Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: djellison Nov 7 2005, 10:56 PM

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

Posted by: David Nov 8 2005, 12:13 AM

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

Posted by: paxdan Nov 8 2005, 12:13 AM

Section 03  ::  07.30 to 10.41  ::  Burns Cliff and Leaving Endurance

Posted by: David Nov 8 2005, 12:59 AM

BEGIN PART ONE
Doug: This is Doug Ellison of unmannedspaceflight.com. The weekend of September 3 saw a weekend-long planetary conference of the British Astronomical Association to coincide with the 2005 DPS conference in Cambridge, England. After an excellent talk on recent scientific findings by the Mars Exploration Rovers, Steve Squyres took time to answer questions submitted by forum members in the gardens of the famous Cavendish laboratory.
But with recent tragic events in the southern USA, my first question was of course about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Doug: News in America has been horrific recently, friends, family, colleagues --

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: -- with Katrina, it's been --

Steve: It's been very tough to watch on TV over here, being so far away. Have friends -- used to have family in New Orleans but they've left -- have friends in New Orleans, I've heard from all of them. Everybody's OK, but still it's just a horrific thing to watch on television.

Doug: On a very slightly lighter note, MER came out of what seems like failure after nightmare after turndown --

Steve: We had our share of crises and disappointments.

Doug: At some point after kind of, proposal after proposal, did you think this isn't worth my time, I'm going to give up? Did you come close?

Steve: I was -- there were times when it was hard to keep going. I never came close to quitting. I will be very honest with you, and tell you that there was a point where a primary driver, I won't say the primary driver, but where a primary driver was simply fear. Was simply the fear that if I quit now, the last decade of my career would have been mostly wasted, and I just didn't want to see that happen. But I think, fundamentally I always knew, I knew from the very start that if we could get this to the launchpad, if we could get it to Mars, and if we could make it work it was going to be something really great. And just that knowledge was enough to keep us going through some fairly difficult times.

Doug: You came pretty close with the 2001 lander.

Steve: I was six weeks away from delivering a calibrated payload to the loading dock at Lockheed Martin. Yeah, we came real close.

Doug: Now, if you'd have got through that six weeks, if HQ had gone, let's fly the 2001 lander, and you'd have gone to Meridiani with Marie Curie --

Steve: Oh, God. Oh, I've had nightmares about that. Because that lander's not going to come to a stop in a crater.

Doug: No.

Steve: That just comes down where it comes down, and you just ask yourself what fraction of Meridiani Planum is craters. Okay. We would have landed out on those plains. We would have had the blueberries. We would have figured out that they were probably rich in hematite. We would have had some basaltic sand. And we would have had pictures of a whole bunch of nothing. And that's what we would have had.

Doug: You think Marie Curie could have stood in and managed anything?

Steve: Marie Curie could go 50m away from the lander maybe, but after that you basically lose control of the thing. I mean, maybe, you know, you could just send her trundling off into the distance -- I don't know what the range on the telecom system on that thing actually is. But all it's got is some really rather poor cameras and an APXS. You can't do mineralogy with it, no microscopic imaging capability on it. No, we would have been confused. We never would have figured it out.
END PART ONE

Posted by: David Nov 8 2005, 01:44 AM

I apologize for anyone who had his or her heart set on this section, but I got a little carried away:
BEGIN PART TWO
Doug: Now, we're going to crack on with the rovers.

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: The talk you just gave to the BAA kind of answered this question, but we -- everyone knows the story of Eagle Crater. You got the concretions, you got crossbedding, you got the salts --

Steve: We got lucky.

Doug: Yeah, very. But kind of lost in, kind of media interest waning away -- how much did Endurance Crater add to that story?

Steve: Oh, tremendously. Tremendously. Because when we had Eagle, all we had was the upper, you know, half-meter of stratigraphy. We couldn't put it into any proper context. We didn't know how much things varied laterally, we didn't know how much things varied vertically. By going laterally 800m we began to get a sense that this stuff is continuous over large distances. And then by going vertically, something like 10m, we actually saw quite a variety. What we found was that although the stuff at the top of the stack was in fact deposited in liquid water, because you see the ripples, most of the stuff that you see in the wall of Endurance Crater was deposited by wind. Certainly the lower portion of the section, and probably the whole middle section, is dunes and sand sheets.
A good analogy is a place in the southwestern United States called White Sands.

Doug: New Mexico.

Steve: Yeah, New Mexico. And what happens in White Sands is there are these playas, okay, where liquid water comes to the surface and evaporates away, and it leaves salt deposits behind, or sulfates. And they're much cleaner sulfates than the ones at Meridiani, but they're sulfate salts. And then what happens is those playas serve as the source for this sulfate sand that then blows around and builds the beautiful white sand dunes. And so what you got is mostly a dune deposit of salty dune sand with water in the low spots between the dunes. And that's probably the situation that we had at Meridiani Planum. We could have put none of that story together if we'd had only what we had over at Eagle. So Endurance was enormously valuable.

Doug: One rock that stands out in there that almost seems to be completely out of context is Wopmay.

Steve: I don't think Wopmay's out of context. Wopmay probably rolled down the hill to its current location. The interesting thing about Wopmay is that it's got a very weird surface texture. When you look at Wopmay carefully, what you see is that it's laced by this pattern of polygonal fractures that seemed very weird and very exotic at the time. The first place that we saw polygonal fractures was Escher. I don't know if you remember that one. But it was one that was way down at the bottom of the crater.

