Project Transcribe, The SS Q'n'A to Text Options

[odave]

I'm up for doing one more - I'll do 8

[slinted]

I'll take a swing at section 10 this evening

[Redstone]

Here we go..

SECTION 11. START 43:00.

Doug: There's loads more questions, but really we need to get moving 'cause I'm starving.

Steve: [laughter]

Doug: But, um...the S1K bug...

Steve: [great laughter]

Doug: Does it exist?

Steve: Ah, yeah. Yeah. We...there are a lot of...we use a lot of automated scripts to make the operations process work and there are a number of scripts out there that would...ah, would break with a four digit sol number. But we're already working on that. We're already working on that.

Doug: You're already working on it?

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. We, we see that one coming. We're already working on it.

Doug: I've got to rename all the folders on my external hard drive if you do it...

Steve: There you go! It's the same, its the same problem. Same problem.

Doug: If you had to chose a new project as PI...

Steve: Yeah

Doug: ...anywhere, what would it be?

Steve: I'm not though. [?] I'm not, um...

Doug: Planetary favoritism?

Steve: I don't, I don't think I see myself ever being a PI again. If I could, if I were going to do it, and I don't see it happening, but if I were going to do it, I'm real, real interested by Europa. I'm really interested by Europa. You know, a Europa...Europa Submarine Mission. Europa Lander Mission! That would be great.

Doug: Ignoring latitude, elevation, terrain type restrictions...

Steve: All those nasty practical issues...

Doug: All the things the engineers love...

Steve: Yeah.

Doug: Where would you drop a third rover?

Steve: Identical to the one that we've got?

Doug: Yeah.

Steve: How much landing accuracy do you give me? All that...

Doug: As...same as you've got...

Steve: Same as MER.

Doug: You can probably bring it in a bit...

Steve: No, no, no, no, no. OK. Same as MER. Um, Melas Chasma, you know, down in the Valles Marineris, that was reeeally tempting. That would have been a good one. Its a scary site because a lot of it's covered by sand dunes, like 30% of that site was covered with sand dunes and you come down on the dunes, man, you're screwed. But, it would have been spectacular topography, and really cool layered rocks, so that would have been a good one.

Doug: A lot of people are seeing MSL as being a good mission for the future BUT it seems something of a waste that this design for MER, that is, that is clearly an awful lot more robust than anyone would have dreamed...

Steve: Yeah

Doug: It would make sense to try and reuse the design. Is...?

Steve: Ah, maybe…

Doug: Would it, would it fit under a scout budget almost or..?

Steve: Its tough as a scout budget. I think that would be hard to pull off. You know it's a terrific platform, its worked exceedingly well, but there's so many things you'd like to have different. You know, you'd like to have a regular steady power source instead of relying on gusts of wind. You'd like to have more range, you'd like to have the ability to look for organics, you'd like to have all those things that MSL has! So, you know, you could go either way on this one. NASA's got a limited amount of money to spend, limited budget and I think MSL's going to be a hell of a good mission.

Doug: There is one, I think a fabulous question. When you are looking at the latest images of a new and unseen part of Mars...

Steve: Yeah, which is my favourite part of the job.

Doug: No, no. No, no! Do you ever think of Carl, and imagine...

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Doug: ...what he would say...

Steve: Yeah, oh Carl...

Doug: ...if he was behind your shoulder?

Steve: Carl would have thought this mission was a hoot. He would have LOVED this mission. Some time after we landed - I had, I read Cosmos a long time ago, when it first came out, it was when I was in graduate school - and a long, long time after that, in fact after we had landed, someone copied for me a passage from Cosmos which is, I forget, I think it's in the chapter called "Blues for a Red Planet", but there's a passage in there where Carl, who was working on Viking at the time, rhapsodized about how great it would be to be able to actually MOVE, and wouldn't it be great to be able to move ACROSS the Martian surface. And I had totally forgotten that passage and then someone e-mailed it to me, and reminded me of it and ah, yeah, yeah, I think of Carl a lot. I think he would have loved this mission.

Doug: Almost built for him...

Steve: Its...yeah...

