SUPRISE......New Steve Q'n'A, Recorded Nov 6th 2006 Options

[odave]

The transcription is coming along great guys - thanks!

I'll do Section 3, "all the things that are funky on both rovers". "Funky" is such a great technical term One thing I love about SS is how down-to-Earth (Mars?) his speaking style is.

As a reminder, the section breakdown and current status can be viewed here.

[NMRguy]

Well, we're almost finished, so I'll go ahead and take Section 2.

For as much as Doug has done for us, it's the least I can do.

[NMRguy]

OK. Here's Section 2. I must admit that I had a few questions with the British portion of the interview. Blame my damn American ears. So Doug, could you go through and check/fill in the parts with the (??). There should be five spots below. Everything else should be fine.



[From Section 1] SS: ...Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.

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Section 2
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DE: Now you mentioned Home Plate, and it was a brief stop on the way on the way to something in the winter.

SS: Yeah, yeah. We sort of got some unfinished business there.

DE: You’ll go back. But what’s the story so far? What have you seen so far, and what more questions have you got left unanswered? And you hope to go back and…

SS: Yeah, Home Plate is clearly some kind of explosive deposit. I think the leading candidate is that it’s some kind of explosive volcanic deposit. I think there are a number of things that point to an explosive origin for it, but I think by far the most compelling is this thing that we call the Bomb Sag. There’s a place really right where we first pulled up to the base of it, where we first took that nice panorama showing the face of Home Plate.

DE: (??)

SS: Yeah. And there’s a place called Barnhill. And in the lower unit there you see this place where there a rock that four or five centimeters across that has landed into some clearly deformable sediments, and you can see the bedding deflected beneath it. And that’s what happens when a rock falls from sky. [Snickers from both] OK. There’s no other really good explanation for that, or at least none that isn’t pretty far fetched. So that points to an explosive origin, and the thing that I think leads us to conclude that it’s most likely volcanic is that the composition of these rocks is very closely linked to some volcanic rocks, clearly volcanic rocks, that have been found near by. So most likely it was some kind of volcanic explosion that formed the thing. What we’d like to do is do a more thorough exploration of all of Home Plate. We had to blast across it really fast. You know, we came in on the north side. We did a pretty good investigation there. We went to the base, climbed up on top, did a very good job characterizing the chemistry and mineralogy at that one particular spot, got some pretty good images, but then we had to get out of there. And we didn’t really have time to do much else; we sort of went around it to the left and kind of went sprinting that eastern side taking a few pictures as we went. But I’d like to look at more bomb sags, for example. I’d like to see if there is any significant variability in the mineralogy and the chemistry from one place to another. There was one fabulous, bizarre rock that we found up on top of Home Plate called Fuzzy Smith. That one didn’t get a whole lot attention at the time in the news media, but it’s one of the most bizarre rocks that we have ever seen. It has an extremely high silica content. Very, very high silica content. It’s compositionally different from every other rock we’ve ever found on Mars. There’s never been a rock that’s been found on Mars that has a composition remotely like that one. We took a very quick look at it with the APXS and the Mössbauer, a couple MI images and boom, we were out of there. I know exactly where the thing is. We have to go back and find that rock again! We can do it! But Fuzzy Smith is a real anomaly. And uhh, I don’t know what kind of story it’s telling us. But we need to go back to Home Plate and understand the complexity and diversity of that thing a lot better than we currently do. It’s the biggest outcrop of layered rock we’ve ever seen at Gusev, and it would be crazy not to do it right.

DE: And once you’ve done Home Plate (??), however long that takes.

SS: It’s likely to take a while. We’ve got a pretty slow moving rover these days.

DE: It’s something that you could study for as long as Opportunity studied Endurance, for example. It’s not (??) upside down.

SS: I think we could. I’m not sure that would be wise. But I think we could easily spend quite a few months there. Yeah.

DE: And once you’ve done it, where next? With a stop where?

SS: Southwest. Southwest.

DE: (??) promised lands.

SS: Yeah, Jim Rice has always liked to call it that. I don’t know what it will turn out to be. It’s got this very kind of bizarre etched topography when viewed from orbit. I’m dying to see what it looks like in HiRISE images.