Doug: Yeah...

Steve: That totally freaked us out when we first saw that. Spent a lot of time on that one. Then we drove over to Wopmay and realized that it's got a pattern of polygonal fractures, and then what we've seen since then is that these polygonal fractures are all over the place. If you look at where Opportunity is right now, okay, that outcrop called Ice Cream, the one where Lemon, Lime and Strawberry are. All of those have this wonderful polygonal fracture pattern. Wopmay, the polygonal fracturing is on the surface of the boulder instead of this flat plateaued surface. But it's the same stuff. And it's weathered, it's eroded to this kind of a lumpy shape. We think that the polygonal fracturing -- I mean, when you see polygonal fracturing like that, it's the consequence of some kind of volume change, something is shrinking a little bit. These salts, the calcium sulfates, the magnesium sulfates, can contain a lot of water. It's water of hydration, it's not liquid water, it's H2O that is bound up in the crystalline structure, the crystal lattice of the salts. And then if there's a dehydration process, where the relative humidity in the outside environment drops a little bit, the salts will tend to dehydrate, as they lose their water they contract. They shrink. And so we think this polygonal fracturing out on the plains, at Escher, in Wopmay may be a consequence of the slight dehydration of the sulfate salts in the rock.
END PART TWO

Posted by: djellison Nov 8 2005, 08:39 AM

Wow - sweet - I go to bed for 8 hours, and 1/6th of it's done

Doug

Posted by: chris Nov 8 2005, 10:56 AM

I'll do 3.

Chris

Posted by: djellison Nov 8 2005, 11:16 AM

Paxdan's doing 3

Posted by: TheChemist Nov 8 2005, 12:34 PM

I'll pick it up from Paxdan and do #4

Posted by: chris Nov 8 2005, 01:28 PM

Paxdan's doing 3

Posted by: ilbasso Nov 8 2005, 01:44 PM

I'll do 6.
- jonathan

Posted by: Ames Nov 8 2005, 02:13 PM

Seven

Nick

Posted by: lyford Nov 8 2005, 04:26 PM

I'll take Section 09 :: 33.49 to 38.32 :: Sci vs Eng and A parked rover
That kinda has something close to one of my questions in it..... ;-)

Should we agree on a standard transliteration for the wind blowing sound? Something like:

*INAUDIBLE DUE TO DUST STORM*

Or do you want us to call in the forensic CSI folks to find out what was really said under it all.....

Posted by: djellison Nov 8 2005, 04:40 PM

If you cant quite make it out, then give me time-brackets and I'll go over it as...well...I was there

Doug

Posted by: lyford Nov 8 2005, 05:08 PM

well...I was there

Posted by: TheChemist Nov 8 2005, 06:10 PM

Ok. here it is. Doug, you might want to proof-hear it ( ), since my ears are better tuned to greek and canadian accents of english


Section 04 :: 10.42 to 14.33 :: Heading South and Purgatory

**************************************************************
Doug : One of the questions that I 've got emailed, was from Tom, or CosmicRocker on the forum, and he asked "what different kinds of geological investigation do you hope to perform at the Etched Terrain that can't be performed in impact crater exposures?"

Steve : Ah, yeah, good question.

Doug : And, "how do you expect the topography to evolve as you head further down into the Etched Terrain?"

Steve :Well, the answer to the second part of that is, I don't know, I really don't, we 'll see what we see when we get there. The answer to the first question is, umm, we will have moved laterally, so we can look for lateral variations. We may have moved vertically through the stratigraphic sections, or maybe we 'll look at vertical variations.I think the primary reason that I was interested in getting to the Etched Terrain, though, is because it's a place where, at least in some parts of it, we think we can look at stratigraphy that is not disrupted by impact. In the places where we 've seen stratigraphy so far, has been Eagle and Endurance, in both cases the rocks are busted up. Now it's fairly intact stratigraphy at Endurance, it's really jumbled up at Eagle, but there are places where we're gonna see rocks that have not been, probably, fractured by impact at all, and that's very appealing, because you 'll be able to see a much more intact stratigraphic record. So is the combination of the intact stratigraphy, plus the fact that you can look for possible vertical and depth or lateral variations, and we 're seeing variations, I mean the blueberries, umm ...

Doug : They 're looking different.

Steve : Yeah, they really do look different.

Doug : Tman has asked "Do you know how or why Opportunity got stuck in that dune ?

Steve : You know we 've really been agonizing over that one, because you really don't want to go through that again, that was an unpleasant experience. It was probably mostly simply a slight variation of the geometry. That particular dune, or ripple, was a little bit steeper and a little bit taller, just by a litle bit, a couple degrees steeper, er you know, five or ten centimeters up taller than anything we had hit before. It was only incrementally different. What that says is we were probably right on the verge of getting stuck numerous times before and we didn't know it.

Doug : Because we lucked out..

