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

[odave]

OK, make that lunch today - my headphones were AFU thanks to my 2.5 year old, so I had to obtain a new pair.

Here are the sections I chose, trying to keep them in the 5 minute range.

Section 01 :: 00:00:00 to 00:05:11 :: Spirit- El Dorado to Low Ridge Haven :: odave
Section 02 :: 00:05:12 to 00:10:12 :: Spirit- Return to Home Plate and after :: NMRguy
Section 03 :: 00:10:13 to 00:16:53 :: "all the things that are funky on both rovers" :: odave
Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans :: lyford
Section 05 :: 00:22:26 to 00:26:38 :: Oppy- Erebus & Olympia :: imipak
Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky :: lyford
Section 07 :: 00:31:44 to 00:37:39 :: Oppy- Victoria arrival, conjunction operations :: paxdan
Section 08 :: 00:37:40 to 00:43:33 :: Oppy- AM Odyssey passes, HiRISE image of Victoria :: imipak
Section 09 :: 00:43:34 to 00:49:23 :: Oppy- Victoria plans :: Marz
Section 10 :: 00:49:24 to 00:54:19 :: Oppy- Victoria early analysis :: CosmicRocker
Section 11 :: 00:54:20 to 01:00:48 :: Oppy- After Victoria? S1K bug effects, "the adventure that just won't stop" :: MarkL

Orange = has a volunteer
Green = transcription done.

As before, just pick whatever section you want to transcribe, but post your choice here so we can avoid duplication.

To start things off, I'll take Section 1

Fabulous interview, Doug!

[Marz]

I'll take chunk 9, if it's still open.

OK, make that lunch today - my headphones were AFU thanks to my 2.5 year old, so I had to obtain a new pair.

Here are the sections I chose, trying to keep them in the 5 minute range.

Section 01 :: 00:00:00 to 00:05:11 :: Spirit- El Dorado to Low Ridge Haven :: odave
Section 02 :: 00:05:12 to 00:10:12 :: Spirit- Return to Home Plate and after
Section 03 :: 00:10:13 to 00:16:53 :: "all the things that are funky on both rovers"
Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans
Section 05 :: 00:22:26 to 00:26:38 :: Oppy- Erebus & Olympia :: imipak
Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky :: lyford
Section 07 :: 00:31:44 to 00:37:39 :: Oppy- Victoria arrival, conjunction operations :: paxdan
Section 08 :: 00:37:40 to 00:43:33 :: Oppy- AM Odyssey passes, HiRISE image of Victoria :: imipak
Section 09 :: 00:43:34 to 00:49:23 :: Oppy- Victoria plans
Section 10 :: 00:49:24 to 00:54:19 :: Oppy- Victoria early analysis :: CosmicRocker
Section 11 :: 00:54:20 to 01:00:48 :: Oppy- After Victoria? S1K bug effects, "the adventure that just won't stop" :: MarkL

Orange = has a volunteer
Green = transcription done.

As before, just pick whatever section you want to transcribe, but post your choice here so we can avoid duplication.

To start things off, I'll take Section 1

Fabulous interview, Doug!

[Marz]

I'll take chunk 9, if it's still open.

Zoiks! Who woulda thought it's harder to understand an englishman than a Yank? Here's my take on chunk #9 - it may not be 100% accurate, but I think it captures the gist of the conversation.

----


DE: Now HiRISE will image Victoria again, that's where MRO wants to get it with the stereo pancam?

SS: Yes. Yes.

DE: ...to get a stereo pancam of the crater.

SS: Yep, stereo is very important for us because we want to use that, of course, along with the stereo we take from ground level, to start assessing entry and exit alcoves.

DE: Now, there is a MOC down, (??) there is a little movie some of you may have seen, I don't know how accurate that is, but...

SS: It's pretty good, actually.

DE: And to my untrained eye, the kinda south-east sorta half the crater looks perhaps a little easier, a little more slope-friendly.