Doug: Perfect for him.

Steve: I think he would have liked it.

END SECTION 11. 47:16

[slinted]

Section 10:

Doug: But, one question that we’ve often thought is, by any measure of reasonable guesstimates before landing, they just shouldn’t be around today.

Steve: That’s right

Doug: And given that, by rights you should be doing something else

Steve: Yeah

Doug: And so should all the engineers and all the scientists who are still on the project.

Steve: Yes

Doug: So…

Steve: We’re very tired

Doug: Who’s doing their job where they should be now?

Steve: [Laughs] Very good question. It’s been very different on the engineering side and the science side. On the engineering side there has been a lot of turnover. Only a handful, not a handful, but a relatively small fraction of the engineers who were active in the day to day flight operations at the start of the mission, are active in it now. They’ve moved on to MSL, to Phoenix, to other projects. There have been a few engineering areas where there’s been almost no turnover. The rover drivers, there’s been like zero turnover. It is the coolest job on the project.

Doug: It’s the best job in the world

Steve: Rover driver is just a really cool job and so none of those guys want to do anything else. They think they got the best job on the planet. I almost agree with them sometimes. So those guys have mostly hung in but there’s been a lot of turnover on the engineering side. What’s happened is basically, what you’ve got is you’ve got, really talented, ambitious young engineers who want to learn something…they work at JPL, they want to learn something about flight operations. MER is kind of the cool mission to work on, so they’ll come in and replace people who have gone on to other projects. So we’ve had quite a bit of turnover on the engineering side.
The science side is basically the same crew that we started with. The science team for this is selected via a whole competitive proposal and peer review process. It’s a very laborious process, and so the science team has stayed more or less intact. Many of us would have been spending our time on other things. I’m involved in the Cassini mission for example. I’m involved in MRO. Thankfully, most of these missions have pretty big teams. For example, on the Cassini Imaging Team, there are plenty of good scientists on the team who pick up the slack.
What has happened to many people is people who thought they going to be spending time analyzing MER data are still involved in the daily repetitive grind of flight operations. I think the biggest impact on all of us, has been that it has been very hard to get our data analyzed and our papers written and published with the constant pressure of flight operations on top of us. And a consequence of that, we have gotten a lot of papers published. We got two special editions of Science, a special issue of Nature that are out, like I said a special issue of EPSL that’s just about to come out. We’ve got a special issue of JGR, Journal of Geophysical Research, on Spirit for which all the papers are now submitted. That’s going to be a spectacular issue. That’s really good stuff. My next big push is going to be a special issue of JGR that’s all about Opportunity. But, man, we’re tired. I mean, we are just, the whole team is just, especially the scientists I think, just deeply fatigued. I mean, it’s the most fun you could possibly imagine having in your career, but we’re tired.

Doug: You need a break

Steve: Um… yeah

Doug: But you don’t want the option to arise where by you can take one

Steve: Well, sure, because the only way we could take a break would be if the rovers die. And so we’re just going to have to keep pushing. We’re doing ok, I mean, we have put a lot of effort into finding ways to make the operations task sustainable in the long term. We are fatigued, but we’re not …if we were working at the pace that we were for the first three or four months of flight operations, where it took seventeen hours between when we saw a downlink and when we had the uplink ready, we’d be dead. We wouldn’t be able to keep doing it. But, fortunately, we’ve gotten much better at it. What used to take seventeen hours now takes six or seven or eight hours, or twelve on a really bad day. And that’s much more manageable.

[CosmicRocker]

Gee, you people made short work of that. I came in thinking there were a few sections left for me to pick from, and now they're all apparently spoken for. If anyone can't do what they planned, email me and I'll be glad to do it.

The transcripts have really been helpful to me for those few parts where I couldn't quite be certain of what I was hearing.

[Tman]

Yeah! Many thanks for this effort! There's a lot I understand only now since I can it directly translate.

[odave]

Here's 8...

BEGIN Part 8 (29:11)
===============
Doug: On the Athena update site you mentioned that a Mossbauer spectra near Independence, or near to the rocks around there were taking four days compared to way back.