DE: HiRISE images…yeah.

SS: HiRISE imaging is, well, HiRISE was turned back on today. So, we’re going to pick…

DE: It’s pretty high on the list of targets, I am sure.

SS: It’s quite high on the list, yes. So yeah, you’ll be seeing more HiRISE imaging of familiar places before too long. And I’m dying to see what that stuff looks at HiRISE resolution.

DE: Now, most of us know how Spirit's doing with a worn out RAT.

SS: Yeah.

DE: Worn out wheel. Pretty tired Mössbauer spectrometer, but still fairly…

SS: Well, the Mössbauer…

DE: It takes a while, but it works.

SS: Yeah, the Mössbauer thing is just a matter of time. If you want to get a good signal to noise ratio, you just have to count longer. But things like the RAT and the worn out wheel definitely impair our ability to do science. We can’t do things as well. We can’t do a grind, we can’t climb. The Mössbauer--we can take beautiful Mössbauer data. It’s just a matter of time.

DE: Is there anything else that we’ve fully not heard about so much. I’ve read speculation that with the wind on top of the hill, mini-TES might have a little dusting on the mirror (??).

SS: Yeah. OK. Let me see if I can really go through it and name all the things that are funky on both rovers.

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This should be the end of Section 2--odave, could you match it up with the start of your section 3? Thanks.

[lyford]

I'll do section 04 - Moving Again

Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans

[djellison]

This all makes great reading It's odd - in 'the moment' of these things, you don't really take in the content, you just try not to miss something out.

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

[odave]

Section 3 (minus NMRguy's overlap at the beginning )
======

DE: [laughs] let's get out the medical record...

SS: Alright. So, on Spirit you already hit the high points. The right front wheel doesn't turn anymore, the RAT is worn out, though of course we can brush, we did get some dust on the MiniTES mirror because we were taking a MiniTES observation when we got hit by one of our wind gusts, and the very same gust that cleaned off the solar arrays deposited some dust on the mirror.

DE: Can you subtract out the dust?

SS: Yeah, the MiniTES guys have developed a technique for removing the affects of that so that's not a big detriment to the science. Let's see, what else on Spirit. Um, nothin' mechanical, nothin' electrical...other than that, Spirit's in really good shape. On both vehicles we've had some deposition of dust from time to time on the Hazcam optics. I mean, you've seen that in some of the images. When you take big camera lenses and you put 'em close to ground level in a windy place you're gonna get a little dirt. But nothin' too bad there. Let's see, on Opportunity. Of course you know the right front steering actuator doesn't work any more, and that affects our ability to steer a little bit, though we've gotten - that's been going on for so long we've really, we've completely learned how to compensate for that.

The one that makes me lose the most sleep is that we've got that broken wire in joint 1, the azimuth joint on the IDD, the arm. It causes us problems from time to time. That joint, when you use it, 95+ percent of the time it works just fine and a few percent of the time, you send a command to it, it doesn't move properly. And what it tends to be most often is small moves, like the kind of things you would do in an MI mosaic. So we try to use that arm carefully because when the thing stalls on ya, it takes a couple of days, couple sols to recover from it, which is kind of a pain in the neck. And the thing that is scariest about that issue is not that occasionally it inconveniences us, that we can deal with, but that it's one more broken wire away from losing that joint completely. And that's the reason we keep the arm out, of course, most of the time now, is because if we fail, if we were to fail stowed, then you'll never be able to use the arm again. Whereas if you fail deployed, you've got a four degree of freedom arm, you just can't move the shoulder back and forth.

Let's see, what else is wrong on Opportunity? Well, of course the Opportunity MiniTES just totally freaked out on us for a while and was returning bad data. We think that we broke it by taking it to extremely cold temperatures at night as a consequence of doing the deep sleep that we need to do with that vehicle. But then it healed itself, and I can't explain that.

DE: That just makes no sense...

