiding the clearance, or is that not possible - so this is purely the wind doing the work? To what extent could the clearing be an optical illusion - ie, when there is bright light fully reflected by the panels, they appear dusty, when not, the dusty patterns on the dark panels stand out..

Just my 2 cents..

[PaulM]

I was wondering if the dust movement was caused by a Marsquake.

[Fran Ontanaya]

But Mars crust is dead, and probably a quake strong enough to shake the rover would make a lot of dust go airborne over Gusev.

A very small vibration can't be the solution, or that shaking mode they tried to clean the MiniTES mirror would have been enough.

[PaulM]

But Mars crust is dead, and probably a quake strong enough to shake the rover would make a lot of dust go airborne over Gusev.

The Viking seismometer did not detect any Marsquakes. However as this abstract makes clear the seismometer was not very sensitive and only worked on none windy days:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979GeoRL...6..368G

It is stated in this article that a picture taken by MRO may be evidence of a Marsquake:

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/03/03/hi...ches-in-action/

[Fran Ontanaya]

There must be a minimum seismic level the MER can directly sense if it tries to.
Would the vibration trigger the dust devil capture program if it was running (and would the microscope be able to capture movement if it was looking)?

About the avalanches, I remember from high school geology that thermal expansion, abrasion, frost weathering, weight removal or even haloclastia or chemical weathering could be involved.

[djellison]

There must be a minimum seismic level the MER can directly sense if it tries to.

It has IMU's and Accelerometers, not Seismometers. This is an issue we've covered before here.

Even if it detected shuddering from a DD (and indeed, there is about a pixels worth of shift at the summit of Husband Hill during strong winds) then by the time the rover had stopped doing whatever it was doing ( if indeed it has the power to be doing anything at that time anyway ) - it wouldn't even know which direction to point the Navcams to take an image of the DD that would be long gone anyway.

The new software to do DD/Cloud watching is a far more sensible and productive means to achieve that sort of thing.

Doug