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

[slinted]

Section 10:

Doug: But, one question that we’ve often thought is, by any measure of reasonable guesstimates before landing, they just shouldn’t be around today.

Steve: That’s right

Doug: And given that, by rights you should be doing something else

Steve: Yeah

Doug: And so should all the engineers and all the scientists who are still on the project.

Steve: Yes

Doug: So…

Steve: We’re very tired

Doug: Who’s doing their job where they should be now?

Steve: [Laughs] Very good question. It’s been very different on the engineering side and the science side. On the engineering side there has been a lot of turnover. Only a handful, not a handful, but a relatively small fraction of the engineers who were active in the day to day flight operations at the start of the mission, are active in it now. They’ve moved on to MSL, to Phoenix, to other projects. There have been a few engineering areas where there’s been almost no turnover. The rover drivers, there’s been like zero turnover. It is the coolest job on the project.

Doug: It’s the best job in the world

Steve: Rover driver is just a really cool job and so none of those guys want to do anything else. They think they got the best job on the planet. I almost agree with them sometimes. So those guys have mostly hung in but there’s been a lot of turnover on the engineering side. What’s happened is basically, what you’ve got is you’ve got, really talented, ambitious young engineers who want to learn something…they work at JPL, they want to learn something about flight operations. MER is kind of the cool mission to work on, so they’ll come in and replace people who have gone on to other projects. So we’ve had quite a bit of turnover on the engineering side.
The science side is basically the same crew that we started with. The science team for this is selected via a whole competitive proposal and peer review process. It’s a very laborious process, and so the science team has stayed more or less intact. Many of us would have been spending our time on other things. I’m involved in the Cassini mission for example. I’m involved in MRO. Thankfully, most of these missions have pretty big teams. For example, on the Cassini Imaging Team, there are plenty of good scientists on the team who pick up the slack.
What has happened to many people is people who thought they going to be spending time analyzing MER data are still involved in the daily repetitive grind of flight operations. I think the biggest impact on all of us, has been that it has been very hard to get our data analyzed and our papers written and published with the constant pressure of flight operations on top of us. And a consequence of that, we have gotten a lot of papers published. We got two special editions of Science, a special issue of Nature that are out, like I said a special issue of EPSL that’s just about to come out. We’ve got a special issue of JGR, Journal of Geophysical Research, on Spirit for which all the papers are now submitted. That’s going to be a spectacular issue. That’s really good stuff. My next big push is going to be a special issue of JGR that’s all about Opportunity. But, man, we’re tired. I mean, we are just, the whole team is just, especially the scientists I think, just deeply fatigued. I mean, it’s the most fun you could possibly imagine having in your career, but we’re tired.

Doug: You need a break

Steve: Um… yeah

Doug: But you don’t want the option to arise where by you can take one

Steve: Well, sure, because the only way we could take a break would be if the rovers die. And so we’re just going to have to keep pushing. We’re doing ok, I mean, we have put a lot of effort into finding ways to make the operations task sustainable in the long term. We are fatigued, but we’re not …if we were working at the pace that we were for the first three or four months of flight operations, where it took seventeen hours between when we saw a downlink and when we had the uplink ready, we’d be dead. We wouldn’t be able to keep doing it. But, fortunately, we’ve gotten much better at it. What used to take seventeen hours now takes six or seven or eight hours, or twelve on a really bad day. And that’s much more manageable.