I attended Steve Squyres’ book signing in Houston Thursday. He gave an excellent presentation on the rovers and he did it in his usually energetic and stimulating style. While much of it covered things that fans like us already know, he also showed images from the most recent sols and said a little about recent interpretations. I didn’t take notes, but I did write up some of the more interesting tidbits I remembered after I came home. Here they are in a bullet list format.
Steve said that their recent interpretations of the origins of Methuselah and Voltaire leaned more toward creation from impact events, rather than volcanic processes.
He said they hoped to make the summit of Husband Hill in the next couple of weeks.
He also said that Spirit's panels were cranking out 900 watt-hours. I know that sounds high, but I’m sure that’s what I heard.
He showed an amazing animation that I had not seen previously, demonstrating the rover's rocker-bogie suspension driving over a simulated corrugated surface similar to the dunes of Meridiani. It was very cool, and I wish I could find it online.
He also showed that humorous video of a rover putting the RAT up to the face of a rock and grinding. All of a sudden, the teeth bite into the rock and the rover spins wildly around the arm, and throws a wheel into the air. I have been told that animation was created by Dan Maas. It was very well done.
Most of the science instruments are in good shape. He mentioned the miniTES that was acting up and then repaired itself, but the only serious problem with an instrument at the moment is the RAT on Spirit. Its diamond blades are shot...no more grinding for it, but it can still brush. They did something like 15 grinds on the mostly very hard rocks in Gusev crater, but it was only designed to do a few grinds.
I was able to ask him a couple of questions. I was about to ask what they learned from the rovers that would change the design of the MSL, but someone asked a very similar question first. Someone asked "If you had to do it over again, what would be different about the rovers?"
He mentioned two things that I remember.
1. He wanted nuclear power.
2. He wanted the ability to analyze for more things, like organic molecules.
I'm sure he would have gone into more details if the audience was more technically oriented.
I asked him two questions. My first question was, “If you are able to make it to the summit of Husband Hill and take a monster panorama, where do you go next?” He said they didn't know exactly, but they would definitely head south. He mentioned there were some layered rocks on the south side that they might want to take a look at. I assume those are the ones near the base of the south side of the hill. He said they might move down from the summit, toward the south a bit, and then take a south-facing panorama. I assume they want to go down to the south a bit to get a better view of the area close to the base of the hill, where those layered outcrops are.
My second question was, “What do you expect to find with Opportunity, now that you are entering the etched terrain? I wanted to know what he thought it would look like and what kind of science he expected to do in an environment where the rocks were exposed on the surface, rather than in the walls of a crater. By this time I felt as if I was pushing my luck, asking too much, while others still had questions. I wasn’t able to ask all that I wanted to know, but he said they were happy to learn that the etched terrain had a lot of rock, and not a lot of light-colored, rover-trapping dunes. But of course, we already knew that from his updates and the imagery. He said the amount of time they would spend in the etched terrain would depend on how much new science they could do.
He did say Victoria will be next, and if the etched terrain offers little new science, they will head directly toward Victoria Crater. I think Steve said Victoria had 40 meter tall outcrops.
Oh, one more interesting thing. CSPAN was there, recording the event. So, Steve Squyres’ presentation may be broadcast on that channel, and might possibly be turned into a realmedia stream at their web site.
Sorry for the length of this post, but it seemed there was a lot that others would find interesting. I hope I presented it accurately.
Spinning Rover:
http://images.spaceref.com/news/2004/rover.armspin.mov
Thanks a lot for the detailed report, CosmicRocker !
I especially like the following part:
As the mythbusters would say: "Does the fun ever stop?"
Great report, thanks. I can't wait for that south-facing pan!
"When will the fun EVER stop
.. am I missing an eye brow"
Doug
Wow, that's amazing, helvick, we're looking at the rovers carrying on at least into June 2006, if the current trend is maintained
One factor that has to be considered is the increasing altitude of Spirit over the plains. With such a thin atmosphere, there has to be a sharp drop-off in dust content even at the top of martian hills. If this is a factor, it makes the thought of decending down the South side of the hill going into winter a more daunting one.
Viking's landers and orbiters both observed the half-life <sort of> of dust in the atmosphere is a few weeks. Once the two great 1977 dust storms stopped raising dust and it got fairly uniformly mixed, there was a very nice exponential decay in observed dust levels. I'd have to dig out old xeroxes of articles to get hard numbers, but they got some very high quality science from the data. Dust smaller than the 1 to 2 microns of typical suspended dust may be present, but more likely as composite dust particles, instead of single grains.
A 1999 report with relevant data/theories on the subject http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/mars/publi/jgr99_mcd.pdf. Look at Table 3 (pressure) and Figure 3 (dust). They both imply pretty uniform dust levels in the altitudes that we're talking about. I'd love to see the "ground truth" results from the MER/MEX join observations.
I saw SteveS yesterday in Seattle. I can highly recommend going to see him if ya get the chance. The book is great (stayed up all night reading it when I got it) and his presentation on the rovers is filled all sorts of great tidbits, and you always get new tidbits from him every time from what I heard about the one at Microsoft later that day. Showed some great stuff including some amazing dustdevil footage I had not seen yet. He mentioned the IMAX movie and seemed to indicate he was involved at least somehow, but I was unable to ask him about his involvement in that film as he was running out the door to get to his next engagement.
A few good jokes too showed the sense of humor Steve has that we've all come to appreciate. I personally enjoyed his comparison of the Rovers to Magellans expedition. Where Magellan started out with 200 men and only 18 survivors finished. And SteveS observed that he is going to finish his mission with the 18 surviving grad students.
How fortunate. It sounds as if you were able to catch him in two different shows on the same day. (or perhaps you heard about the the one at MS second hand.) Anyway, did he have anyting interesting to say about the most recent sols?
I only caught him at one presentations. Heard about the other one through friends who work at the Evil Empire that just had a few little differences, different factoids and the like. He did not say much beyond the recent sols that was not covered in his recent post. Fully expects to take "the mother of all panoramas" from the top of Husband Hill, I would say he is very confident in the ability to summit. He reiterated that they expect to summit and then drive down the other side, no indication to any planning changes. He didn't have much to say about Oppy.
I do regret not getting to ask him about any new conclusions about the state of Spirit's RAT though, given the pictures they took a few weeks ago on sol 565.
And Steve did show a video made of the dust devils recorded by spirit on Sol 568 that is very impressive. (It's Friday I had time to surf this evening, and find the originals.)
Here's a recently posted http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1445148.htm from an Australian radio show called "The World Today" with Steve as a guest.
Not too much new, but he mentions his initial reaction to the first navcams from the top. The transcript gets the spelling of his surname incorrect, but the interview itself is fairly good for a general audience show. Eleanor Hall is apparently ABC's answer to NPR's Terry Gross. ;)
"The mother of all panoramas."
Hopefully the air will clear enough to see Gusev's walls.
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
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?zenid=12e5908f57f3d0d025bb7a6f41c5ff5c&main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&video_cat=SELECT+A+CATEGORY&video_policy=SELECT+A+POLICY&video_keyword=SELECT+A+KEYWORD&simple=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.
http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/
Steve is back home! And leading the troops once more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
edstrick: That would be interesting to try. I have been amazed many times by some of the powerful multivariate statistical techniques, and even did some PCA analysis of large well log datasets. But I must admit I really didn't understand the details of how it worked. I had to enlist the help of the company statistician, who tried to educate me. I got lost somewhere in multi-dimensional eigenvector space, and had a devil of a time finding my way home again.
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