Steve : Yeah, we just didn't happen to dig in, and somehow we just stepped over a line, we crossed over some line with this one that we didn't know it was there, and this one got us. There have been some speculation, if you look at the overhead view of those, of the dunes, most of them run kind of North-South, but there are some that run in an angle, and Purgatory Dune was one of the ones that runs in an angle. There 's been some speculation on the team that that set of the ones that run in an angle might be younger, might be fresher, might as a consequence be less indurated, less stuck together with salts, it might be a little fresher. So that's a potential explanation, I think it's mostly just the geometry.

Doug : Late last night I was in the kitchen of our house with Nico scrolling through some old pictures, and we came up with a pancam picture from Sol 70,75 just before Fram, looking back towards Eagle crater...

Steve : yeah, yeah ...

Doug : ..and it's flat as a pancake, it's got slight rippling

Steve : ...very slight rippling ...

Doug : it's so different from where we are now.

Steve : The ripples get bigger and bigger the further south you go, I mean that's something we saw consistently as we went. You 'll notice, if you plot our old landing area ellipse, the ellipse that we were targeting, the edge of the ellipse actually runs through Erebus. Yeah, ok, so once we get south of Erebus, we will approach a terrain that is so nasty-looking that we didn't dare even trying to land there.

Doug : Like Victoria crater <laughs>

Steve : Well, not just Victoria crater, just that really pronounced etched terrain, the stuff that was showing those parallel.. I called it sort of a "quartering" texture, it had those parallel grooves and ridges, we didn't know what they were, we now know they are these ripples, but .. it was.. this was weird driving into stuff that we didn't dare try landing into. We've done the easy stuff.

<laughs>

Steve : We did the planes .. Now it's time for something new.

Doug : Crossing over to Spirit now.
**************************************************************

Posted by: Tman Nov 8 2005, 07:56 PM

I like that part

Although, because the cause at Purgatory Dune is still so uncertain I guess it wasn't easy for Steve. Therefore I'm sold on Steve's fidelity and openness. Hats off!

Posted by: Nix Nov 8 2005, 11:07 PM

Nice work guys. Thank you for your effort

Nico

Posted by: Ames Nov 8 2005, 11:49 PM

BEGIN PART 7 (24.54)

Doug: Now There’s has been an online phenomenon almost, spurred by Ustrax about this dark region between the summit of Husband Hill and the basin.

Steve: Yeah there’s kind of a dark splotch there.

Doug: For some reason Ustrax has named this thing Ultraya Abyss

Steve: Ultraya..?

Doug: Ultraya Abyss

Steve: Abyss. ABYSS?

Doug: Yeh. The speculations have gone from ‘Good God go there’s gonna be caves!’ to it’s just like a dark set of dunes but like we’ve seen on the side of other parts of the Columbia Hills

Steve: Right

Doug: Is that a name you’ve ever heard?

Steve: Ultre…

Doug: Ultreya

Steve: Ultreya? -- No. I’m Sorry

Doug (laughs): Have you got a name for it yet?

Steve: No. Ah Huh. -- We never named that

Doug: Do you think um ‘cos for some reason there’s people have just picked on the poor patch of dark soil and gone completely to town with it. (Have you) no idea as which route off Huspand Hill yet? obviously…

Steve: We’re still working on it. Um. If you notice the last -- few sols, what we’ve done is we’ve taken taken, what will be, two (I think they’re gonna be even better than summit pan) two spectacular panoramas. One of them is Just logo compressed (so losslessly compressed) blue. What we did is take a logo blue panorama of the entire inner basin and we are doing this little shuffle step where we move to the left and do the whole thing again with logo blue plus colour. So we get long baseline – stereo, should be a spectacular terrain map, and then we will have colour on top of that and that image will form, that pair of images will form our fundamental planning tool for the descent.
Here’s what we’re doing right now - ok, I have asked the team to do several things, while I’m gone, while I’m over here. Come up with a prioritised list of science activities to conduct in the summit region, OK make it as long as you want, I don’t care, make a nice long prioritised one OK. And then -- pick a set of potential science targets between where we are now and Home Plate. OK just about everybody agrees that Home Plate is a very enticing target; I think we wanna go there. But lets pick some candidate targets along the way. Then when I get back we are gonna do two things; One is we are gonna sit down with the rover planners, the guys who actually plan the rovers route, with our list of potential science targets along the way and were gonna assess the traversability – what’s too steep, what’s not too steep, what’s too rugged, what’s not too rugged, and try to plan out a tentative path, OK, just as we had a tentative path from Eagle to Endurance, um, that will be safe traversable and intersect some of the high priority science targets between where we are on Home Plate. Um, don’t know exactly where it’s gonna go it’s probably gonna sort of start off by going to the East a bit and then turn South.

Doug: There almost seems kind of a ridgeline like a curling exit out of a multi-storey car park going all the way around.

Steve: Exactly! Yeh! and that, that’s just to my eye initial, to my eye initially looks like a potentially good path. Have to talk to some of the rover planners if they’re thinking in a similar way but that’s all to be determined

Then the other thing we are gonna do is we’re gonna look at that prioritised list of tasks for the summit campaign. And we’re gonna say OK, this one’ll probably take three sols and this one’ll take six sols and this’ll take two sols and what we’ll do is we will select a date by which we are gonna leave the summit

Doug: Like select a day to leave Eagle and…

Steve: Exactly, Exactly, Exactly it’s precisely what I did at Eagle crater, Ok we had pretty much nailed the water story at eagle crater by about Sol 42 or 43. The team had this LONG list of things that they wanted to do at eagle crater. I said fine guys OK you can do whatever you want but at sol 60 we are heading over the lip and off to Endurance OK and you figure out what you wanna do for the rest of that time but sol 60 we’re out of here, and what that does, is it forces you to prioritise, it forces you to get efficient with, with how you use this resource. So we’re gonna do the same thing for leaving the summit of, uh, of, uh, Husband Hill. Haven’t decided what the date is yet, I wanna see what the list looks like.

