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Mission Success Criteria
dvandorn
post Jul 22 2008, 07:27 AM
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It's currently halfway through Sol 56. We have, to this point, accomplished the following (please correct me if I'm missing anything):

- Full Mission Success stereo color pan of the entire landing site

- Full RAC coverage of what it can view under the lander

- One TEGA run

- One WCL run

- Two OM images of soil

- Zero AFM images of soil

- Programmed observations of winds and temperatures

How far, with only 34.5 sols left in the 90-sol primary mission, does that leave us from accomplishing the Mission Success Criteria? (Capitalized so that, as Steve Squyres noted, if you fail to accomplish them you'll know that You Have Failed.)

I understand that things are working well enough that we can likely count on a good 30 sols of full mission activity past the base 90-sol mission. Even at figuring that in, we appear to be nearly halfway through Phoenix's entire useful lifetime.

Are we seriously in jeopardy of failing to achieve some of the success criteria?

-the other Doug


--------------------
“The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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glennwsmith
post Jul 23 2008, 05:41 AM
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Perhaps Peter Smith has a different conception of this mission than that which UMSF has been accustomed to, and one which has been successfully borne out so far -- not a broad "let's poke around everywhere", but a strategic, surgical strike. After all, they did land right on top of their ice target, which was revealed within a few hours. And now, a single delivery of ice bearing soil to TEGA and the WCL, followed by successful analysis -- which can be accomplished in a few more days -- will triumphantly complete the mission. . .
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JRehling
post Jul 24 2008, 02:38 AM
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Some of the requirements are vague in a way that lawyers could argue with, if need be, but I think we really need to have two more successful uses of TEGA in order to confirm detection of organics: One of an ice sample, followed by one test with the blank. If there are no organics, then the blank test would be unnecessary, but then we'd want to test another ice sample followed by the blank test if the second ice sample showed organics.

It's the pacing of success/failure that's unusual. With a flyby or landing, you pretty much find out after failure if it was going to fail. With an orbiter, you might always hope that whatever was wrong will jostle itself into a fixed situation, and you only gradually give up hope. But Phoenix faces a real deadline. I don't know how to measure whether it's ahead of pace or behind pace, but it feels like it's a little behind.
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