Project Transcribe, The SS Q'n'A to Text Options

[TheChemist]

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

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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.
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[Tman]

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!

[Nix]

Nice work guys. Thank you for your effort

Nico

[Ames]

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)

[lyford]

'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.


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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)

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[odave]

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

[odave]

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)

[djellison]

Wow - nice one guys !!

[chris]

Section 05 :: 14.34 to 19.00 :: Gusev and Rock Types
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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
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Chris

[dot.dk]

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

Should be BAsalts I think

[OWW]

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?

Minor nitpicks. I think they actually said:

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, brecciated impact melt and original floor"... [ floor/flow ???? ]

Steve: Yep.

Doug: ..."inclined 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 in the making...

[chris]

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

[djellison]

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

[dvandorn]

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

[Redstone]

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