END PART 7 (29.03)

Posted by: lyford Nov 9 2005, 12:27 AM

'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.


***********

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)

***********

Posted by: odave Nov 9 2005, 01:49 AM

Looks like at this time 1 through 7 and 9 have been spoken for and/or done.

Just in case someone's doing 8, I'll skip to the end and do... 12

Posted by: odave Nov 9 2005, 03:33 AM

And here's #12. I'll do another one tomorrow evening EST if there's any left

BEGIN Part 12 (47:17)
================

Doug: In terms of public outreach, the raw images going online,

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: The [slurred...47:21-47:23]. It's like e-mail has redefined kind of a standard almost. The raw images, it's like, it's like a soap opera.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Well that was exactly what we wanted to do!

Doug: Do you think the pressure is now on, I mean, 'cause, six months after you have Cassini arrive, and the raw images start goin' on there. Do you think that the pressure's now on that perhaps missions have to kind of be more open?

Steve: You know if one of the things that we did with this mission was to establish expectations that other projects will in the future choose to meet, then I think that's a good thing. There was no requirement from NASA or anybody that we put our images online in real time. That was a decision that my team made. We decided very early on that this mission, being the adventure that it is, it's different from many other missions. You know, its not like you have a flyby, and then two and a half weeks later there's another flyby. This is a daily process of discovery and exploration. And it just had such potential as something that like you said, a soap opera, this adventure that people could share, that we realized very early on that there was enormous potential with puttin' the images out in real time. And you know, I mean if, you're in the U.K., I'm in Ithaca New York, if, as long as the scripts are running well and we're updating quickly (and it's often we don't but we try our best). You know, if you're awake and I'm asleep you can see pictures...

Doug: Before you do.

Steve: ...from Mars before I do, and I think that's great! And I hope that other projects in the future will do the same thing.

Doug: And...I've read the book, Nic has read the book. And it's...I don't need to plug it because I think anyone who listens to this is going buy the damn thing anyway. I think they'll end up buying it three times. Do you think you would ever spend the time to do a followup?

Steve: I've talked to my publisher about that. At one point the idea was, when it came out in paperback I'd add a chapter or two. But they like to have the paperback come out about a year after the hardcover, and if so...

Doug: That's not...

Steve: ...if we're going to put it out in paperback next summer, they'd need to have the final few chapters, you know, a couple months from now and the mission's not going to be done. I don't want to update the book continuously...

Doug: No...

Steve: If I'm gonna finish it up, I'm wanna finish it. So, I think probably what will happen, most likely scenario, is adding one or two or a few chapters after the, in an edition that comes out after the mission is well and truly over.

Doug: Kind of like a "post-script" almost.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. When the mission's really done. They will die someday. They are not immortal <laughs> I'm convinced of this.

Doug: <laughs> Steve, thank you very much indeed!

Steve: Aw, glad to do it.

==============
End Part 12 (50:09)

Posted by: djellison Nov 9 2005, 10:25 AM

Wow - nice one guys !!

Posted by: chris Nov 9 2005, 01:39 PM

Section 05 :: 14.34 to 19.00 :: Gusev and Rock Types
=========================================
START 14.34

Doug: Crossing over to Spirit now.

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: And this is my question really - how much of a disappointment was Gusev, and we're getting to sol 90, got to Bonneville, that's lucked out. Was the pressure on around Mazatzal to get something to say here's some science, we've not got any yet....

Steve: Uuuhm.

Doug: ...sol 90 is coming up, we need to achieve something.

Steve: Well, there would have been a lot of pressure, I think, had it not been for two things. One was we had Opportunity, and by the time it was getting to the end of the Spirit nominal mission Opportunity had discovered so much. The mission was such a success that, you know, it took some of the pressure off Spirit. The other thing was I think there would have been a lot of pressure to do something, you know. I don't know what we would have done if we really thought the rover was about to die, but none of us believed that. I always trusted these vehicles. I mean I didn't count on gusts of wind cleaning them off - that came as a complete surprise. But I didn't think the wheels were just going to fall off when the sun came up on Sol 91 - I realised these things were going to last for a while. So we were able, because of the lifetime the vehicle had, to fortunately to get to the Columbia Hills, and since then life has been good. Now I will tell you that if all we had was the nominal mission, if the wheels had fallen off when the sun came up on Sol 91 for both rovers, then I would have said that the Gusev site was in fact a bit of a disappointment. I mean, everything worked, we learned a lot about the salts on Mars out on the plains, but it wasn't what we came for. We didn't really find what we came for at Gusev until we got up into the hills.

Doug: There is a chap on the forums that calls himself "the other Doug"...

Steve: [laughs]

Doug: ...and he is playing geologist here. "I have informally proposed a model where a deep core of the Gusev floor would reveal, from the bottom up, bracketed impact melt on the original floor"...

