Jim Bell Q'n'a Posted!, ...your questions answered Options

[elakdawalla]

I've just posted Doug's first Q and A with Jim Bell on this page:

Rover Audio Updates

May it be followed by many more!

--Emily

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I've just posted Doug's first Q and A with Jim Bell on this page:

Rover Audio Updates

Thanks, Emily. A question: When exactly was the interview? The web page gives the date of the interview as November 28, 2005, whereas Doug says at the beginning of the audio file that the interview was today, January 26, 2006.

[elakdawalla]

Thanks, Emily.  A question: When exactly was the interview?  The web page gives the date of the interview as November 28, 2005, whereas Doug says at the beginning of the audio file that the interview was today, January 26, 2006.

Yikes, stupid error, fixed and thanks for noticing!

Emily

[dot.dk]

That was great! I kind of missed the wind blowing from the good old Steve interview

Maybe you could ask Jim to use a headset next time? I think I heard Doug more than once at times

[Toma B]

Wil there be transcript of this interview?
How big is that MP3 file....please don't ask why this stupid question...

[Tesheiner]

3.8 MB.

[djellison]

I'm trying to convince Jim to use headphones

And yes - I'm going to try and do a transcript to match - but I've got a bedroom to re-decorate so I'm a bit pushed for time...

oh - and our car was broken into last night, so we've got to deal with that as well.

If someone could coordinate a transcribing effort, then I'd be happy to wrap it up as a PDF like last time.

Doug

[lyford]

Well, at 16:38 what say we slice it into 2 minute chunks? (Give or take whatever logical sentence breaks are around those points...)

I can take the first and second, so if someone else wants to start at 4:00 or so. I may have time to do more later - I am planning "a bit of research on hold music styles in 21st century North America," I mean making some tech support calls, this afternoon, and so should be able to type a bit.
And this one should be a little easier, since I think Steve talks a little faster than Jim

(PS - I tried to start a new thread for this but I was unceremoniously rebuked for trying to do so. Please move this if need be, Those Who Can.)

[odave]

I think only Doug or an admin can start a topic in "Front Page Stories"

I'll take 4:00ish-6:00ish...

[lyford]

00:00-04:00

DE: This is Doug Ellison of Unmanned Spaceflight.com with the first Pancam update on January 26, 2006. It’s Sol 735 for Spirit and Sol 714 for Opportunity. “The Guy With the Cool Camera” is the name that Jim Bell gave to himself just over two years ago when he unveiled to the world the first colour picture postcard from Spirit from the floor of Gusev Crater. But now, 2 years later, and so far beyond the expected design life of Pancam, I started by asking him how they are doing after so long in the Martian environment.

JB: Well, to everyone’s, I think, great surprise, they don’t appear to be aging, not even in the way that was predicted.And what I mean by that is, you know, it’s a pretty harsh environment on Mars. Not only because of the large temperature cycles we go through like minus 100 degrees at night Celsius up to zero to plus five in the daytime and the cameras and the detectors just float up and down at those temperatures. You know we very rarely have to use heaters; we can’t even afford to use heaters in terms of power. So that’s one aspect, but the other thing is that it’s a very harsh radiation environment compared to the Earth, you know Mars doesn;t have this nice protective cocoon magnetic field that keeps a lot of the cosmic rays and high energy particles diverted and so if you look at some of our nighttime images from the Pancams for example you see an enormous number of cosmic rays. And those kinds of high energy events, high energy particles often cause damage to detectors; they cause the background levels to change or increase, et cetera. So we expected over time to see sort of a graceful degradation of performance but we’re not seeing it! We’re seeing pretty constant, wonderful performance during the two earth years that these have been on Mars. So the only part of the system that is degrading, if you want to call it that, is our little calibration targets, the so-called Mars dials on the back of each rover that we use for calibrating the cameras every day; and those are getting dusty. And then the get clean. And then they get dusty again! And then they get clean. But overall they are much dirtier and dustier than when we landed, so that’s an issue that we have to deal with.

DE: Looking at some of the other cameras, particularly Opportunity’s Hazcams around the heat shield area, and particularly around the time of the recent regional dust storm, you can see signs of a kind of mottling of the sky which is suggestive of perhaps some dust getting on the lens - are you seeing that with Pancam at all?

JB: No we have not, and it’s actually a very difficult thing to search for, I don’t know if you wear glasses or anybody who wears glasses, if you take your glasses off and look at them, they’re usually just filthy! But you can see just fine through them, the dirt and dust on your glasses is so out of focus that you can see just fine through them. And unless you get some big splotch, like we think and like you said there were pieces of dust actually on the hazcam lenses, unless we saw, you know, somebody threw a clod of dirt at the pancam front window, we probably wouldn’t detect it. So I would not be surprised if there were a thin layer of dust on the front windows of the cameras for the pancam and the navcam but we don’t see any evidence of it, we can’t detect any evidence of it. And the way we try is by monitoring the sun taking special images where we move the sun around the field of view; we haven’t seen any evidence that we can quantify.

[djellison]

When exactly was the interview?

1905Z on Jan 26th, according to Skype

Doug

[djellison]

I'm sorting out Q's for the next one - going to ask about the typical end-of-drive imaging, what it all is, what it means, why certain bits of it are done etc etc

Also - the flatfields, darkfields, how often and how are they done - and how Oppy is managing with it's hand on its head.

Doug

(PS - Jim's schedule is a bit packed for the second half of this week - so we're doing this one tonight)

[paxdan]

I'm sorting out Q's for the next one - going to ask about the typical end-of-drive imaging, what it all is, what it means, why certain bits of it are done etc etc

Also - the flatfields, darkfields, how often and how are they done - and how Oppy is managing with it's hand on its head.

Doug

can you ask what advantages (if any) there are to pinning down the position of phobos and deimos using solar-eclipse timing versus using images of the moons against a starfield given that PANCAM can detect bright stars.

[elakdawalla]

Lyford stepped up to transcribe the first 4 minutes of this; does anyone want to transcribe more?

--Emily

[odave]

I'm up for doing minutes 4-6 and still plan on doing it - I just had a busy weekend. Look for it tomorrow...