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

[djellison]

Everyone likes suprises right....

At very short notice ( <36hrs ) - Steve and I managed to meet up in Milton Keynes yesterday evening and do another Q'n'A - this time an hour long talking about everything that's gone on in the last 12 months or so since the first Q'n'A last September.

http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_071106.mp3
Approx 14 Meg, 1 hour 48 seconds long.

Sorry I didn't have time to do a call for questions - but with the time between knowing it was on and doing it being so short there just wasn't the time to call for them, plough through them and then pick them...I think I got through all the good stuff though. I tried to see any left over stuff mentioned here, things that might have been asked for a Pancam update but better suited to Steve rather than Jim - and I was able to ask my admin team if they could think of any as well ( thanks guys ).

This time it was on the lounge area on a hotel landing....no ducks or wind noise - but occasional passers by heading to and from their hotel rooms - I hope the quality's good enough (I think it is)

If someone wants to put down time markers for transcription and people do the same as last time, I'd be happy to put together another PDF like last time.

Enjoy!

Doug

[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!