press conference notes

The Wednesday morning press briefing starts in a few minutes. I'll post notes as soon as it's wrapped up. I've now got a utility for recording the Real Media streams to my hard drive so I can go back and make corrections to my notes if I have time (unlikely).
My recording of the stream faild :) and I was kindof counting on that so these notes are really rough. Sorry. Enjoy.

Randy Lindeman:
Colombia Memorial Station image. This image conveys the wonder, excitement, pride, and honor that goes along with this wonderful mission and the hardware that got us to Mars. It was shot in infrared, red, blue and green and corrected to approximate true color. The image taken looking in the East to Northeast direction. It's shown in the cylindrical perspective. About 1/2 bits per pixel. 4 frames wide by 3 tall.
As an engineer, I'm going to speak to what we see in the lander. See the airbags covered in that Martian dust. We also see the airbags popping out from underneath the egress aids and the lander. This is leading the team to consider a slight tweak to the parameters for Opportunity. The reason we don't retract them fully is that it makes the lander much higher off the ground. Because our primary egress direction to the right in the image was essentially blocked, and we had to perform the turn in place and egress to the lower left hand part of the image, there's probably a little bit of noodling that the Opportunity team will do to increase the chances of a forward or nominal egress.
We see marks on the ground that have been left by the airbag retraction and the tracks left by the rover wheels as we egress off that egress lead. Marks show scraping away that thin veneer of red Martian dust exposing the darker soil. This image turns out to be very significant. I was speaking with Ray Arvidson, earlier. In this image we see both thh starting point of Spirit's mission, the lander, and we see the near rim of the large crater which is about 250 meters away, where the team would like the rover to go for the mid part of the mission, and at the upper right hand corner of the image, we see the north end of the east hills complex that the team would like the rover to head towards in the latter part of the image. My quick glance at the terrain indicates a relatively benign surface with few hazards like large rocks, slopes, that would cause issues for long driving. Not only beautiful but is an inspiring place where Spirit can stretch her legs.

Jennifer Trospar:
It's afternoon at the rover and perhaps as I'm speaking it's transmitting data via UHF to Odyssey overhead. You've heard the phrase, the rain in Spain. Today it was the rain in Canberra. When the rover woke up this morning, the Deep Space Network in Canberra was under storm, rain and lightning. Between 9am and 9:45 am at the rover is an important time to send our commands to the rover. As a result of the rain in Canberra, the signal strengths were not sufficient so our commands were not able to be received by the rover. Spirit didn't get all the data we wanted it to get so the rover did exactly what it was supposed to do which was to continue it's "master sequence" from yesterday. So not a lot of science done today. It's in a safe state and we'll hear from it via Odyssey.
Next I'd like to talk about the team and what they do overnight to get ready for the rover wakeup. Being on Mars time, we have people who are here 24 hours every day. On Mars time you come in at a different time by 40 minutes every day. One group of people, a shift, is the sub-system specialists and the Flight Director. A lot of times they'll have an Activity Lead responsible for content rather than execution. Sometimes there's a Mission Manager in the room. You have the sub-system specialists, attitude control specialists, power specialists, communications specialists, thermal specialists, mechanical folks, and that's the team you normally see. What you probably don't see, is as soon as the rover's completed talking to us, is the other team that's responsible for taking the results, looking at what happened today, deciding if we need to modify anything, and making the plan for the science activities for the next day. Two shifts doing this overlapping for 16 hours each Martian day.
The weather looks rainy in Canberra for the next few days. The rover is healthy. Tomorrow, depending on what we see in the UHF pass, it's possible that we'll RAT tomorrow.

Q. I'd like to find out about color images and how they're reconstructed. Have we seen any images where red was taken through a red filter rather than an infrared filter? Is this "true color"

Jennifer: I'll let Ray take that one. Continuing the tradition of letting the audience answer questions...

Ray Arvidson: what you saw was not true color. We didn't have a chance to balance it to see what the eye would see. It takes a long time. Weeks. And it depends on what you mean by true color. A truecolor image that you would see on Mars -- do you want to see it as you would on Mars or as you would with a blue sky like you would on Earth? We typically don't use the wavelengths that the eye uses to do geologic analysis. We've seen color images in blue green and red but they're not truecolor. We haven't done the calculations yet to have true color.