SS: I have no idea how that happened. It's just so typical of the way things have gone on this mission. But yeah, MiniTES healed itself and MiniTES has been totally fine for a very long time now. There's one thing that's a little weird on Opportunity where on a number of occasions we have sent commands to the Microscopic Imager to acquire an image and the commands were rejected as being invalid. And what that means is some bits got flipped as the command was being transmitted from the CPU to the camera. The way the flight software works, if that happens to a camera, the first thing it tries to do is re-transmit it one more time. And every instance, I believe, there might have been one or two where this wasn't true, but in virtually every instance where that's been the case, when we had a rejected command, when it was sent the second time, it worked. What we think this might point to, and this is pure speculation, is that there might be some degradation of the cable. There's what's called a flex print cable, which is what's used to send a lot of signals up and down that arm. It's a very complex cable because it's gotta go through all these joints...

DE: ...all the joints...

SS: ...and everything, yeah, and with lots of motion and lots of wear,

DE: a lot of temperature swings...

SS: Yeah, lots of thermal cycling. With all of that, the cable can begin to degrade a little bit, and if you have some wear of the cable, you could wind up starting to get a little cross-talk between adjacent wires or something like that and have corrupt signals going up and down the arm. But we've seen very little of that, and it doesn't seem to be getting worse. Let's see...oh yeah, and then we have an intermittent problem with the internal reference channel on the Opportunity Mossbauer Spectrometer. It's got the four main detectors at the front end of the instrument which are used to collect the science data, and on the back end of the instrument there's a fifth detector that is used for calibration. And we've been having intermittent problems with that reference channel. It's not causing us any difficulties because A] it works some of the time, and B] even if we lost it entirely, we have a completely separate Mossbauer calibration target that's mounted on the rover that we can look at externally if we need to. So either way, we've got that covered. And I think that is everything I can think of that's wrong with both vehicles right now. Plus they're dirty [laughs].

DE: A bit of dirt...

[MarkL]

This all makes great reading It's odd - in 'the moment' of these things, you don't really take in the content, you just try not to miss something out.

Doug

There's a good level of detail in the discussion as a result of Steve extemporizing and good prep. It is a good read for the most part.

[CosmicRocker]

I thought I should check in to see if there were any sections remaining to be done, but it appears they are all done except for one, and that one has been claimed. This project is almost complete.

[lyford]

...it appears they are all done except for one....

I can take a hint - WORKING ON IT!!!!

[lyford]

Ok, last installment and it was really nice to hear the Spirit moving again bit...
I blame Thanksgiving preparations and Alton Brown's Sweet Potato Pie for my tardiness, I had a slight tuber related knife injury, which is healing nicely.

So here it is, typed with one and 4/5 hands:

Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans


DE: Nothing that a good gust of wind wouldn't fix....

SS: Yeah, if we get some. I'm not counting on any more wind gusts for Spirit. The wind gusts that we got for Spirit, the bigs ones, were all ridge crests and summits - and that rover's never going to climb another mountain. So I don't know if we are going to see that again.

DE: The whole area is something of a large bowl...

SS: Where we are right now is pretty sheltered from the wind, I believe. Though we have been seeing changes. When you look at the images we have taken of the inner basin from Spirit, we have seen places where dust devils have come through and there have clearly been changes in the dust cover, so who knows? We could get lucky.

DE: Now, this morning, I got the images down, and I shouted out loud over my cornflakes - you've moved!

SS: Yes, yeah!

DE: Not a lot...

SS: Yes.

DE: But you have moved!

SS: Sol 1010 - this was planned last week. I think in my online notes on the Athena website I said "You're gonna see Spirit move pretty soon." But boy it was good to actually see it work... You know, you park your car in the driveway for seven months and you don't move it, the first time you put the key in and you hope the engine's going to turn over! I had every reason to believe the thing was going to work. We looked very, very hard at whether or not a period of extended no motion could cause anything to seize up or not move properly and there was just no credible failure mode that we could come up with. The kinds of motors and gear boxes and so forth that we use, you should be able to let them sit for a very long time and the first time you apply power - off they go! And so we all felt very confident that when we asked Spirit to move again, she was going to move just fine. But still it was nice to see the scenery change a little bit, yeah!