Steve: Yep.

Doug: ..."interleaved layers of lacustrine and pyroclastic materials over that, and then the cap of basalt that we spent 154 sols exploring". Is that anything like what you guys are thinking?

Steve: Yeah, exactly.

Doug: Exactly that?

Steve: Exactly that.

Doug: The guy's clearly a geologist, isn't he?

Steve: [laughs]

Doug: Do you have enough data from the Columbia hills by now to determine if they are predominantly volcanic or predominantly impact?

Steve: I think its a mix of both. I just finished putting together a paper for JGR, the Journal of Geophysical Research, with a whole bunch of co-authors from the team. Its called "The Rocks of the Columbia Hills", and it describes the different rock types that we have found. Some of them I feel pretty confident are impact ejecta. For example - the rocks in the
west spur, which we call Clovis class rocks, because Clovis was the first good outcrop of that that we saw. I think those are probably impact ejecta for reasons that I described in my talk, but basically you have got this jumbled up mix of fine and coarse grains, and its got a fairly high nickel content. Its got a much higher nickel content than is easy to explain in an igneous rock. - a volcanic rock. There's another class of rock that we call Wishstone class rocks, named after Wishstone, which is a rock that we found on the north west flank, that look a lot like explosive volcanic deposits - what you would get if you had some pyroclastic deposit, a geologist would call it. A big volcanic explosion. I don't think we
can completely rule out an impact origin for that, but it doesn't have the high nickel content, and it looks for all the world like a geologic material that you call a tuff on Earth. So we've got some things that may be volcanic, and then there's Peace and Alligator, which are sedimentary rocks. Those we only found two little outcrops of - I wish we could find more of that stuff, but its only the two outcrops that we've found, and that's a basaltic sandstone that's glued together with magnesium/calcium sulphates. So that's a sedimentary rock, pure and simple, and whether it formed in air or water I don't know, but water clearly flowed through it because that was what evaporated away to leave the salts behind. So its actually quite a variety.

END 19.00
=========================================

Chris

Posted by: dot.dk Nov 9 2005, 02:12 PM

we learned a lot about the salts on Mars out on the plains

Posted by: OWW Nov 9 2005, 04:35 PM

Section 05 :: 14.34 to 19.00 :: Gusev and Rock Types
=========================================
Doug: ...and he is playing geologist here. "I have informally proposed a model where a deep core of the Gusev floor would reveal, from the bottom up, bracketed impact melt on the original floor"...

Steve: Yep.

Doug: ..."interleaved layers of lacustrine and pyroclastic materials over that, and then the cap of basalt that we spent 154 sols exploring". Is that anything like what you guys are thinking?

Steve: Yeah, exactly.

Doug: Exactly that?

Steve: Exactly that.

Doug: The guy's clearly a geologist, isn't he?

Posted by: chris Nov 9 2005, 04:55 PM

Yes, well spotted, brecciated, not bracketed. Perhaps I spell checked a bit too enthusiastically. ( Also, I did do most of it on the train this morning, so I may have misheard bits).

Chris

Posted by: djellison Nov 9 2005, 05:07 PM

My plan is to do a listen-and-read-thru-at-the-same-time when it's all together to make sure it's all right

Doug

Posted by: dvandorn Nov 9 2005, 05:37 PM

Gee -- maybe I ought to go to night school, get a geology degree, and see if I can snag a place on the MSL geology team...

Drat, I've been having that same dream again, haven't I?



-the other Doug

Posted by: Redstone Nov 10 2005, 01:03 AM

I'll take section 11. I'll work on it tonight.

Posted by: odave Nov 10 2005, 01:43 AM

I'm up for doing one more - I'll do 8

Posted by: slinted Nov 10 2005, 02:11 AM

I'll take a swing at section 10 this evening

Posted by: Redstone Nov 10 2005, 03:02 AM

Here we go..

SECTION 11. START 43:00.

Doug: There's loads more questions, but really we need to get moving 'cause I'm starving.

Steve: [laughter]

Doug: But, um...the S1K bug...

Steve: [great laughter]

Doug: Does it exist?

Steve: Ah, yeah. Yeah. We...there are a lot of...we use a lot of automated scripts to make the operations process work and there are a number of scripts out there that would...ah, would break with a four digit sol number. But we're already working on that. We're already working on that.

Doug: You're already working on it?

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. We, we see that one coming. We're already working on it.

Doug: I've got to rename all the folders on my external hard drive if you do it...

Steve: There you go! It's the same, its the same problem. Same problem.

Doug: If you had to chose a new project as PI...

Steve: Yeah

Doug: ...anywhere, what would it be?

Steve: I'm not though. [?] I'm not, um...

Doug: Planetary favoritism?

Steve: I don't, I don't think I see myself ever being a PI again. If I could, if I were going to do it, and I don't see it happening, but if I were going to do it, I'm real, real interested by Europa. I'm really interested by Europa. You know, a Europa...Europa Submarine Mission. Europa Lander Mission! That would be great.

Doug: Ignoring latitude, elevation, terrain type restrictions...

Steve: All those nasty practical issues...

Doug: All the things the engineers love...

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: Where would you drop a third rover?

Steve: Identical to the one that we've got?

Doug: Yeah.