SS: Well... i mean, there are some... we could... Duck Bay would've been easy to drive into.

DE: Duck Bay is pretty Karatepe style.

SS: Duck Bay would've been really easy to drive into. I'm not sure it would've been easy to drive out because there's a fair amount of loose soil there. But I think there's prospective entry and exit alcoves at a number of places on this crater. So yeah, um, i mean, the fundamental point of this traverse that we're gonna be doing along the rim for a little while here is to look at the layering at the rock that's exposed in the promontories, and basically use those promontories as sorta like virtual bore-holes, if you can imagine such a thing the way geologists would collect data.... um... to look for lateral variation in the stratigraphy. But while we'll be doing that, we will also be doing some long baseline stereo with pancam looking across the crater and trying to assess slopes. And that, combined with the HiRISE stereo I think we should, eventually, get a very good elevation model for the whole crater.
Um, I don't want to go into the crater until we think we have found an exit route, or until we've just convinced ourselves that there isn't one. In other words, when we go in, I want to go in with knowledge of what the implications are. And so we need to do a much better job than we've been able to do so far in surveying these craters. I think we'll find an exit route.

DE: And if you do, and let's speculate horrendously here. The partial circumnavigation...

SS: Yep, months.

DE: Yeah, a couple of months around perhaps...

SS: uh....3, 4, 5 months.

DE: Now how far around? 120 degrees or so, thereabouts?

SS: We're... the juiciest stuff, the very best science along the way looks like it's 90 to 120 degrees. That arc is where a lot of the very best stuff is, at least as you look at the HiRISE images. Beyond that, the layering is not as well exposed and you also start to get into more big ripples that we prefer to avoid if we can. So it's this next 90 to 120 degrees where it looks like the best stuff is.

DE: From where we are now it's slightly off to the left?

SS: From where we are now, yeah.

DE: Let's say we get in...

SS: Yep. We could spend a LOT of time in that crater.

DE: As long as Endurance and then some.

SS: Oh, Jeeze, it's six times bigger!

DE: Yeah.

SS: Ok, we spent 6 months in Endurance. Ok? This crater is six times larger. [laughter] Ok? And the mossbaurer spectrometer is a lot older, and once we get in the crater a lot of the really important stuff is going to be the mineralogy and geochemistry. So a thorough exploration of Victoria crater is years. [laughter]

DE: Might it fit in, perhaps with one slope on the way in because that's power positive at one part of the year in... in the Martian year, you know... 6 Martian months later, on a slight different slope...

SS: Yes.

DE: And we almost talking about trying to get out almost a year later...

SS: Yes, there are many possible scenarios for how we go in and out of this thing, and we have not ruled any of them out yet. One possibility is you go in, you explore, and you come out the same way you came in, like we did at Karatepe. Another possibility is you go in one place and you come out another. Another possibility is multiple toe-dips, you go partway in and out, then you go to another alcove and partway in and out, and you do that multiple times. All of those are on the table. We don't know enough about the topography and we don't know enough about the stratigraphy to have chosen such an approach yet.

One of the things we've always tried to do on this mission when we face a situation like this, is not try to make too many decisions too far ahead of time. I always encourage the team to, you know, let's make the decisions we have to make, but let's not get too wedded to long term decisions because what happens is you sorta decide, "oh, we wanna do this or we wanna do that", and maybe it's not the right decision, and it's a lot easier to postpone a decision and then make it when you have all the knowledge than it is to make a preliminary decision people kinda get attached to that idea and then you have to realize later you should change it. And so we decided a long time ago, 2 years ago, that we wanted to get to Victoria crater and we have moved towards it with single-minded determination since then. But now that we're here, we're trying to not jump to too many premature conclusions about what's the best thing to do because as we discover and learn new things, we're potentially gonna change our views.

But right now, a partial circumnavigation counterclockwise, errr, or clockwise rather and surveying from the rim to try to find good places to get in and out is what the focus is gonna be, and then we'll pick our routes once we know more than we do now.