Project Transcribe, The SS Q'n'A to Text Options

[djellison]

A few people have offered to help transcribe the Steve Q'n'A MP3

http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_030905.mp3

So - I've 'chopped' it up into about a dozen virtual sections each somewhere between 3 and 6 mins long, and if volunteers want to pick one, post here and then post the finished text when done and I'll string it all together as a PDF when it's done

Section 01 :: 00.00 to 03.36 :: Intro and Mars '01
Section 02 :: 03.37 to 07.29 :: Endurance and Wopmay
Section 03 :: 07.30 to 10.41 :: Burns Cliff and Leaving Endurance
Section 04 :: 10.42 to 14.33 :: Heading South and Purgatory
Section 05 :: 14.34 to 19.00 :: Gusev and Rock Types
Section 06 :: 19.01 to 24.53 :: DD's and Rover Rocking
Section 07 :: 24.54 to 29.10 :: Ultreya and Leaving Husband Hill
Section 08 :: 29.11 to 33.48 :: MB Decay and Rover Life
Section 09 :: 33.49 to 38.32 :: Sci vs Eng and A parked rover
Section 10 :: 38.33 to 43.00 :: What should you be doing?
Section 11 :: 43.00 to 47.16 :: S1K, New PI, Other Landing sites, Carl
Section 12 :: 47.17 to 50.09 :: Outreach, Book Follow up, Thankyou

Green = Transcription Done

Pick whichever you want, and post here the moment you decide, so we dont end up duplicating If I get some time, I'll take a couple and plough thru them. It would be nice to wrap it all into a little PDF article with pictures etc - like an extract from a pretend UMSF Journal or some such publication - and if I'm fortunate enough to do something like this again, I could do it the same way

Thanks in advance to everyone who grabs a number out the hat.

Doug

[lyford]

'K Doug - here is Section 09 - had just a little trouble hearing you around 36:28... put my best guess in bold as a place holder. Should be pretty close - and I left out most of the "ums" and "uhs." I think I left the best ones in, though. ;-) Since work has me too busy to be doing any imagery anymore, I am glad to finally be giving something back again to this wonderful board.


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BEGIN PART 09 33.49)

Doug: Is there one issue that, between the engineers and the scientists, or perhaps different parties within the scientists, has caused, that has really stuck out and caused debate between them?

Steve: Actually very little... and I am really pretty pleased and kinda proud about that. I mean it’s inevitable that within the science team there will be a certain amount of, you know, “We want to do this” and “No, we want to do that”, I mean that happens all the time. But between the scientists and engineers we’ve done really, really well. It is not uncommon on some of these space missions for the scientists and engineers to be at odds with one another, especially during the development phase, but also during operation as well. We worked really, really hard on this project, and by “we” I mean largely myself and Pete Theisinger, who was the project manager during development, to really forge a partnership between science and engineering. And the relationship between science and engineering on this project is better than on any space mission that I have ever worked on. I am really really pleased about that. I’ll bet you that if you came to one of our operations sessions and you sat in the integrated sequence team room for 6 hours, you’d have to sit there and listen and watch very carefully for a long time before you figured out which people were the scientists and which were the engineers.... The scientists on this mission have spent a lot of effort learning the engineering, and the engineers have learned a helluva lot of science! And we really kinda think alike now.... so there’s been very little of that.

Within the science team there has not been too much, either, and I attribute that mostly not to, you know, sound leadership, but just simply to long life. [laughs] You know, if you think that the rover’s about to give out on you, then yeah, everyone’s going to fight over resources - “No, I want to take dust devil movies,” “No I want to do this,” “No I want to do that....” But it’s become apparent to us that these rovers are so tough, so durable, that there’s gonna be time for everybody. So we do a lot of “horse trading” - “Yeah we’re gonna do this observation today, but I promise you we’ll do this one tomorrow.” But because the rovers have been, while not an inexhaustible resource, a very prolific one, it’s really been easy to settle these disputes among the scientists because with time everybody gets what they want.

Doug: If we have the kind of, the gradual demise, the mobility demise of either rover -

Steve: Quite plausible...

Doug: And you ended up parked somewhere -

Steve: You mean we are down to the point where we simply cannot move?

Doug: You can’t drive, you are stuck.

Steve: Yes. Right.

Doug: Do you think headquarters would still fund extensions? And what could you do if you were to [scan? stand? sand?] one spot over a period of time? (36:28)

Steve: Umm - I think if one rover is still moving, I mean they don’t fund the two rovers separately-

Doug: [It’s one project...] ????

Steve: -because , there’s - they provide money for the project. So I think if one rover is still active and moving, that we would go into a reduced operations mode for the other one, where we could do continuous operations. Once both rovers stopped moving, at some point then it would time to start winding down the project. What would we do with a stationary rover? Well, first of all, we do a lot of atmospheric science. We do a helluva lot of atmospheric science. We do imaging of the sun, we do imaging of the sky, all kinds of sky imaging, we do the dust devils, we do lots and lots, I mean, you won’t see this on the JPL website, but we do a ton of MINI-TES observations of the sky.

Doug: Very early on we saw a kind of a graph that showed like a thermal going across...

Steve: Oh yeah, we’ve done a huge amount of the stuff, and we still do it daily. In fact I will be presenting some of that at the DPS meeting here in Cambridge this week. So they’re very effective weather stations and they don’t care if they are parked, driving, doesn’t matter -

Doug: It’s weather....

Steve: -if you’re doing atmospheric science you don’t have to move. So we would still be doing all that, and that’s very productive science. You would certainly take a “Rub al Khali” type panorama, okay, where you were you would want to document that in detail, with lots of filters and no compression. And you know, you could take the mother of all Mossbauer spectrometer mosaics, you know...

Doug: And a MI mosaic of all..

Steve: Yes, sure, there’s all kinds of things you could do... at some point you reach the point of diminishing returns. But I think as long as at least one rover is active it makes sense to keep operating both.

Doug: Now I’ve purposely not asked how long you think they’ll last-

Steve: [Laughs]

Doug: Because every radio interview, every interview you see, they ask the same question and get the same answer.

Steve: Yes, that’s right.

END PART 09 (38:32)

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