Safe Mode Options

[mars_armer]

I just heard that Odyssey went into safe mode on Saturday. I haven't seen any official announcement yet.

One result is that MER is having to replan using direct to earth only. Current estimate is that Odyssey will not be able to support UHF relay until "mid-week at the earliest".

[djellison]

A typical rover day - roughtly - in local solar time....

10:00 - Wakeup
11:00 - Direct from Earth HGA uplink of days commands
11:30 - 5 min carrier only tone on LGA to confirm handover to new sequence (if driving at the same time, this is called a honk - and no, they've not observed a dopler from the rover driving )
11:40 - Sometimes a nap for a half an hour, or an hour.
15:00 - Sometimes an Odyssey Pass
16:00 - Sometimes an Odyssey Pass - usually one, sometimes 2 - about 90 mins apart
17:00 - Sleep
if deep sleep -thenskip straight thru to the following morning, otherwise
03:00 - 04:00 - same UHF as before, one or two, about 90 mins apart.

The bulk of the rovers activities occur between around 11:00 and 15:00. Very VERY little data gets downlinked via DTE on the HGA usually - as it's power inefficient compared to UHF ( on a Whrs / Mbit scale )

I imagine, without UHF passes - they might use an extended HGA pass in the morning and add some DTE after the uplink - and perhaps another short one in the afternoon to downlink housekeeping data for the day, and a very small ammount of science data - probably little more than thumbnails, and reduced navcam frames.

Doug