Q. For Jennifer, if you've got a delay does it impact your "downtime"? Will it put a crunch on the RATting. Also, in the picture, the loose cables, is that realted to the airbag retraction sproblems?

Jennifer: We actually have all the RATting products together. We are working on the products for the science we want to do on the RATted rock. It won't significantly impact the downtime. It looks to be that RATting will be done.

Randy: We have electrical cables tied down to the lander with only a few exceptions. It's the electrical cabling that had that blue foam insulation in the picture. The airbags had retraction cables but *inside* of the airbags so they're not visible.

Q. Why do they call it the red planet if it's not red. When Spirit moves it scratches the surface it's dark underneath?

Ray: We haven't calculated the formal color of Gusev. In 1976 we calculated the color at the Viking landing site and medium chocolate brown was the color we saw. We see dust settling out of the atmosphere which covers a slightly darker, but still reddish colored minerology underneath.

Q. About the airbags, now that you can see them so clearly are there any further ideas about the poofyness and what causes it? Had some of the internal cables snapped?

Jennifer: They're still poofy so we don't think that there's air in them. We added layers during development and they're much thicker than Pathfinder's were. We believe they're maintaining their shape, they're thick, they're cold, they're not drooping down. For Opportunity, we're thinking about retracting 5-7 more revolutions to pull them in further and still not have a deck height too high. Deck height might go up to 35 cm which is still quite reasonable.

Q. There's an incline up to that crater in the image. How much of an incline? Plan to drive up and look in?

Ray: We talked about doing a radial traverse into the ejecta. We sure would like to drive right up to the rim. The slopes are not big, only a few degrees and the rocks are not big.

Randy: The rover's quite capable of driving on slopes of 15, 20, and even potentially more degrees than that and in dealing with soft soils and driving over rocks in the 20 cm size. As we get into slopes and obstacles we'll have to slow down in our movements. We will make recommendations to project management for what we think is safe. In our testbed we're initially mocking up anything that we're doing for the first time.

Q. Picture foreground shows traction mark of the airbag, is that showing the characteristics of magic carpet?

Jennifer: It is similar. It does appear to be adhering to the airbags.

Q. How far can the rover go in an optimistic scenario. How many years of work for this mission.

Jennifer: Three and a half years ago the project was conceived. Work was done in Pathfinder and Mars 2001 Lander that had heritage that we used. This was a very short timeline for a mission of this complexity. Heritage was necessary. Success is measured in more things than how far you can drive, though that's very cool. Places you can drive to and the instruments you have, how they match up and what you can learn. Keys to success are the first time things that you have done that no other mission has done. One key, to actually abrade a rock, a first time activity no other mission has been able to do. This mission is a series of lots of successes. The next big success will be when we dig into Adirondack. As far as driving, we're very pleased with the terrain.

Randy: You really need to think of the rover as a series of sub-systems that come together to make a complete spacecraft. My answer is gonna be that we believe that we know we can go several kilometers at least. But the systems capabilities are also dependent on power and thermal and flight software and our ability to understand the terrain that we're sending the rover, the whole process. We've always had a goal of being able to do on the order of 100 meter traverses in one sol. That's a lofty goal and the subsystems are lined up to get as close as possible to that goal. We will have to expand our abilities to make long traverses, greater than 20-30 meters per sol if we're going to make it to those East Hills.

Q. How far is Spirit from the airbags now? Also, you mentioned that through Canberra you weren't able to transmit data. What does it do when it does not receive anything? Sticks to what he was doing the previous day? Could Spirt get lost or crash?

Jennifer: The run out sequence, yesterday's sequence that continues today doesn't do any driving or instrument deployment, nothing that's potentially harmful, just sequences to stay healthy. We put decision cycles in for activities like RATting so we will hear back before making the final go. We've moved a couple times so we're 2-3 meters from the lander. First we rolled off 3 meters, about a meter away from the lander then we turned and moved to Adirondack.

Q. For Randy, we were hearing about the various shifts, now that you've been doing this for 18 sols, about 20 days, can you give us a personal sense of how it's going.

