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

[NMRguy]

OK. Here's Section 2. I must admit that I had a few questions with the British portion of the interview. Blame my damn American ears. So Doug, could you go through and check/fill in the parts with the (??). There should be five spots below. Everything else should be fine.



[From Section 1] SS: ...Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.

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Section 2
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DE: Now you mentioned Home Plate, and it was a brief stop on the way on the way to something in the winter.

SS: Yeah, yeah. We sort of got some unfinished business there.

DE: You’ll go back. But what’s the story so far? What have you seen so far, and what more questions have you got left unanswered? And you hope to go back and…

SS: Yeah, Home Plate is clearly some kind of explosive deposit. I think the leading candidate is that it’s some kind of explosive volcanic deposit. I think there are a number of things that point to an explosive origin for it, but I think by far the most compelling is this thing that we call the Bomb Sag. There’s a place really right where we first pulled up to the base of it, where we first took that nice panorama showing the face of Home Plate.

DE: (??)

SS: Yeah. And there’s a place called Barnhill. And in the lower unit there you see this place where there a rock that four or five centimeters across that has landed into some clearly deformable sediments, and you can see the bedding deflected beneath it. And that’s what happens when a rock falls from sky. [Snickers from both] OK. There’s no other really good explanation for that, or at least none that isn’t pretty far fetched. So that points to an explosive origin, and the thing that I think leads us to conclude that it’s most likely volcanic is that the composition of these rocks is very closely linked to some volcanic rocks, clearly volcanic rocks, that have been found near by. So most likely it was some kind of volcanic explosion that formed the thing. What we’d like to do is do a more thorough exploration of all of Home Plate. We had to blast across it really fast. You know, we came in on the north side. We did a pretty good investigation there. We went to the base, climbed up on top, did a very good job characterizing the chemistry and mineralogy at that one particular spot, got some pretty good images, but then we had to get out of there. And we didn’t really have time to do much else; we sort of went around it to the left and kind of went sprinting that eastern side taking a few pictures as we went. But I’d like to look at more bomb sags, for example. I’d like to see if there is any significant variability in the mineralogy and the chemistry from one place to another. There was one fabulous, bizarre rock that we found up on top of Home Plate called Fuzzy Smith. That one didn’t get a whole lot attention at the time in the news media, but it’s one of the most bizarre rocks that we have ever seen. It has an extremely high silica content. Very, very high silica content. It’s compositionally different from every other rock we’ve ever found on Mars. There’s never been a rock that’s been found on Mars that has a composition remotely like that one. We took a very quick look at it with the APXS and the Mössbauer, a couple MI images and boom, we were out of there. I know exactly where the thing is. We have to go back and find that rock again! We can do it! But Fuzzy Smith is a real anomaly. And uhh, I don’t know what kind of story it’s telling us. But we need to go back to Home Plate and understand the complexity and diversity of that thing a lot better than we currently do. It’s the biggest outcrop of layered rock we’ve ever seen at Gusev, and it would be crazy not to do it right.

DE: And once you’ve done Home Plate (??), however long that takes.

SS: It’s likely to take a while. We’ve got a pretty slow moving rover these days.

DE: It’s something that you could study for as long as Opportunity studied Endurance, for example. It’s not (??) upside down.

SS: I think we could. I’m not sure that would be wise. But I think we could easily spend quite a few months there. Yeah.

DE: And once you’ve done it, where next? With a stop where?

SS: Southwest. Southwest.

DE: (??) promised lands.

SS: Yeah, Jim Rice has always liked to call it that. I don’t know what it will turn out to be. It’s got this very kind of bizarre etched topography when viewed from orbit. I’m dying to see what it looks like in HiRISE images.

DE: HiRISE images…yeah.

SS: HiRISE imaging is, well, HiRISE was turned back on today. So, we’re going to pick…

DE: It’s pretty high on the list of targets, I am sure.

SS: It’s quite high on the list, yes. So yeah, you’ll be seeing more HiRISE imaging of familiar places before too long. And I’m dying to see what that stuff looks at HiRISE resolution.

DE: Now, most of us know how Spirit's doing with a worn out RAT.

SS: Yeah.

DE: Worn out wheel. Pretty tired Mössbauer spectrometer, but still fairly…

SS: Well, the Mössbauer…

DE: It takes a while, but it works.

SS: Yeah, the Mössbauer thing is just a matter of time. If you want to get a good signal to noise ratio, you just have to count longer. But things like the RAT and the worn out wheel definitely impair our ability to do science. We can’t do things as well. We can’t do a grind, we can’t climb. The Mössbauer--we can take beautiful Mössbauer data. It’s just a matter of time.

DE: Is there anything else that we’ve fully not heard about so much. I’ve read speculation that with the wind on top of the hill, mini-TES might have a little dusting on the mirror (??).

SS: Yeah. OK. Let me see if I can really go through it and name all the things that are funky on both rovers.

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This should be the end of Section 2--odave, could you match it up with the start of your section 3? Thanks.