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

[odave]

Section 1:
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DE: We'll, it's been just over a year since we last chatted. Have you stopped trying to make predictions about what might happen...

SS: [laughs]

DE: ..or 12 months ago did you think "it would be nice if we could do this, it would be nice if we could do that"? Aspirations of 12 months ago, how do they tie in with today?

SS: I think they tie in pretty well. I think the biggest difference between what we had hoped would be the situation a year ago and what is the situation is that because we've lost the right-front wheel on Spirit, we can't climb anymore. So I had had thoughts about maybe going up McCool Hill, or something like that, or at least going part way up it, and that's not in the cards. Spirit just can't climb anymore. We can do slopes up to 7, 8, 9 degrees, but you need to be able to climb 20 degree slopes for that kind of thing, so that's off the table. But other than that, the plan was, let's go explore Home Plate, let's find a safe place to spend the winter, let's try to get to Victoria Crater. So we always have a long term plan. We've got a long term plan now for both rovers. But what actually happens is always dependent on what Mars throws at you.

DE: Now, in those 12 months, it may seem like Spirit's spent most of them sat at Low Ridge Haven...

SS: Yeah.

DE: ...you've covered a lot of ground since last September, and we worked from the top down. First stop was...

SS: Now, you're going to have to remind me where we were last September, because I think in sol numbers, I don't think in...

DE: We'd just, it was, I guess, late 600s, just got to the summit...

SS: OK, all right...

DE: ...at the summit a couple of weeks...

SS: ...so we're comin' down off the crest of Haskin Ridge.

DE: Indeed.

SS: Yeah, OK.

DE: The first major stop was probably El Dorado

SS: Well, El Dorado, sure. But there was all that Commanche stuff and everything before that. Seminole, Commanche, several others in there. But El Dorado was a big one, yeah.

DE: Did anything stand out once you got there and got the instruments onto it? About what was going on, and why all that dark material <unclear>

SS: I think El Dorado...and El Dorado is not unique. There are other things very similar to it. There's something like that over on Clark Hill, for example. But I think of El Dorado as being basically an aeolean cul-de-sac, a place where the pattern of the winds is such that sand can get in but it can't get out very well. It just has to do with the nature of the prevailing winds and the shape of the topography, and so it provides sort of a local trap for sand grains. Once they get in, it's very hard for them to get out of there.

DE: It was a rapid sprint thereafter...

SS: Yeah, it was.

DE: ...and you had, Paso Robles was a surprise not far from Larry's Lookout...

SS: That's right.

DE: ...and then you hit Tyrone,

SS: Tyrone, yep.

DE: ...and Arad.

SS: Arad, yeah.

DE: Were they telling similar stories...

SS: Similar but not identical. Now I don't know what the composition of the soil is at Tyrone. By the time we got there it was really gettin' tight, I mean it was scary. 'Cause we were trying very hard to get to a safe place to spend the winter. At that point we had said "OK, we're done doing science, just get the rover someplace safe", and then we got stuck, and of course having the right-front wheel not functioning made it even worse. So that was a very tough situation. Arad, we did do a careful investigation of, and it's similar, but not identical to what we found at Paso Robles. It has an enormous amount of ferric sulfate salt, as was the case at Paso Robles, but Paso Robles had a significant quantity of phosphates, and we didn't see that at Arad. So there's something different there. But they're conceptually similar.

DE: Did it surprise you how quickly it went from "free power for everybody" to "quick, let's find a slope, because" ...

SS: No, it's straightforward math. We knew exactly what the current was going to look like, it's easy to predict. We weren't seeing any anomalous rate of buildup of dust on the solar arrays or anything like that, it's just the changing of the seasons. We knew exactly the pace it was going to happen at, we were trying to be someplace safe by about sol 800, and it was a little later than that, but not much. The only thing that really made it sporty was that all of a sudden, we lost that wheel. And that made it a lot more difficult, because we had what looked like some really good places to spend the winter on McCool hill that we were heading for, and then when the wheel went out, all of a sudden our options were very limited. And fortunately Low Ridge was there, and actually we got pretty lucky. Low Ridge turned out to be a pretty good place to spend the winter. Very interesting place, interesting geochemistry, we found two meteorites, it's been a great place. Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.