Randy: This first 18 sols for Spirit, the first 12 sols were impact through egress. That's a very different flavor for downlink and uplink teams, mission management, etc. The reason is that impact through egress is very scripted. There are parameters that are changed like the turn in place move to egress in a different direction but fairly scripted. For the next few days we were still fairly scripted, getting into the dirt and deploying the IDD. Since that time we've spent a few days in "surface nominal" and we have things like the rain in Canberra and things that happen that aren't scripted. I don't know how long it'll take us to get to the surface nominal process into a steady state with all the bugs worked out in people, software, etc. It's going to take a little while. That's part of the fun. Every person responding a little different to being on Mars time. We've been getting help over the last year with suggestions for adjusting. We see some zombified people walking around. Quite often you'll see a person in mission support doing a coffee run. Marstime is going to be an issue for several reasons. One is that no one wants to sleep. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Opportunity coming up in a few days and people like me on Spirit will want to know what's going on there. It's very interesting.

Jennifer: My husband's on totally the opposite shift. That's the thing that's hardest for everyone on the team. Their normal life isn't their normal life. This rover is a young teenager that needs a lot of attention. Time away from families makes it hardest. We're working on a schedule for the team that makes it easier on the team to not be on Marstime all the time. Will happen after Opportunity.

Q. How long is a Mars day? How is your life going to change when Opportunity lands? Will it double all your capacities. How many people now and then.

Randy: Mars day is 24 hours and 39 minutes and 35 seconds long. The mission project is staffed so that there is a Spirit or MER-A component and an Opportunity or MER-B component. There's a little bit of fudging on that and we're not quite two completely separate and completely staffed. For the first 3 sols during landing we're going through a stand-down with no radical work for Spirit. We'll continue in-situ science but not make any major moves. There's a large group of people that feel professionally or personally compelled to be involved with both MER-A and MER-B. Wonderfully physically stressful time. Only after the end of Opportunity's impact to egress time when we'll reach a steady state for surface nominal. It's going to take a heavy toll on people. Some people try to stretch the boundaries on sleep. Hopefully no one pushes themselves too far. My team chief has sent out an email with concern about things like driving home after 30 hours in the lab. It's just too exciting to say no to.

Q. The mission on 2005 to the same planet has anything to do with this mission?

Jennifer: The rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have 90 days expected lifetimes. They will not be operational during the '05 mission. We'll use some technologies and people from the MER missions. The '05 mission is a different mission with different vehicles and different objectives.

(briefing note: tomorrow usual spirit update briefing at 9am PST. on Friday, two back to back briefings, a 9am Opportunity, and 10am regular spirit. Saturday pre-noon landing update.)

Q. Could Mars be blue and not red?

Steve Squyres: I can assure you that Mars is not blue. It's going to look different depending on the angle of the sun, the amount of light, the surface texture. We have a color calibration target and we use it to adjust the pictures as closely as possible. We've done some color images in which we've used infra-red for the red color. On others we've used a red filter. It depends on the choice of filters that we use. We make that decision based on many things. One is our desire to produce something that's approximately truecolor. Another is that science drives it for example the infrared can tell us something about minerology that the red filter can't.

Q. What exactly struck you the most in your area of expertise?

Jennifer: A lot of my involvement has been in system engineering and verification and validation. A great tribute to all of the people working on the project is how well the vehicle has worked. All through cruise, EDL, entry to impact, the tools are all working. We're moving much faster to science objectives than we had anticipated. When we were planning we said that most likely 1 out of 3 days something's going to go wrong and you're not going to accomplish what you intended. If you count the rain in Canberra today, we're 17 for 18 and that surprises me.

Randy: Unlike Jennifer, I'm a real neophyte to the mission operation side. I'm from the hardware side. The team I worked with designed and built the mechanical system of the rover. When all these elements come together, the things that strikes me the loudest, Jennifer said she thought of Spirit as a teenager, I feel like the rover is a baby and from 0 to 90 sols it's going to go from being a baby to an adult. Everything we do with the rover is a learning experience, not just how the rover will perform but the communication link, the software, all of the components working together. There's a learning curve. Sometimes I just want to put the petal to the metal and drive. That's why I'm not in charge ;-) Soon we'll be doing things and it won't be the first time.

End of briefing.

Posted by asa at January 21, 2004 09:50 AM