Steve: Yeah, but you've got to realize that Independence is a special case because it's very low in iron. There are two things that affect how long a Mossbauer integration takes. One is how strong or weak the source is. The source strength now is about a quarter, about 25% (actually a little less than that), of what it was when we first landed. So, an integration that used to take typically, say 12 hours - or, actually we often did 'em in about 8 hours - one that used to take 8 hours takes 32 now, OK? But the other thing is that the strength of the Mossbauer signal is in direct proportion to how much Iron 57 there is in the target material. Independence, it turns out, is remarkably low in iron for reasons that I can't explain to you well, but that was a very low iron target. What we'll often do these days is we'll do the APXS first, get it down, determine the iron content, and then decide how long to make the Mossbauer integration on the basis of how much iron it has. So a typical Mossbauer integration these days is between 32 and 48 hours for a rock with kind of normal iron content for Mars, which is 4 times what it was at the start of the mission. But when you have a really low iron target like Independence you have to lengthen it out.

Doug: Now both Mossbauer and APXS, remind, use radioactive samples, bounce it off the rock, and measure the signals coming back.

Steve: Yeah, but the physics is quite different.

Doug: Are they both going to suffer over time, this kind of [?overrun with Steve? 30:56-30:58]

Steve: No, no, no, that's only the Mossbauer. Mossbauer uses Cobalt 57; the half-life is 271 days. We've been on the surface a little over two half-lives. The APXS uses Curium 244 which has a half-life of 20 some odd years, so ah...

Doug: That's probably not going to be a problem!

Steve: <laughs> I don't anticipate havin' a problem with that one.

Doug: No. Is there a point where it's going to become prohibitively long, do you think, or...

Steve: Ahhhum....no...

Doug: ...will there be a situation where: rover's low on power, let's plunk it down and do it for eight days, or?

Steve: You know...um...eh... I think, you know, once it gets out to be...right now it's 48 hours, and we've got lots of power, so it's two sols. OK, big deal. You know, that's fine. Another 271 days, with lots of power, it'll be 4 sols. 271 days after that, it's gonna be 8 sols. If it gets to the point where it's a week, or two weeks to do a Mossbauer integration, you'll need to be more and more certain that it's really what you want to do. But we've got all kinds of things like that, OK? The IDD, the arm. We've had a little problem with the IDD on Opportunity where a handful of times through the mission we've (this has probably turned up on the flight director updates) where we send a command to the microscopic imager on Opportunity and it rejects the command as invalid. The command doesn't look right, there's been some corruption of the bits along the way and so the way the software works, it then just re-transmits the command one second time and each time it's happend the first time, it's the second time the command has gotten in, so we've never lost any images as a consequence of this. But we suspect that it might be an indicator of some fraying somewhere on the cable, the electrical cable that runs down the length of the arm. And because of that, we have started to treat the arm, the IDD, as a consumable resource, as something that might give out on us eventually. So, in the early days of the mission, anytime we were stopped anywhere for just a sol, we would just whip out the arm with abandon..

Doug: Touch and go!

Steve: Just touch and go, man, we would just bang away pictures of just about anything, because, "hey, it's Mars, we've never seen this before". We're a lot less cavalier with our use of the arm now. We are less cavalier with the use of of the PMA, the pancam mast. I'm worried about the actuators, the gearboxes and the motors on that wearing out, and so we're much more efficient in our use of that than we used to be. So there's all kinds of things, not just the Mossbauer, that we're being more cautious about the use of, and we'll continue to be more cautious as time goes on.

===============
End Part 8 (33.48)

[dot.dk]

I'll do part 3

[dot.dk]

BEGIN Part 3 (07:28)
===============

Doug: Now listening to the Director Updates there is these little quicktime movies.

Steve: Yeah! Which I hardly ever see actually so I don’t know that much about them.

Dough: They all end with: “That’s what happening on Mars today”.
But for about 150 SOL’s the word came out: “And then a few days after that we’ll be leaving Endurance Crater”.

Now. It was almost as if it kept going. Ooh this thing as well, Ooh Oh this as well.
Was it kind of a contradiction there? Kind of I wish we get going, Ooh there is something over here as well!

