SUPRISE......New Steve Q'n'A, Recorded Nov 6th 2006 |
SUPRISE......New Steve Q'n'A, Recorded Nov 6th 2006 |
Nov 7 2006, 11:26 AM
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#1
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
Everyone likes suprises right....
At very short notice ( <36hrs ) - Steve and I managed to meet up in Milton Keynes yesterday evening and do another Q'n'A - this time an hour long talking about everything that's gone on in the last 12 months or so since the first Q'n'A last September. http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_071106.mp3 Approx 14 Meg, 1 hour 48 seconds long. Sorry I didn't have time to do a call for questions - but with the time between knowing it was on and doing it being so short there just wasn't the time to call for them, plough through them and then pick them...I think I got through all the good stuff though. I tried to see any left over stuff mentioned here, things that might have been asked for a Pancam update but better suited to Steve rather than Jim - and I was able to ask my admin team if they could think of any as well ( thanks guys ). This time it was on the lounge area on a hotel landing....no ducks or wind noise - but occasional passers by heading to and from their hotel rooms - I hope the quality's good enough (I think it is) If someone wants to put down time markers for transcription and people do the same as last time, I'd be happy to put together another PDF like last time. Enjoy! Doug |
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Nov 9 2006, 12:54 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 240 Joined: 18-July 06 Member No.: 981 |
Part 11
(why not start at the end) D: Now you said that you’d like to know if you can leave or where you can leave. If you do leave Victoria, where next? SS: (laughs) Ha. Well … D: There’s not a great deal. SS: No there isn’t and what that says is that you should not leave Victoria without having done Victoria very well. We spent 21 months getting here. Since the day we landed, the dream goal of the mission was getting to the crater. I mean I remember, gosh it was the night we landed I think or within 24 hours of landing. We figured out more or less where we were, and then the guys at JPL found the “MOC strip” that had the landing site in it and printed it out. Enormous -- you know 3- 4 feet wide and 20 feet long or something. I remember unrolling it on a table in the operations area and Tim Parker, Mike Malin and a couple of other guys on the team were pointing. “Well OK here’s the little crater …”, we hadn’t named it Eagle Crater yet, “Here’s the little crater where we landed” and “Oh wow look at that crater over there!” and that was Endurance, and ”Boy it would be neat if we could get there”. We’re all clustered round looking at these little craters and thinking where we’re gonna go, and away down, 20 feet away at the other end of the table is this big honkin’ thing and it was just this fantasy, at the time. But we saw it the first night. You know, we knew that that thing was there. It was such an effort to get there and there’s so much scientific potential here and you have to go so far before you get to anything else. I mean the next crater onward from Vic that potentially offers more, scientifically, than Victoria does is I dunno 12, 15 kilometres away. D: To the ESE there’s a really large … For some reason the community have nicknamed it Ithaca. I don’t know why. I think that’s rude. (Laughs) But it’s a long way to the SE and you know how navigable is that terrain anyway? It took so long to get this far. SS: You’re talking about a distance from here to there that is more than the total distance traversed by the rover so far. So I do not look at that as a realistic goal. I still want to find an egress route. I just don’t like the idea of driving this thing in and not being able to get out. For example, we’re not gonna do 360 degrees around the rim of this thing before we go in because there’s so much that leads us to want to go in. Suppose we do 90 degrees or 120 degrees around the rim, then we find a good ingress point and in we go, we do some work in there and then we come up with some scientific question that is best answered by more imaging from the rim. I wanna be able to do that, you know. I don’t wanna just get stuck in that crater forever. So even if we don’t drive off to some distant crater, there are reasons to want to get out. But as to where you would go next, its hard to think that far ahead. I mean you’ve got to realize for example we certainly intend to go into this crater. If we go in and we lose a wheel, as has already happened on Spirit, that’s it. D: That’s it, you’re stuck. SS: You’re not coming out. I mean the demonstrated hill climbing ability with one bad wheel is about a seven or eight degree slope. And so if you drive in and you lose a wheel that’s it, you’re there forever. Just like Spirit’s never gonna climb McCool Hill. If we go into Victoria and we lose a wheel “whhittt” (neck chopping gesture) that’s it, game over. D: If you add the sol numbers together now its 2001. SS: Oh is it now. Today? Is that right? Yeah I guess that’s right. D: 990 and 1011. SS: Yeah that’s right. We just cracked 2000 sols. D: One thing I should touch on which we laughed about a year ago, the S1K bug. SS: Yeah. D: I never thought we’d actually have to worry about it but … SS: How did you come through the S1K bug? (Laughs) You must have folders that have .. D: I have folders to rename. I haven’t done it yet. SS: (Laughs) I think we came through it fine. D: The fabulous Midnight Mars Browser tool that many of us use to grab all the pictures, a little Java app that James made, that needed an S1K fix. The JPL image website, that needs an S1K fix. SS: Oh really? D: Yep. There’s something 1000 up way high. It’s reporting them incorrectly. SS: Uh oh. OK. D: The pancam tracking site, that needed a little fix because that was set to a thousand then was giving you one again. But how was it, I mean did you catch everything before you … SS: I think we caught everything. We tested it very thoroughly ahead of time. We saw this coming months and months and months in advance. A lot of software people went to work on it, made every change that it looked like we possibly needed to make and then we tested the hell out of it just like we test the hell out of everything before we actually use it. And so yeah, we’re very very thorough in our testing of it and I am not aware of any problems that we’ve had with S1K. I mean S1K for Spirit came during conjunction. And I was a little nervous about that but nah as far as I know it’s all been fine. D: Opportunity is ready to start all over again with Victoria; Spirit’s just about ready to start moving. SS: Yeah, just started moving today. D: It’s the adventure that just won’t stop? SS: Well its been that way for a thousand, two thousand sols depending on how you look at it. It will stop. It’s gonna stop some day. We don’t know when and so all we can do is you know the attitude that I’ve been trying to take and the whole team’s been trying to take from the very beginning is you know we have an extraordinary opportunity here. Every day is an adventure. It could end at any moment. Just cherish it every single day. Don’t ever take for granted this incredible gift that we’ve got, and lets just push hard and squeeze the most we can out of these vehicles while we got em. D: Steve, thank you very much. SS: Glad to do it. |
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Nov 9 2006, 01:25 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 2262 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Melbourne - Oz Member No.: 16 |
Midnight Mars Browser tool that many of us use to grab all the pictures, a little Java app that James made, Hey that's the second time today that MMB has been attributed to me. As much as I'd like to take the credit, I think Mike deserves a mention as I'm sure he contributed to it somehow. (Well what do you know, Doug does appear to say James on the recording, Climber mush have subconsciously absorbed this when listening and thus made the same mistake in the 'New Adventure' thread. ) James -------------------- |
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