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

[lyford]

Did my best, but I am afraid I couldn't make out some of Doug's lines, under Steve'e enthusiasm. You may want to double check, Doug.

And one rock I didn't recognize he mentions with Overgaard and the festoons - Cornbelt? Cornville?

If they were naming rocks after Arizona towns, there is both an Overgaard and Cornville in AZ....

***************

Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky

SS: One thing that I've had people ask me in the past, and you might have asked me this once, was - are there any things we regret passing by, this whole mission long. And for me the one that I regretted bypassing most was a rock called Scoop. And Scoop was a rock that was in the wall of Eagle Crater, kind of on the opposite side of the r from where we were, we imaged it from a distance with Pancam, in fact we did some Pancam super resolution on it. And it looked from a distance to have the best examples of the festoon geometry cross lamination that we had seen, but at this point it's like sol 50 or sol 60 of what we thought was at that point was going to be a 90 sol mission -

DE: And you said you had to be out...

SS: And I said we are gonna get out of here by sol 60, because I want to at least try to get to that Endurance Crater way over there before the rover dies on us. Ha ha! And so all we did is do super resolution on Scoop from a distance and off we went. And had I known that the vehicle was going to last that long, Scoop looked so good - Scoop might have been as good as Overgaard turned out to be - I would have gone over there and done a good M.I. mosaic and really nailed it. But, you know, Overgaard and Cornville? Cornbelt? XXXXXXX turned up and there you are... so those are just text book examples that you don't have to draw any funky little lines on the pictures to convince anybody that the festoons are there. So it was a good stop.

DE: Now you've promised us a pretty rapid drive from there to Beagle and on to Victoria, and that's what it turned out to be...

SS: As rapid as we could make it under the circumstances, yeah.

DE: With a brief, a brief stop...yes.

SS: Jammerbugt - yeah, Jammerbugt.

DE: Now you spent a lot of time back in Purgatory - did those lessons carry straight forward? "Now we know how to do this..."

SS: Oh yes, when we hit Jammerbugt we knew just what to do, there was no... you know, we didn't have to take the rover back into the testbed and bury it up to the hubcaps again and start screwing around, we knew exactly what to do and we were out in pretty short order at Jammerbugt. There wasn't a - you remember at Purgatory it was two and a half weeks before we even dared try to move! So, yeah, Jammerbugt was much less of a problem than Purgatory was. I mean the only reason Jammerbugt happened was that you can be timid in your driving and you can be aggressive in your driving; if you're too timid you go too slowly, and if you're too aggressive you get deeply stuck. And we always felt that we wanted to have a driving technique that would be aggressive enough that we would run some low risk of getting a little bit stuck. We certainly didn't want another purgatory type incident where we were going to be stuck for six weeks or something like that. But we felt all along that if we were too timid about our driving that it would just take too long to get there. So we were fairly aggressive and on that instance it did get stuck briefly but it wasn't a big deal...

DE: Swimming pool owners across much of Western California are celebrating that they didn't have to go and relocate...

SS: We didn't have to go and buy more DIATOMACEOUS EARTH! Oh, that was bad....

DE: You had a brief stop not far from Beagle, a brief IDD workout. Was it the same stuff, the same sort of material you had seen previously, or...

SS: Which spot are you talking about?

DE: About twenty... it was a brief brushing, not far from Beagle.

SS: That might have been when I was on vacation. I took about a three week vacation right around that time.

DE: While you were on vacation, they did a brushing.....

SS: If it was around Beagle, that was about the time that I was off in the wilds of Western China, and was pretty well cut off from the world, so I don't know too much about that one - other than to tell you that any IDD work that we had done on outcrop didn't reveal anything startlingly new...

DE: If it was festooned or something interesting...

SS: I mean I can't tell you the exact details of what the sulphur concentration was or something like that but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

DE: Now the annulus of Victoria has been an absolute breeze!

SS: Yes! Which was nice...

DE: Nothing like that since the run from Eagle to Endurance.

SS: Yes - and it was really, really nice. Everybody was a little nervous about the annulus, it sort of looked too good to be true? After struggling our way through all of that stuff, for so many kilometers, to kind of break out and just have the last five hundred meters be a clear shot to the rim, it's just like we're getting suckered, something's up - we gotta watch it!

DE: There's something missing...

SS: But no, actually it was just easy driving, all the way to the rim, it was nice!

DE: Everyone took the MOC images and tried to compare it and think - well, it might be the same as this, and then you take the Pancam images and stretch them - and think well actually it kind of looks like was it the way it was back then...

SS: Yeah, it was really very similar to the run from Eagle to Endurance, it was very easy.

DE: And once you got there....

SS: OH BOY! Yeah, Duck Bay...