Roving Mars (imax!) Trailer Options

[djellison]

g, when he gave a brief status check upon landing - before 'Tranquility Base here...').

From memory here....and I'll get it wrong I'm sure

"OK Engine stopped, ACA out of detent ,Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in."

It's SOMETHING like that. Whenever you see a clip on TV, they go "OK Engine Stop, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed" andin my brain, I drop in the lines they 'missed'

Doug

[chris]

From memory here....and I'll get it wrong I'm sure

"OK Engine stopped, ACA out of detent ,Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in."

It's SOMETHING like that. Whenever you see a clip on TV, they go "OK Engine Stop, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed" andin my brain, I drop in the lines they 'missed'

Doug

Very good Doug! The Lunar Surface Journal gives us:

102:45:40 Aldrin: Contact Light.
102:45:43 Armstrong (on-board): Shutdown
102:45:44 Aldrin: Okay. Engine Stop.
102:45:45 Aldrin: ACA out of Detent.
102:45:46 Armstrong: Out of Detent. Auto.
102:45:47 Aldrin: Mode Control, both Auto. Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in.
102:45:57 Duke: We copy you down, Eagle.
102:45:58 Armstrong (on-board): Engine arm is off. (Pause) Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

[ElkGroveDan]

Very good Doug! The Lunar Surface Journal gives us:

102:45:40 Aldrin: Contact Light.
102:45:43 Armstrong (on-board): Shutdown
102:45:44 Aldrin: Okay. Engine Stop.
102:45:45 Aldrin: ACA out of Detent.
102:45:46 Armstrong: Out of Detent. Auto.
102:45:47 Aldrin: Mode Control, both Auto. Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in.
102:45:57 Duke: We copy you down, Eagle.
102:45:58 Armstrong (on-board): Engine arm is off. (Pause) Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

Good points both of you. I remember hearing the question on a game show "What was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon?" The answer was given as "Houston". But clearly poor old oft-forgotten Buzz Aldrin gets the nod here with the word "contact."

[john_s]

I don't suppose they left in any of the voice traffic from MSSS (call sign "MGS MOC") reporting during that period (in admittedly cryptic terms) that we had enough data from the UHF pass that the rover had to have survived the landing?  I feel a bit cheated out of my place in history by JPL's failure to understand what I was saying, and I've never seen a transcript or heard a recording that included that traffic.  Oh well 

I love this forum- wonderful to get tidbits like this. I hope posting here will help to restore your rightful place in history...

Back to the movie. We saw it last night, in a packed theater in Denver (nice to see folks turning out en masse for this!). I thought it was actually pretty good. The Earth-based stuff was excellent (the parachute deployment in the wind tunnel was particularly wondeful) and I wouldn't begrudge a frame of it if only the movie had been longer overall- it would definitely have been nice to spend a larger fraction of the total time on Mars. I guess they were afraid that the general public would quickly tire of rocks and hills and sand, and they might be right for all I know- as someone who can't get enough of rocks and hills and sand it's hard for me to judge.

I was amazing to see the Pancam panoramas on the Imax screen- I want a screen like that in my living room so I can fully appreciate the panoramas produced by the folks on this forum. Great too to see Opportunity bouncing into Eagle crater, the way I'd always imagined it.

There is a much longer movie waiting to be made about MER- I hope it happens sometime.

[ElkGroveDan]

From your blog:

"They spent several minutes building up the tension that surrounded Spirit's landing, and the horrible 10 minutes of silence that followed it."

I don't suppose they left in any of the voice traffic from MSSS (call sign "MGS MOC") reporting during that period (in admittedly cryptic terms) that we had enough data from the UHF pass that the rover had to have survived the landing?  I feel a bit cheated out of my place in history by JPL's failure to understand what I was saying, and I've never seen a transcript or heard a recording that included that traffic.  Oh well 

That was you? As a fan and follower of MGS for years, I heard that comment at the time, and actually wondered if I was correct in assuming that the folks at Malin were involved. Neato.

[djellison]

"What was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon?"  The answer was given as "Houston".

