SUPRISE......New Steve Q'n'A, Recorded Nov 6th 2006 Options

[djellison]

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

[imipak]

Here's Chunk 5. I wasn't too sure about the "umm"s and "err"s - I've left most of them out, but included a few "you know"s. I found I'd carried on quite a way past the end of the slot, so I've left a bit of that in. Also - I remember Overgaard, but "Cornville"?

Many thanks for the interview, Doug (and Steve!) I'm just about to settle down and listen to the whole thing properly.


[ 00:22:26 ]

DE: Let's segue, mildly seamlessly, to the other side of the planet -

SS: OK -

DE: - and do the same thing, run over the last twelve months or so.

DE: Most of the time was post-Purgatory, pre-Erebus. Now you took a
right, you went west around Erebus --

SS: Right, yeah

DE: -- towards Olympia and Payson and so forth. Was that choice of "those
look like interesting targets", or was it "the other way doesn't look
traversable"?

SS: It was both, it was both. The character of Meridiani is such that
what's traversable, and what's good science when you're out on the
plains, tends to line up really nicely, because the science that's
most intriguing of course is in the rocks, I mean there's interesting
stuff in the soil, but the soil's all very similar, and so once you've
done certain things, you've done them. Whereas, you know, the rocks
show lots of interesting variability, certainly the stuff that we saw
at Olympia really paid off very nicely for us. And as it turns out
also, the rock is the easy stuff to drive on. So that was a situation
where both of those things lined up together.

DE: Now you had a pretty lengthy stay around Olympia -

SS: Yeah, that was forced on us, because of the problem with the
arm. The problem with the arm - it took us a long time to figure out
what was going on. That was a surprise, it was a real anomaly;
clearly, something had broken, I mean, something just went wrong on
the rover. And you know, having had the right front steering actuator
go, having had the right front drive actuator on Spirit go, we were
very concerned about losing that IDD joint, because for a while it
looked like maybe we'd just lost the ability to move it altogether,
and that would mean we'd never be able to stow the arm again, that was
going to impair our driving, certainly it would impair usage of
the IDD and all the instruments on it. That was a really, potentially
very bad, situation. And so we really wanted to take our time and
figure that out. It took a while to get it straight, and figure out
how to deal with it. As it is now, we've got it figured, but it forced
a long stay on us at Olympia. Now, the good thing - this is, you know,
just one of those things - we took lots of pictures of the rocks
around us Olympia, and it looked sort of interesting; and then
after we'd been there a while, we'd kind of imaged everything, and
well, OK, the engineers are still futzing around with the arm, what
are we going to do? And so, you know -- well, OK, let's try taking images at
different times of day. And we took images at different times of day,
including some very low light. And then - bam! All that texture at
Cornville and Overgaard popped out, and that was just sensational. But
we really wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't been stuck there for a
while.

DE: Now what was that actually telling you, how did it relate back to
what we'd seen previously..?

SS: It wasn't telling us anything fundamentally different, it was just
much better examples. We had seen the festoon geometry or trough
geometry, cross-bedding, all the way back at Eagle crater. But that
was a situation where - we have some very, very, experienced sedimentologists
on our team, there's a guy named John Grotzinger who is an extraordinarily
experienced sedimentologist who has a very, very good eye for
recognising these sorts of things, and he was able to pick out, from a
distance, in very fuzzy pancam images, some festoon geometry,
crossbedding, at Eagle crater that was really very hard for the
untrained eye to pick out. And - you know, it was there, and we made
our case, and it was good stuff, but what I - what John and I both
wanted all along was some examples of that where you didn't have to
draw lines on top of the pictures to convince people that it was
there, it was just there - Bam! in your face - obvious stuff that was
there.

[0:26:38 - end of chunk]

One thing that I've had people ask me in the past, and you might have
asked me this once, was - are there any things we really regret passing
by, this whole mission long?...