Odyssey made a pass over the rover and is relaying more than 20 megabits of data to Earth. Right now the MER is using its UHF antenna to communicate with the Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecrafts in orbit around Mars. Starting today we hope to be communicating directly with the MER via its high-gain antenna.
The first images in from the pancam have arrived at JPL. Update: The pancam image they're showing now is actually data from the MGS flyover this morning that gave us about 6 megabits of data. We're still waiting on Odyssey data. The MER data via Odyssey is expected to contain dozens more images (about what we got from Spirit last night with it's first 24 megabit upload to Odyssey).
Engineers are currently paying close attention to the warmpth of the rover and its subsystems. It's a bit warmer than expected but probably not problematic. This is likely the result of temperatures being a bit higher at Gusev due to the tau.
What we're about to see: More pancam images. More of the DIME images. EDL bin data. UHF link debug report. Thermal survey.
Thermal: there may be a convective cell keeping the mini-TES warm which might save us some battery power.
Telecom: the link is good all the way down below 10 degrees elevation. The next couple of passes will have a slightly less favorable position so we may get slightly less data than previous passes.
Also noted was that MGS made a maneuver to adjust it's flyover for the anticipated Opportunity (the second MER) landing later this month. This was an anticipated maneuver and seems to have gone as expected.
Schedule for today: At about 2:25 (as late as 2:55) this afternoon the NASA TV will cover the project sending a wakeup call to Spirit. Between 7 and 8 PM there will be status updates and commentary on NASA TV. Between 8 and 9 PM there will be a press briefing. Between 9 and 10 PM NASA TV will cover the deployment of the high-gain antenna.
New pancam image showing a piece of the rover in the forground and some surface features near the rover has just been displayed.
Posted by asa at January 4, 2004 12:02 PM