Steve: How much landing accuracy do you give me? All that...

Doug: As...same as you've got...

Steve: Same as MER.

Doug: You can probably bring it in a bit...

Steve: No, no, no, no, no. OK. Same as MER. Um, Melas Chasma, you know, down in the Valles Marineris, that was reeeally tempting. That would have been a good one. Its a scary site because a lot of it's covered by sand dunes, like 30% of that site was covered with sand dunes and you come down on the dunes, man, you're screwed. But, it would have been spectacular topography, and really cool layered rocks, so that would have been a good one.

Doug: A lot of people are seeing MSL as being a good mission for the future BUT it seems something of a waste that this design for MER, that is, that is clearly an awful lot more robust than anyone would have dreamed...

Steve: Yeah

Doug: It would make sense to try and reuse the design. Is...?

Steve: Ah, maybe…

Doug: Would it, would it fit under a scout budget almost or..?

Steve: Its tough as a scout budget. I think that would be hard to pull off. You know it's a terrific platform, its worked exceedingly well, but there's so many things you'd like to have different. You know, you'd like to have a regular steady power source instead of relying on gusts of wind. You'd like to have more range, you'd like to have the ability to look for organics, you'd like to have all those things that MSL has! So, you know, you could go either way on this one. NASA's got a limited amount of money to spend, limited budget and I think MSL's going to be a hell of a good mission.

Doug: There is one, I think a fabulous question. When you are looking at the latest images of a new and unseen part of Mars...

Steve: Yeah, which is my favourite part of the job.

Doug: No, no. No, no! Do you ever think of Carl, and imagine...

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Doug: ...what he would say...

Steve: Yeah, oh Carl...

Doug: ...if he was behind your shoulder?

Steve: Carl would have thought this mission was a hoot. He would have LOVED this mission. Some time after we landed - I had, I read Cosmos a long time ago, when it first came out, it was when I was in graduate school - and a long, long time after that, in fact after we had landed, someone copied for me a passage from Cosmos which is, I forget, I think it's in the chapter called "Blues for a Red Planet", but there's a passage in there where Carl, who was working on Viking at the time, rhapsodized about how great it would be to be able to actually MOVE, and wouldn't it be great to be able to move ACROSS the Martian surface. And I had totally forgotten that passage and then someone e-mailed it to me, and reminded me of it and ah, yeah, yeah, I think of Carl a lot. I think he would have loved this mission.

Doug: Almost built for him...

Steve: Its...yeah...

Doug: Perfect for him.

Steve: I think he would have liked it.

END SECTION 11. 47:16

Posted by: slinted Nov 10 2005, 03:31 AM

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.

Posted by: CosmicRocker Nov 10 2005, 04:06 AM

Gee, you people made short work of that. I came in thinking there were a few sections left for me to pick from, and now they're all apparently spoken for. If anyone can't do what they planned, email me and I'll be glad to do it.

The transcripts have really been helpful to me for those few parts where I couldn't quite be certain of what I was hearing.

Posted by: Tman Nov 10 2005, 07:59 AM

Yeah! Many thanks for this effort! There's a lot I understand only now since I can it directly translate.

Posted by: odave Nov 10 2005, 06:41 PM

Here's 8...

BEGIN Part 8 (29:11)
===============
Doug: On the Athena update site you mentioned that a Mossbauer spectra near Independence, or near to the rocks around there were taking four days compared to way back.

Steve: Yeah, but you've got to realize that Independence is a special case because it's very low in iron. There are two things that affect how long a Mossbauer integration takes. One is how strong or weak the source is. The source strength now is about a quarter, about 25% (actually a little less than that), of what it was when we first landed. So, an integration that used to take typically, say 12 hours - or, actually we often did 'em in about 8 hours - one that used to take 8 hours takes 32 now, OK? But the other thing is that the strength of the Mossbauer signal is in direct proportion to how much Iron 57 there is in the target material. Independence, it turns out, is remarkably low in iron for reasons that I can't explain to you well, but that was a very low iron target. What we'll often do these days is we'll do the APXS first, get it down, determine the iron content, and then decide how long to make the Mossbauer integration on the basis of how much iron it has. So a typical Mossbauer integration these days is between 32 and 48 hours for a rock with kind of normal iron content for Mars, which is 4 times what it was at the start of the mission. But when you have a really low iron target like Independence you have to lengthen it out.

Doug: Now both Mossbauer and APXS, remind, use radioactive samples, bounce it off the rock, and measure the signals coming back.

Steve: Yeah, but the physics is quite different.

Doug: Are they both going to suffer over time, this kind of [?overrun with Steve? 30:56-30:58]

Steve: No, no, no, that's only the Mossbauer. Mossbauer uses Cobalt 57; the half-life is 271 days. We've been on the surface a little over two half-lives. The APXS uses Curium 244 which has a half-life of 20 some odd years, so ah...

Doug: That's probably not going to be a problem!

Steve: <laughs> I don't anticipate havin' a problem with that one.

Doug: No. Is there a point where it's going to become prohibitively long, do you think, or...

Steve: Ahhhum....no...

Doug: ...will there be a situation where: rover's low on power, let's plunk it down and do it for eight days, or?

