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

[imipak]

I got a bit carried away... here's chunk #8. Sorry if anyone else had their eye on that bit! Doug, I'm sorry to report that I can't make out what you're saying in a couple of places; I've indicated those with (?) bracketed question marks.



SS: ...they're going to be fabulous mosaics when they come down, but, ah,..

[ 00:37:40 ]

y'know, the thing that's hurting us right now is that we still don't
/quite/ - almost, but not quite - have enough power to start grabbing
a.m. Odyssey passes. I mean, those a.m. Odyssey passes can be
tremendously valuable in principle; A.W.A., right? We're /real/
close to being able to use a.m. Odyssey passes, but not quite yet, and
so right now our data volume is pretty restricted, and that's going to
be the limiting factor on our pace along the rim of this crater for a
while.

DE: How do the A.M. Odyssey passes work - do you, actually [?] the
rover stay comparatively awake and then deep sleep after the pass, or..?

SS: The way you do an a.m. Odyssey pass is, simply, that you wake the
rover up - you turn the CPU on - at the time when the, uh, vehicle is
going overhead; but the problem is, you can't deep sleep on a night
like that, because the battery - what deep sleep is, is you take the
battery off-line, essentially, and then it automatically goes back
on-line when the rover wakes up in the morning; but you can't wake the
computer up if the battery's off-line; and so, especially on
Opportunity, a.m. Odyssey passes are pretty costly, powerwise, and we
just can't quite afford 'em yet. It'll change soon, but I think about
500 watt-hours is probably the magic number, I think once we get above
500 we'll be able to start doing a.m. passes again, and that'll speed
things up, because the science that we have for Opportunity planned
for the next several months is very, very, very pancam based; you're
going to be seeing a lot of pancamming, and not too much of anything
else, because that's where the real science lies for the next few
months.

DE: Now, you've said that you want to go... clockwise.

SS: Yeah... initially.

DE: ..because clockwise looks perhaps a little more exciting...

SS: Yeah.

DE: ...is that based on the pancam imagery, or is it based on HiRISE?

SS: No. HiRISE, HiRISE. I mean,..

DE: ...cause you can't really see what's up, because we're up against
?? that way.

SS: OK. You notice that the MRO project acquired that image in their
first six days of normal orbital operations. OK. They did that at the
request of the MER project. We went to - I mean, I'm on the HiRISE
team...

DE: (??)

SS: ...but, yeah, we had a team meeting in Berne, is Switzerland -
gosh, what was it - probably five, six, seven weeks ago? I don't know,
a number of weeks ago; and my whole pitch at that meeting was, `Let's
make sure that we get a HiRISE image of Victoria crater before
conjunction, so that we can use that to support this upcoming
strategic decision of, do we go clockwise or counterclockwise around
the crater.' The entire timing of that image, the reason that the
HiRISE took it when it did, was so we could use that image to help
make the decision on which way to go. um... It's a fantastic
image. I'll tell you a funny thing about that image. It was - as I
said, it was planned during the first six days of HiRISE
operations. We had no idea how good the pointing was going to
be. There was considerable concern that we would just miss the target
altogether.

DE: It was *spot on*.

SS: Well, you see, that's the frustrating thing. If I knew -- what we
did was, the most important thing was getting Victoria
crater. Everything else - Eagle, Endurance, all that stuff - was
secondary. We had this big image, and we wanted to make sure that we
got Victoria. So what I said to the HiRISE team was, look: don't screw
around, you know, while it's tempting to bias the centre of the frame
northwards so that we can get Eagle, and Endurance, and the
heatshield, and the backshell, and the parachute, and the lander, and
all the tracks, and all that stuff, let's just put it dead centre on
Victoria and maximise our chances of getting Victoria, because
/that's/ the image that we have a tactical need for now, is - is to
plan which way we're going to go around the crater. Had I known that
the pointing was going to be that good -

DE: Yesss!

SS: -as it came out, it was just dead nuts right in the middle of the
frame, you know? And if I'd've know that it was going to be that good,
we would indeed have biased it north, so one of the things that's now
on our to-do list is to, at some point, to go back to the Opportunity
site and do a shot that *is* biased to the north, and that will catch
all of our other hardware, and tracks, and everything we've done in
the past. But, yeah, it was funny the way that image worked out,
because I was, uh, prepared - we were all prepared for the pointing to
be bad, and it was perfect - just perfect.

DE: (??) just bang-on.

SS: ...and what a picture.


DE: It's, um... it's nice to see something -- MOC did a fantastic job,
seeing the rovers,

SS: Oh yes, yes.

DE: ...it's extraordinary to see them at all. But what HiRISE does is,
you go - "Ah, that's a rover" - you recognise it -

SS: Yeah. That image had a lot of impact on us. I said at the time
that it was good to see the rover again, and you could sort of say
it's a silly thing to say, because every day that we take pancams and
navcams and hazcams, we see the rover - bits of it - and, you can take
a panorama of the whole deck and that sort of thing, and that's... But
somehow it doesn't have the same visceral impact as seeing it.

DE: Sort of,...

SS: Sort of, this lonely, valiant little rover --

DE: ??

SS: Yeah, in the middle of nowhere like that, and especially right up
on - you know, just poised on the lip of that enormous crater that we
fought so hard to get to.

DE: Being so brave... (?)

SS: ..that was a wonderful picture, that was a wonderful picture, you
really got to tip your hat to the HiRISE team, Alfred McEuan and that
whole team that did that instrument, because that was just a
magnificent accomplishment.

[00:43:33]

DE: Now, HiRISE will image Victoria again..