Excitingly, it's 'OK'


MC - fear not - your moment of fame is available to download....

http://www.planetary.org/radio/show/00000100/

09:28

Flight : MGS MOC this if Flight on MER A Ops
MGS MOC : Go ahead flight
Flight : Can you give me a current status please
MGS MOC : We're not quite yet able to say how much data volume we're getting, stand by and I will let you know ASAP



13:14
MGS MOC : Flight MGS MOC (with more than a little noticeable excitement)
Flight : Go MGS MOC
MGS MOC : I have some indication of greater than 240 kilobytes of MR data at this point which may be indicitive of reception after landing...we'll have to wait about another 4 minutes to get this data back down

16:43
MGS MOC : Flight MGS MOC I have positive confirmation of more than 240 kilobytes of MR data (Planetary society then go wild - THEY know what it means)

18:10
MGS MOC : Flight MGS MOC
Flight : Go MGS MOC
MGS MOC : I have 16 frames in lock, we see it in lock earliest is 04:24:57, latest is at 04:28:57 which is considerably after the expected landing time (translate as....why are you not going nuts, I've got data from your rover right here) I'm still waiting for the second chunk of data, standby

At this point we give Wayne Lee a slap for calling you Mike Malin

21:01 the "It's THERE..it's THERE" LGA beep - and they finally figure the spacecraft is OK - MGS MOC thinks "for god's sake -I was telling you that 5 minutes ago!!"



Doug

[mcaplinger]

MC - fear not - your moment of fame is available to download....

Wow, thanks Doug! And thanks also for including the time indices so I didn't have to listen to all of the commentary. (sorry Donna)

Frankly, what I said seems clearer than I remember it being -- I'm not sure why the JPL people continued to be in suspense as much as they did.

It's funny, we had NASA TV on in San Diego but with the volume turned down, and Wayne Lee's commentary wasn't on the voice loop we were on, so we really didn't have much sense of what the mood was at JPL. After they got the tones back the loop went nuts, so much so that I couldn't get a word in edgewise to indicate that we were pushing the UHF data back to JPL -- hence my "I assume you see your data" after it had come up on their screens.

If I had heard him, I would have asked the flight director to tell Wayne Lee I wasn't Malin...

I did get a call about a half hour after this point saying that our processing software had incorrectly time-tagged the EDL data, so I was in the office for a few hours after that making sure the next MGS pass would have good time tags. (It turned out the problem was due to the non-standard way we were processing the EDL data so as to tell how much we were getting in as close to real-time as possible.)

[djellison]

Just thought of a question and YOU would be the man to answer. Reading the Flight Director reports over at the MER Notebook, I and saw mention that using MGS MOC relay, they tended to have trouble with image file products. I know that they dropped the MGS UHF passes after, what, 6 months or so ( I assume to do more work with MGS's instruments instead of having to have science downtime for relay? ) - but any idea what/how/why/where the trouble w.r.t imaging products was?

I have the full Opportunity EDL as about 50 mins of DVD, but it's a lady at MSSS that time I think, not sure who - but she mentions that MOC had started taking 'the global image' which I presume is http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...3/R1303894.html + http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...3/R1303895.html ?

Doug

[mcaplinger]

Just thought of a question and YOU would be the man to answer. Reading the Flight Director reports over at the MER Notebook, I and saw mention that using MGS MOC relay, they tended to have trouble with image file products. I know that they dropped the MGS UHF passes after, what, 6 months or so ( I assume to do more work with MGS's instruments instead of having to have science downtime for relay? ) - but any idea what/how/why/where the trouble w.r.t imaging products was?

There were two factors. First, Odyssey has more a lot more memory onboard for UHF data, and it can send it to Earth 2-3x faster than MGS. So Odyssey was much preferred for UHF passes. Also, when MOC is used for UHF data it can't do much else, whereas the Odyssey science instruments can carry on pretty much normally through a UHF pass.

Second, the design of the Mars Relay on MGS didn't include any handshaking, so a small amount of data was probably dropped every 16 seconds, and this might have impacted image processing. I'm not really sure how the MER UHF handled the lack of handshaking, if at all.

You can read a lot more info about the MR on the MSSS website, http://www.msss.com/mars_images/mars_relay/mer/

I have the full Opportunity EDL as about 50 mins of DVD, but it's a lady at MSSS that time I think, not sure who - but she mentions that MOC had started taking 'the global image' ...