Steve: You know...um...eh... I think, you know, once it gets out to be...right now it's 48 hours, and we've got lots of power, so it's two sols. OK, big deal. You know, that's fine. Another 271 days, with lots of power, it'll be 4 sols. 271 days after that, it's gonna be 8 sols. If it gets to the point where it's a week, or two weeks to do a Mossbauer integration, you'll need to be more and more certain that it's really what you want to do. But we've got all kinds of things like that, OK? The IDD, the arm. We've had a little problem with the IDD on Opportunity where a handful of times through the mission we've (this has probably turned up on the flight director updates) where we send a command to the microscopic imager on Opportunity and it rejects the command as invalid. The command doesn't look right, there's been some corruption of the bits along the way and so the way the software works, it then just re-transmits the command one second time and each time it's happend the first time, it's the second time the command has gotten in, so we've never lost any images as a consequence of this. But we suspect that it might be an indicator of some fraying somewhere on the cable, the electrical cable that runs down the length of the arm. And because of that, we have started to treat the arm, the IDD, as a consumable resource, as something that might give out on us eventually. So, in the early days of the mission, anytime we were stopped anywhere for just a sol, we would just whip out the arm with abandon..

Doug: Touch and go!

Steve: Just touch and go, man, we would just bang away pictures of just about anything, because, "hey, it's Mars, we've never seen this before". We're a lot less cavalier with our use of the arm now. We are less cavalier with the use of of the PMA, the pancam mast. I'm worried about the actuators, the gearboxes and the motors on that wearing out, and so we're much more efficient in our use of that than we used to be. So there's all kinds of things, not just the Mossbauer, that we're being more cautious about the use of, and we'll continue to be more cautious as time goes on.

===============
End Part 8 (33.48)

Posted by: dot.dk Nov 11 2005, 09:59 PM

I'll do part 3

Posted by: dot.dk Nov 11 2005, 10:38 PM

BEGIN Part 3 (07:28)
===============

Doug: Now listening to the Director Updates there is these little quicktime movies.

Steve: Yeah! Which I hardly ever see actually so I don’t know that much about them.

Dough: They all end with: “That’s what happening on Mars today”.
But for about 150 SOL’s the word came out: “And then a few days after that we’ll be leaving Endurance Crater”.

Now. It was almost as if it kept going. Ooh this thing as well, Ooh Oh this as well.
Was it kind of a contradiction there? Kind of I wish we get going, Ooh there is something over here as well!

Steve: Uhhm, it’s hard for me to answer that question well because I never actually heard or read the transcripts of any of those flight director updates. Might have been wishfull thinking on the part of the engineers. I think on the science team we always had a very definite sense that we were gonna be in there for a while. There was a point. I mean there were no question as we worked our way down. We kept thinking at some point we’re gonna run out of rock and we’re gonna turn around and go back cause you know we spend all last summer working our way down Karatepe the stratigraphic section there. And each time we thought we were about to run out of rock or we might get to something that was too steep we found out there was more rock and there were stuff for us to do. So every time we thought we were about to go out we thought “No look there is more good stuff ahead of us”. We got all the way down to where Escher was. At some point there was some discussion that maybe we would drive back up Karatepe, but then there was Burns Cliff. Now we had to try to get to Burns Cliff. We got as far as Wopmay quite easily and then at Wopmay it just turned treacherous on us. We were thrashing around near Wopmay for god what seemed like weeks.

Doug: Your navcam movies were all you see is the rover just slowly tilting

Steve: It was horrendous. It was awful. I was at the SOWG chair for a lot of that and it was torture. And finally one day. You know, we had got to the point where I said to the engineers: “look guys. If we don’t make some headway on this SOL I give up. I promise we’ll leave”. THAT SOL was the one were we got out and got our wheels back on fairly solid ground. Had it gone on for one more SOL we probably would have cut and run.

Then once we got up to Burns Cliff we really had to take our time because we were also nervous about that slope we were on. We were on a very steep slope and the problem is if you come loose on something like that your gone. So it was a long argues process, but it just payed off big time for us, it really did.

Doug: It’s probably the kind of THE mosaic from Opportunity.

Steve: Well not only the Burns Cliff mosaic, but just the wealth of information that we got in Endurance crater. There is a special issue of a journal called EPSL (Earth and Planetary Science Letters) That’ll be. Papers all done there’re accepted it’s in production right now I don’t when its gonna come out, but it probably will be in the next few month. That has just a collection of papers of everything that we learned in Eagle and Endurance. And it’s…

Doug: A lot…

Steve: We’re real proud of these papers, yeah.

===============
End Part 3 (10.38)

Posted by: dot.dk Nov 11 2005, 11:10 PM

I'm sorry if I have stolen paxdans work, but I just looked at the sections not marked in green in the first post.

Posted by: dot.dk Nov 13 2005, 03:07 PM

Ok here is section 06. The things I've put in [ ] I'm not 100 % sure about what's being said.

BEGIN Part 6 (18:55)
===============

Doug: Seems like you can’t have a single imagine sequence from Gusev now without catching at least one, and usually about a dusin dust devils.

Steve: It is the season.

Doug: What have we learned from dust devils? In terms of dust devils? In Pathfinder we got one.

Steve: Yeah, Uhm. We certainly learned they are seasonal phenomena. We looked for those things for months. We looked for, we looked for dust devils for 100’s of SOL’s

Doug: [“move” or something like that?]

