[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

Doug's latest conversation with Jim is now online here:

Rover Audio Updates

Doug says it'll probably be mid-February for the next installment.

There is a lot of interesting info in this one....transcriptions anybody?

--Emily

[odave]

Pancam update 31-Jan-06
00:00 - 6:00

DE: This is Doug Ellison from UnmannedSpaceflight.com with a new Pancam update for January the 31st, 2006. It is Sol 719 for Opportunity and it's just turned to Sol 740 for Spirit. Opportunity's only done a very short drive since the IDD shoulder problem, and it looks - in this parking mode of slapping its hand on top of its head - as if the RAT contact sensor's very close to some of the solar cells on that front-left array. How close is that, and how many more images are you having to take to check that the arm's in the right place before you can do any driving?

JB: Right. It is quite close, and I don't know the exact numbers, I don't want to quote an exact number, but it's on the order of a few, on the order of five centimeters, something like that. So it is relatively close. And that mode, that "elbow-first" mode was designed after a lot of careful analysis and testing by the rover team at JPL to be what they thought would be the best way to do these small bumps. And a bump is just rover lingo for a small forward or backward motion to try to get a specific target into what's called the work volume. That is the volume of space in front of the rover that the arm can put its different instruments down into. So typically we'll do an approach up to some target, get relatively close, sometimes get the target right in the work volume, but more often than not have to do a bump the following sol to get a juicy target of interest into where we want. And so their analysis with the test rover at JPL with the rover software showed that stowing the arm in this way would provide what they believe to be a safe environment for driving small distances. So that said, it's not at all clear, and it's the subject of a lot of current analysis that we'll be driving long distances that way, we don't know. That's something that the rover drivers and the mobility team and engineers are working very hard to try to figure out. What's the best way to do long drives in this new mission operation scenario.

DE: Potential for having a mode for when looking around a few local targets, and then another way of parking it for longer transits.

JB: I think that's, something like that, maybe a hybrid way to drive. I think that might be likely. But I still, I think it's premature and it's going to require some more time for them to complete their analysis.

DE: Recently through the Exploratorium, and I'm not sure if this is an Exploratorium and JPL raw sites issue or a real rover issue, an awful lot of pretty old Opportunity images coming down, a lot of autonav images, and some more of them from 50+ sols ago. Is that clearing the Flash out for some conscious reason, or is it just the priorities come down to that level?

JB: Yeah, exactly, it’s the latter. You know we have, basically each rover has a hard disk, essentially, of Flash memory onboard, and every product, every picture that we take, every spectrum that we take gets assigned a priority, and we literally downlink in that queue according to priority. So the high priority stuff that we need for driving tomorrow will come down first. And every day we try to make sure we’re acquiring roughly what we can downlink, sort of “live within our means” if you will. Some days we will eat more than we can downlink, if you will, and that causes the Flash to fill up and we’ll put products that aren’t tactically necessary for tomorrow’s decisions in lower priorities. So what you’re seeing is a manifestation, I think, of two things: one, that we’ve had some very good downlinks over the last week or so, so we’re able to dig deeply into the lower priority Flash bins, and the second thing is, and, you know, frankly, we’re sort of running out of things to do…

DE: [laughs] I was going to suggest that…

JB: …in our current location. We’ve taken this spectacular 13 filter panorama, 360 degrees, we’ve done all kinds of various monitoring, atmospheric monitoring, deck dust monitoring. We’ve taken a huge number of these super res - super resolution – targets of these fascinating features all around us, but we’re even starting to run out of those to look at in great detail. And so you’re seeing a net pulling of information out of the rover relative to putting new information in. So it’s not a bad thing to finally get those products down, of course we would never have taken them if we didn’t hope to get them down eventually, but we’re just now starting to get down in those deeper levels of the Flash memory.

DE: In hanging around so long at that region, Opportunity’s finally done something that Pathfinder did, just take its panorama with every filter.

JB: [laughs] exactly, exactly.

DE: Switching to the other side of the planet, Spirit seems to be doing some fairly good driving recently, 739 imagery, some of it has just popped down, and the driving terrain seems to be a bit mixed. There seems to some fairly dusty and fairly large rocky terrain, but also some fairly easy driving if you can pick your way through it. How is it from the inside?