Recent Comments From Steve Squyres, notes from his Houston, Tx presentation Options

[Jeff7]

"The mother of all panoramas."


Hopefully the air will clear enough to see Gusev's walls.

[brianc]

A very pleasant if lowbrow interview with Steve Squires on ABC Queensland by someone who sounds suspiciously like Rolf Harris

http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/stories/s1446615.htm

[CosmicRocker]

In the first post of this topic, I mentioned that CSPAN recorded Steve Squyres' presentation in Houston. I had been watching CSPAN's schedule, but apparently missed it when it aired on September 6th on Book TV. I learned that CSPAN has two separate video searches, one for the free on-line stuff, and another for videos of shows that can be purchased. This explains why it will not be found using the video search on the main cspan.org page.

It can be found using the video search at the CSPAN store. A search there for "mars rover" finds about 50 events recorded by CSPAN going all the way back to Pathfinder.

http://www.c-spanstore.org/shop/index.php?...mple=mars+rover

Unfortunately, they did not record all of the MER events. I'm trying to convince myself it is worth $45 US for a DVD of a presentation that I attended. The other MER events are $29.95.

[Cugel]

http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/

Steve is back home! And leading the troops once more.

[Marcel]

I can imagine so well how frustrating it must be to suddently loose control (glitch of oppy) over the computer status and no clue whatsoever about what triggered it. Especially with the Spirit rebooting sequence still fresh in mind. I hope they'll find out all about it.

[Bob Shaw]

A very pleasant if lowbrow interview with Steve Squires on ABC Queensland by someone who sounds suspiciously like  Rolf Harris

http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/stories/s1446615.htm

BrianC:

On the subject of Home Plate, I wonder if SS was asked if he could tell what it is, yet?

Bob Shaw

[edstrick]

They may have some clues from the pan-cam 11 band spectra. Apparently, MiniTES capabilities are severely degraded at that distance because of atmosphere interference.

[Bob Shaw]

They may have some clues from the pan-cam 11 band spectra.  Apparently, MiniTES capabilities are severely degraded at that distance because of atmosphere interference.

Edstrick:

Whoosh!

Bob Shaw

[Redstone]

Squyres is going to be on BookTV on C-SPAN2 tomorrow (Sunday 18th) at 9:30 am Eastern Time. (1330 GMT, 2:30 pm BST).

Schedule and details at: http://www.booktv.org/schedule/

C-SPAN can be watched streaming at http://www.c-span.org/. Click on the links near the bottom center of the homepage.

I think this is a replay of the Houston presentation, but it could be something new. According to Yahoo TV, this is the first time it's aired. But they aren't so reliable.

[CosmicRocker]

Thank you, Redstone! I'm sure happy I noticed your post before going to bed. I had decided not to buy the DVD from CSPAN for $45, but now I can record it. I appreciate your mentioning that.

[CosmicRocker]

They may have some clues from the pan-cam 11 band spectra.  ...

It takes a lot of effort to extract very crude spectra from the raw images we have access to, but I really thought I could take a shot at that today. The unknown exposure times really skew the points, but I hoped I might get lucky. My mother-in-law's 80th birthday party really messed up my plans.

Early in the mission I created several spectra of some blueberries using averaged pancam luminance values of selected berries. The best I could guess from them at the time was that certain iron oxides and sulfates were more consistent with the "spectra" I was seeing than other more igneous or vocanic iron minerals. When the calibrated data was finally presented in a press conference I was able to see the similarities and the significant differences between my 11 point data sets and theirs.

In spite of those problems, it might not be fruitless to attempt something similar with the many pancams of Home Plate. Maybe tomorow...

[edstrick]

What I don't have access to now and would love to have is software that could do "Principal Component Analysis" of Images. It does statistical analysis of cross correlations in image sets and generates a series of component images. The first component is the one with the greatest correlation of all images combined, the second is perpendicular to the first in n-image statistics space and has the greatest remaining correlation after the first is eliminated, the third is perpendicular to the first two and so on. It can really help squeeze the "unusual" items out of a highly correlated dataset (for example, the infrared channels). Results are hard to interpret spectrally, but they really help pick out what's different.

[djellison]

I asked him two questions. 

Indeed you did - just saw it on Cspan2

Doug

[Redstone]

I just watched it too. Great presentation. Steve looks older on C-SPAN than he does on NASA TV.

With this talk and Doug's interview, do I still need to buy the book? Maybe I can hold out until the paperback comes out.

I loved the comment about getting stuck in Purgatory: "If you want to get the attention of NASA Headquarters..." I can just imagine the "parents" at HQ worrying about what the kids at JPL are doing with the family car.

[CosmicRocker]

I'm glad both of you were able to watch that replay of his talk. He was informative, but also very entertaining. Another comment about Purgatory dune that I enjoyed came after he described the extensive extrication tests they performed in the test bed. He said something like, "After weeks of work we finally discovered the optimal technique to get the rover out...Put it in reverse, and gun it." The entire audience roared with laughter.

Doug: What you probably couldn't see in the Q&A session was that the white shirt I was wearing was my UMSF golf shirt, which had fortuitously arrived from CafePress that very day. I tried to turn the logo toward the camera a couple of times, but I was too far away for it to be visible.