NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe will be appearing on NASA TV momentarily. I'll post notes if there's anything interesting.
So far, no briefing. "Program will begin momentarily" still sitting on the screen.
While you wait, you can check out some good commentary on the latest Spirit news over at stevex.Text and you can read about some of the other exciting missions underway at Flexistentialism. I've posted in the past about some of these mission. You can read some more from me back in January of 2003 and November of 2003.
I started to take notes on the O'Keefe briefing, also featuring Charles Alachi and Ed Weiller, but then I had a catastrophic power failure on my laptop -- battery came loose :-) and I lost my notes so I'm just gonna summarize what the general commentary was. It was a similar format of open Q & A as the earlier briefing.
Questions fell into a few main categories, the Spirit problems, Hubble, and the new Bush initiatives.
The Spirit responses from Ed, Charles, and Sean, were that people are optimistic and confident that the rover's gonna be there for a long time, roving, and gathering and sending data. The expectation is that the mission could go months longer than the initial 3 month objective.
On the Bush calls for manned missions to Moon and Mars, budget will be out in February and more will be clear then. People, teams, and other resources are already being moved around. Current programs and missions will be modified or ammended to align with new goals. O'Keefe said that development of nuclear power in space (prometheus project) will push scientists to find new ways to consume that power.
On Hubble, O'Keefe said that Shuttle risks in a Hubble servicing mission were not acceptable to him so those resources would be put into other efforts. No plan on retreiving Hubble for museum. He discounted questions about changing Hubble's inclination. He discounted that it had anything to do with Bush's new push. Ed (formerly Hubble mission manager) said that Hubble was the best space science mission in NASA's history but supports decision of the agency. Panel seemed a bit bothered with all the Hubble talk and tried to steer the discussion back to Odyssey.
(commentary for Opportunity landing will start in about 2 hours, 7:30 PST).
There will be a replay of today's Spirit noon briefing starting momentarily.
Posted by asa at January 24, 2004 03:59 PMI can't wait to watch NASA TV tonight online and see whether we Opportunity was successful and landed safely. It certainly will make me feel better about the Spirit situation, since there won't be any added pressure to get it back up and running.
I really think the future NASA should plan on sending these rovers out in pairs like they did with Spirit and Opportunity. It builds up the excitement so much, lessons learned in one mission can be applied to the other mission, and lots of science is done when there is two rovers there.
Posted by: Chris G. on January 24, 2004 05:45 PMWe may not find out tonight. I'm betting we won't. More in an upcoming post.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on January 24, 2004 06:54 PMI stand corrected. Wow! Another perfect landing, we may have even had better radio contact than with Spirit. Sidepetal down, though.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on January 24, 2004 09:38 PM