DE: Just a little.

SS: It's just been a small move, and the move was very successful. We got just the motion that we had anticipated. The tilt of the rover changed a little bit, the northward tilt, something that's important to us, dropped by about a little bit less than one degree, which is not an alarming amount. The reason that we waited until now to do this move rather than doing it before conjunction say, was that we wanted to have enough margin in our power, we wanted our power numbers to be high enough, that even if we got some very unexpected result, and the tilt dropped by five degrees or something, we'll still be in good shape. So we're fine with this tilt number, and yeah, the vehicle's moving again!

DE: So what's the medium term plan? There's a little piece of rock just over...

SS: Yeah, the medium term plan is do this turn to the right, which we've now initiated, and there's two things over to the right that particularly interest us. The one is that as the rover was dragging its wheels through the soil, the front right wheel, there was bright soil that was deposited in the wheel tracks or churned up from the wheel tracks. And we're very interested in looking at that. The other thing is that there's some wonderful finely layered rock a little bit to the right of our current location, and we're very interested in having a go at that as well. That target to me looks to be pretty dusty, so I'm not sure we'll be able to do too much with it geochemically, cause it's got this very complex geometry to its surface; it would not be an easy target to brush with the RAT. But certainly we can have a go at it with the MI and we'll see what we see. After we have got the power margin high enough that we are confident to move off of Low Ridge entirely, by which I mean having a power margin wide enough on flat ground, knowing that even if we totally go down on the flats that we'll have enough power, then we are going to be heading back towards Home Plate, but hitting a few targets along the way. In particular, there are a number of these vesicular basalts, basalts, rocks that have a sort of foamy texture to them..

DE: (unintelligible)

SS: Yeah, what happens, Gong Gong was a great example of that if you remember that one, that was fantastic set of pictures that we took of that rock, but what happens is that when volcanic materials are extruded to the surface, if they have some gases dissolved in them, then when the pressure gets low, when they get very close to the surface, that gas will come out of solution and will form bubbles that make these kind of swiss cheese like cavities in the rock. There have been a number of these rocks that we have seen. There are actually some fabulous ones just up the hill from us on Low Ridge but we don't think we can get to those, but there are several that are down on the flats between us and Home Plate. And I expect to single out one of those and give it a very thorough working over before we head off to Home Plate. What you're going to see next with Spirit is going to be very different from the situation when we were going to Home Plate the first time, because when we were going to Home Plate the first time, the power was getting worse and worse and worse everyday and we were rushing through everything. Now, with the power improving gradually, every single day it's going to be getting better and better and better, and it's going to do that for months, we can take our time and really do things right, and it's going to be nice!

[odave]

That's a wrap! Thanks for the effort guys - now it's off to Doug for "stitching"

(lyford...the pie sounds yummy. I was also intrigued by the recipe for sweet potato waffles, I'll have to give them a try. I make a mean sweet potato chili, but I don't think my family wants to deviate that far from the turkey-day norm )

[CosmicRocker]

Hehe. I never expected to find other Alton Brown fans here. I have some issues with some of his theories, but I usually manage to catch his shows.

[djellison]

It'll be a while until I can get round to this I'm afraid - 'real life' is being a bit obstructuve - but I'll post in here when I can...the important thing is that it's all down on 'paper' so anyone can read it all, even if it involves some thread jumping

Doug

[odave]

To assist readers in thread jumping, here are the original sections with links to their transcription posts:

Section 01 :: Spirit- El Dorado to Low Ridge Haven
Section 02 :: Spirit- Return to Home Plate and after
Section 03 :: "all the things that are funky on both rovers"
Section 04 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans
Section 05 :: Oppy- Erebus & Olympia
Section 06 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky
Section 07 :: Oppy- Victoria arrival, conjunction operations
Section 08 :: Oppy- AM Odyssey passes, HiRISE image of Victoria
Section 09 :: Oppy- Victoria plans
Section 10 :: Oppy- Victoria early analysis
Section 11 :: Oppy- After Victoria? S1K bug effects, "the adventure that just won't stop"