Steve: Uhhm, it’s hard for me to answer that question well because I never actually heard or read the transcripts of any of those flight director updates. Might have been wishfull thinking on the part of the engineers. I think on the science team we always had a very definite sense that we were gonna be in there for a while. There was a point. I mean there were no question as we worked our way down. We kept thinking at some point we’re gonna run out of rock and we’re gonna turn around and go back cause you know we spend all last summer working our way down Karatepe the stratigraphic section there. And each time we thought we were about to run out of rock or we might get to something that was too steep we found out there was more rock and there were stuff for us to do. So every time we thought we were about to go out we thought “No look there is more good stuff ahead of us”. We got all the way down to where Escher was. At some point there was some discussion that maybe we would drive back up Karatepe, but then there was Burns Cliff. Now we had to try to get to Burns Cliff. We got as far as Wopmay quite easily and then at Wopmay it just turned treacherous on us. We were thrashing around near Wopmay for god what seemed like weeks.

Doug: Your navcam movies were all you see is the rover just slowly tilting

Steve: It was horrendous. It was awful. I was at the SOWG chair for a lot of that and it was torture. And finally one day. You know, we had got to the point where I said to the engineers: “look guys. If we don’t make some headway on this SOL I give up. I promise we’ll leave”. THAT SOL was the one were we got out and got our wheels back on fairly solid ground. Had it gone on for one more SOL we probably would have cut and run.

Then once we got up to Burns Cliff we really had to take our time because we were also nervous about that slope we were on. We were on a very steep slope and the problem is if you come loose on something like that your gone. So it was a long argues process, but it just payed off big time for us, it really did.

Doug: It’s probably the kind of THE mosaic from Opportunity.

Steve: Well not only the Burns Cliff mosaic, but just the wealth of information that we got in Endurance crater. There is a special issue of a journal called EPSL (Earth and Planetary Science Letters) That’ll be. Papers all done there’re accepted it’s in production right now I don’t when its gonna come out, but it probably will be in the next few month. That has just a collection of papers of everything that we learned in Eagle and Endurance. And it’s…

Doug: A lot…

Steve: We’re real proud of these papers, yeah.

===============
End Part 3 (10.38)

[dot.dk]

I'm sorry if I have stolen paxdans work, but I just looked at the sections not marked in green in the first post.

[dot.dk]

Ok here is section 06. The things I've put in [ ] I'm not 100 % sure about what's being said.

BEGIN Part 6 (18:55)
===============

Doug: Seems like you can’t have a single imagine sequence from Gusev now without catching at least one, and usually about a dusin dust devils.

Steve: It is the season.

Doug: What have we learned from dust devils? In terms of dust devils? In Pathfinder we got one.

Steve: Yeah, Uhm. We certainly learned they are seasonal phenomena. We looked for those things for months. We looked for, we looked for dust devils for 100’s of SOL’s

Doug: [“move” or something like that?]

Steve: I found we just gave up and now they are everywhere. Uhm, we have learned how. We have learned about their morphology. We have learned about the dust loading, the concentration of dust in them. Which help you to infer things about what the wind velocities and pressure [radians of Mars are]. We have learned how rapidly they move. We have learned how effective they are at suctioning dust of the surface so from that you can calculate things like dust transport rates. Uhm, we have learned quite a bit about them. Plus they just make cool [Inaudible because of laughter?]

The first time I ever saw a dust devil movie. It was like. It was like. It was like they day that we learned that Heat Shield Rock was a meteorite. I just laughed I just sat there at the SOWG meeting and just started laughing. It was just. We’ve had so many just lucky events.

Doug: If it got any better you just couldn’t stand it.

Steve: There’re a couple of moments like that and the first dust devil movie it was just so good that all I could do was laugh

Doug: I think you locked out on this probably in the sequence for the Husband Hill pan, but have you thought of doing, you’ve done navcam sequences for dust devils, there’s some Pancam less regularly.

Steve: Yeah

Dough: Have you thought of doing, getting terminology here, perhaps R2 and say L6.