That was Elsa Jensen, the MOC operations supervisor at MSSS. She got a credit in Squyres' book and I didn't.

We took global maps on the landing orbit for both rovers. See http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/07/
(doesn't look like we did a similar release for MER-B.)

[djellison]

(doesn't look like we did a similar release for MER-B.)

Allow me.... (attached)

Is it fair to describe MGS as being from the 'old school' of spacecraft systems, whereby much of it works based on 'data rates' - wheres Odyssey is more from the new school of spacecraft which simply generates files? I suppose this is a symptom of the carry over from '92.

Doug

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[djellison]

And to add to that, from the day Spirit Landed - the MOC WA Globals of the South Pole one after the other. One could make, if you did this for months of imagery, a nice movie showing the expansion and shrinkage of the cap over the seasons.

Doug

Attached File(s)

 R1300437.mov ( 225.96K ) Number of downloads: 322

 

[dvandorn]

Very good Doug! The Lunar Surface Journal gives us:

102:45:40 Aldrin: Contact Light.
102:45:43 Armstrong (on-board): Shutdown
102:45:44 Aldrin: Okay. Engine Stop.
102:45:45 Aldrin: ACA out of Detent.
102:45:46 Armstrong: Out of Detent. Auto.
102:45:47 Aldrin: Mode Control, both Auto. Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in.
102:45:57 Duke: We copy you down, Eagle.
102:45:58 Armstrong (on-board): Engine arm is off. (Pause) Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

This is followed, as most people may recall but that none of the transcripts ever capture, by Charlie Duke's immediate response to Armstrong's "quote." Now, keep in mind that Duke was the only person, other than Armstrong, who knew that Neil was going to change the LM's callsign after touchdown -- so he *knew* what to say next, and he still almost blew it:

Duke: Rog, Twank -- Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathin' again, thanks a lot.

-the other Doug

[mcaplinger]

Is it fair to describe MGS as being from the 'old school' of spacecraft systems, whereby much of it works based on 'data rates' - wheres Odyssey is more from the new school of spacecraft which simply generates files? 

Actually, the Mars Observer/MGS data architecture is amazingly clean -- each instrument gets its own allocation of downlink rate (most of it goes to MOC) and there's no need to adjudicate downlink usage; it's all pre-allocated. There's no waste because everyone uses their entire allocation (in the MGS case we have a lot of planning and sequencing software that insures this.)

Odyssey and MRO use "APIDs" -- ways of prioritizing how all the various data products are prioritized and sent down. It may have some benefits, but it also requires more coordination between data producers. Both systems work but the MGS scheme is simpler.

Odyssey can send more data simply because it has more memory -- its RAD6000 has 128 MB whereas MOC has 12 MB -- and its downlink is faster (about 128Kbits/sec max, compared to MGS's ~80 Kbps.)

[Bob Shaw]

This is followed, as most people may recall but that none of the transcripts ever capture, by Charlie Duke's immediate response to Armstrong's "quote."  Now, keep in mind that Duke was the only person, other than Armstrong, who knew that Neil was going to change the LM's callsign after touchdown -- so he *knew* what to say next, and he still almost blew it:

Duke:  Rog, Twank -- Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.  You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathin' again, thanks a lot.

-the other Doug

oDoug:

I was going to mention that, but decided to be kind - I think, just maybe, Charlie Duke was a leeeeetle bit stressed at that point. Can't think why!

Bob Shaw

[ilbasso]

And of course Charlie Duke had his own chance to utter the first words from the moon on Apollo 16:

104:29:36 Duke: Contact! Stop. (Pause while they drop to the surface) Boom!

[Young, from the 1972 Technical Debrief - "When we got the Contact light, I counted the 'one-potato' and shut the engine down. The thing fell out of the sky the last 3 feet. I know it did. I don't know how much we were coming down, maybe a foot a second."]

[Duke, from the 1972 Technical Debrief - "I don't remember exactly, but about 1.8 (fps) - I think I saw - right before touchdown."]

[Young, from the 1972 Technical Debrief - "I wouldn't (want to) stroke that gear (by shutting down the engine earlier), man. I'll tell you, that would really jar your teeth."]

104:29:40 Duke: Pro. Engine Arm. (Pause) Wow!!! (Garbled) man! Look at that!