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

[paxdan]

Section 7.

31.44

DE: And once you got there?

SS: Oh Boy! Yeah, Duck Bay. That, that was wonderful, you know…. I try very hard not to take my work home with me, too much. I have my home life and my family life, and while my family is very interested in the whole mars thing, you try to keep that separate. So, for example, at our house in Ithaca we don’t have any MER pictures up on the walls anywhere, it just not something we’ve done yet. There is one place though, there’s one room where I’m saving a space on the wall I’m gonna have two, once this is all over, I’m gonna have two MER pictures up on the wall in my house: one is going to be the Everest Pan from the top of Husband Hill, I wanted to get to the top of that mountain so bad [laughter] and then the other one is gonna be one of these panoramas, I don’t know which one, maybe the Cape Verde Pan, the one we’re taking right now, but one of these panoramas from the rim of Victoria crater, and it not just because they’re so beautiful, I mean they’re both just gorgeous striking images, but its what they represent.

DE: everything that had gone before to get there

SS: Right, that was 21 months of day-in, day-out, pushing, pushing, pushing, through terrain that no human had ever had to deal with before

DE: terrain that wasn’t even safe enough to land in.

SS: Yeah, to try and get this little robot to the edge of this spectacular feature and the accomplishment of that task was extraordinarily satisfying…. Plus it’s a beautiful place, the pictures are great.

Have you seen all that cross bedding at the bottom of Cape St Mary?

DE: Yes

SS: isn’t that great

DE we’re stiching it together already.

SS: Ah god… you have to really stretch it to pull it out of the shadows, ‘cos it’s in the shadows, but boy, you pull that out. I’m planning on showing that at my talk tomorrow, and also down in London, It’s just fabulous stuff.

DE: I’m just thinking on the spot here; I remember back with the heatshield, there was an imagining sequence that had every image taken twice. Once with a short exposure and one with a long exposure, that was on the southwest side of the heatshield, which looks like a silvery tent, is there some kind of trick you could pull looking in the shadows?

SS: Sure, yeah we could do that, umm I think a better way to it is to take images at different times a day.

DE: Would the current power be friendly towards that?

SS: Umm, not friendly, but you know, we’re up to 460 Watt/Hours creeping up towards 500 now. I mean one of the lessons we learned at Olympia and Overgaard was that there can be a huge payoff in waiting for the lighting to be right and so I think one of the things we’ll end up doing is somewhere along… you know we’re gonna do this traverse along the rim, partway along the rim of Victoria and we’re gonna do an awful lot of PANCAMing as we go, we’re gonna take a lot of pictures of this thing. And I think you’re gonna see us doing the best that we can within the power restrictions to take advantage of the changing lighting geometry to see these vertical faces at favourable geometries.

DE: Get up early or stay up late.

SS: Whatever it takes.. yeah and if that sucks to much power out of the battery then you just recover the next day, but it could well be worth it.

DE: Now… Conjunction has been and gone and we’ve got the girls back afterwards, compared to conjunction last time around Opportunity seems pretty busy.

SS: Oh yeah, it was very different from conjunction last time. I mean Conjunction last time was Sol two-hundred-and-something

DE: yeah 230, 240?

SS: Yeah, I forget… something like that, 250ish, At that point we didn’t have to software tools on the ground necessary to do multi sol plans, OK we weren’t doing 3 sol plans every Friday back then, we were doing single sol plans every day, ah, doing multi sol plans requires lots of software tools that you don’t need for a single sol, and it turns out that was smart the way it went when we decided that we needed to go from 7 days a week to 5 days and 3 sol plans on Friday and therefore we needed some software that allows us to do 3 day sol plans, they didn’t write it so it can only handle 3, they wrote it so you can handle as many sols as you want as long as long as you had the time to do it. And so we did a 15 sol plan for each of those rovers, you know I sat down and ran a 15 sol SOWG (Science Operations Working Group) meeting

DE: I bet that was a long one

SS: and ah you’d be surprised, it wasn’t all that of a long one, we knew exactly what we wanted to do. While the rovers were kept pretty busy, it was quite repetitive from one sol to the next. Obviously you’re not driving, so that makes it fairly simple, and so we had a sort of rhythm to it that made it comparatively straightforward to plan, but yeah we got a lot more done during this conjunction than we did during the last one. And of course now we’re paying the price for that…

DE: you’ve got a pretty full flash

SS: our memory, our flash is just chock full of images right now, I mean that’s to reason we haven’t driven away from Cape Verde yet, but we should be driving very soon but the reason we haven’t managed to drive away yet is that we have too many pictures in the flash. i mean, you know, there’re going to be fabulous mosaics when they come down.

37.39