Steve: I found we just gave up and now they are everywhere. Uhm, we have learned how. We have learned about their morphology. We have learned about the dust loading, the concentration of dust in them. Which help you to infer things about what the wind velocities and pressure [radians of Mars are]. We have learned how rapidly they move. We have learned how effective they are at suctioning dust of the surface so from that you can calculate things like dust transport rates. Uhm, we have learned quite a bit about them. Plus they just make cool [Inaudible because of laughter?]

The first time I ever saw a dust devil movie. It was like. It was like. It was like they day that we learned that Heat Shield Rock was a meteorite. I just laughed I just sat there at the SOWG meeting and just started laughing. It was just. We’ve had so many just lucky events.

Doug: If it got any better you just couldn’t stand it.

Steve: There’re a couple of moments like that and the first dust devil movie it was just so good that all I could do was laugh

Doug: I think you locked out on this probably in the sequence for the Husband Hill pan, but have you thought of doing, you’ve done navcam sequences for dust devils, there’s some Pancam less regularly.

Steve: Yeah

Dough: Have you thought of doing, getting terminology here, perhaps R2 and say L6.

Steve: So you get colour simultaneous...

Doug: I think you might have locked out once during an imaging sequence.

Steve: Uhm, we thought about it. There is a group of scientists on the team who are the kind of the dust devil hunters, ok they are the dust devil science advocates. They are the ones that comes in with all the clever different dust…

Doug: Mark Lemmon
Steve: Yeah, Mark Lemmon and some of the guys at Arizona State. The most recent thing was to do simultaneous navcam and Mini-TES so try to actually catch a dust devil with Mini-TES. Uhm, so we talked about that. The problem is it is not. It’s not an observation with a high percentage of payoff. Pancam is not nearly as good a tool for looking for dust devils as navcam is cause it just got that narrow field of view. So your chances of getting it are slim. Plus if you do the colour imaging you are spending even more bandwidth to try to do it. It would make a cool picture if you caught one.

There’s probably not a lot of science return in it because we know the colour of Martian dust. It’s not gonna tell you a lot more about dust devils. And so the dust devil guys have kind of concluded that there is more… They’ve got limited bandwidth. They have a certain amount of bandwidth to work with.

Doug: Rather spend the megabits on…

Steve: Rather spend the bits on the movies that have the high payoff. Frankly will be cool thing to do because I think it would be a sexy picture.

Doug: I think you got one just locked out.

Steve: Really? When was that?

Doug: I don’t know. Mark Lemmon is running a website with all the images. And one single frame and I think it is probably R2 and L6 perhaps. Something like that.

Steve: Bound to happen sooner or later by chance, but it’s a, you know as a fishing expedition it’s one that would be… If it payed off it would make a very cool picture.

Doug: Now early on when we had that first cleaning event 400 something.
Suddenly went from filth to gleaming.

Steve: That was amazing!

Doug: Everyone said we don’t think it is a dust devil. And you had… Well that was kind of rare there was probably not even a dust devil, but just a gust we were not hit by a complete dust devil.

Steve: Yeah, and I still believe that.

Doug: You think it’s just fortunate gust?

Steve: One of them was at night.

Doug: That’s not gonna be a dust devil.

Steve: It’s probably not a dust devil. Uhm, yeah one of them was at night. The dust devils we think are predominantly active, in fact we know they are predominantly active, in the afternoon.

Doug: So lunch time phenomena?

Steve: Yeah, lunch time into the mid afternoon and primarily out on the plains. You don’t see dust devils climbing the flanks of Husband Hill they seem to look to like it out on the plains.

So you know. While I can’t tell you it wasn’t a dust devil, because obviously we weren’t taking pictures then. You know ridge crests, it was at Larry’s Lookout, I mean ridge crests tend to be windy places and it’s clearly the windy season. So I don’t think it needs to have been a dust devil. I think more the dust devils are simply being visual indicators that it’s the windy season.

Doug: Once we may have heard that the rovers tilted ever so slightly.

Steve: Oh, Yeah you can see that! You can see that!

Doug: Is that happened more than once or?

Steve: Yeah! We’ve seen that several times. Very slight, I mean it’s like a pixel or two, it’s very very small. But yeah there are sequences that I’ve seen were you’re looking out on the plains. In fact where you see it is when we’re taking dust devil movies. And it’s not that the dust devil sort of came real close to us it’s just that that’s when you take a series of images click, click, click all in a row that you can see these changes. But there are a few dust devil movies where if you look carefully you can see the horizon go up and down.

Doug: [That comes so the whole body of air coming across that includes the dust devils]

Steve: Well yeah, it’s just that we’re embedded in this flow of wind coming over the Columbia Hills. And yeah, it rocks the rover ever so slightly.

That was a real surprise to me the first time I saw that, man. Actually if you take one of those rovers and bump it it’s pretty easy to jiggle it. They got these big broad wings and if you accidentally bump in to one of those things…

Doug: They’re not that heavy when they’re on the ground on Mars.

Steve: No, they will wiggle a little bit. That was interesting to see.

===============
End Part 6 (24.46)

Posted by: djellison Nov 13 2005, 03:15 PM

That's the whole lot - I'll try and get it put together nicely before I head out to Spain!

Doug