Steve: So you get colour simultaneous...

Doug: I think you might have locked out once during an imaging sequence.

Steve: Uhm, we thought about it. There is a group of scientists on the team who are the kind of the dust devil hunters, ok they are the dust devil science advocates. They are the ones that comes in with all the clever different dust…

Doug: Mark Lemmon
Steve: Yeah, Mark Lemmon and some of the guys at Arizona State. The most recent thing was to do simultaneous navcam and Mini-TES so try to actually catch a dust devil with Mini-TES. Uhm, so we talked about that. The problem is it is not. It’s not an observation with a high percentage of payoff. Pancam is not nearly as good a tool for looking for dust devils as navcam is cause it just got that narrow field of view. So your chances of getting it are slim. Plus if you do the colour imaging you are spending even more bandwidth to try to do it. It would make a cool picture if you caught one.

There’s probably not a lot of science return in it because we know the colour of Martian dust. It’s not gonna tell you a lot more about dust devils. And so the dust devil guys have kind of concluded that there is more… They’ve got limited bandwidth. They have a certain amount of bandwidth to work with.

Doug: Rather spend the megabits on…

Steve: Rather spend the bits on the movies that have the high payoff. Frankly will be cool thing to do because I think it would be a sexy picture.

Doug: I think you got one just locked out.

Steve: Really? When was that?

Doug: I don’t know. Mark Lemmon is running a website with all the images. And one single frame and I think it is probably R2 and L6 perhaps. Something like that.

Steve: Bound to happen sooner or later by chance, but it’s a, you know as a fishing expedition it’s one that would be… If it payed off it would make a very cool picture.

Doug: Now early on when we had that first cleaning event 400 something.
Suddenly went from filth to gleaming.

Steve: That was amazing!

Doug: Everyone said we don’t think it is a dust devil. And you had… Well that was kind of rare there was probably not even a dust devil, but just a gust we were not hit by a complete dust devil.

Steve: Yeah, and I still believe that.

Doug: You think it’s just fortunate gust?

Steve: One of them was at night.

Doug: That’s not gonna be a dust devil.

Steve: It’s probably not a dust devil. Uhm, yeah one of them was at night. The dust devils we think are predominantly active, in fact we know they are predominantly active, in the afternoon.

Doug: So lunch time phenomena?

Steve: Yeah, lunch time into the mid afternoon and primarily out on the plains. You don’t see dust devils climbing the flanks of Husband Hill they seem to look to like it out on the plains.

So you know. While I can’t tell you it wasn’t a dust devil, because obviously we weren’t taking pictures then. You know ridge crests, it was at Larry’s Lookout, I mean ridge crests tend to be windy places and it’s clearly the windy season. So I don’t think it needs to have been a dust devil. I think more the dust devils are simply being visual indicators that it’s the windy season.

Doug: Once we may have heard that the rovers tilted ever so slightly.

Steve: Oh, Yeah you can see that! You can see that!

Doug: Is that happened more than once or?

Steve: Yeah! We’ve seen that several times. Very slight, I mean it’s like a pixel or two, it’s very very small. But yeah there are sequences that I’ve seen were you’re looking out on the plains. In fact where you see it is when we’re taking dust devil movies. And it’s not that the dust devil sort of came real close to us it’s just that that’s when you take a series of images click, click, click all in a row that you can see these changes. But there are a few dust devil movies where if you look carefully you can see the horizon go up and down.

Doug: [That comes so the whole body of air coming across that includes the dust devils]

Steve: Well yeah, it’s just that we’re embedded in this flow of wind coming over the Columbia Hills. And yeah, it rocks the rover ever so slightly.

That was a real surprise to me the first time I saw that, man. Actually if you take one of those rovers and bump it it’s pretty easy to jiggle it. They got these big broad wings and if you accidentally bump in to one of those things…

Doug: They’re not that heavy when they’re on the ground on Mars.

Steve: No, they will wiggle a little bit. That was interesting to see.

===============
End Part 6 (24.46)

[djellison]

That's the whole lot - I'll try and get it put together nicely before I head out to Spain!

Doug