post-edl opportunity press brief

Opportunity press briefing is underway. Notes when it's concluded.

Lots of applause. Press is all standing and applauding and hooting and hollering. The team is making its way to the stage. Lots of hand-shaking and cheering. "Two for two!"

Pete (?) off-camera: Oh, my god.
Rob (?): Get a pie! Orlando, get a pie.

Applause as Sean O'Keefe enters the room.

On stage they stand arms raised and hands locked.

Veronica McGregor (media relations) introduces the panel.

Sean O'Keefe:
Thank you very, very much. What a night. As the old saying goes, it's far better to be lucky than good but you know, the harder we work, the luckier we seem to get. This team is absolutely phenomenal. NASA, when really focused on an objective can put every ounce onto a task. This team is the best in the world, no doubt about it. It's fascinating to see how these rovers are beginning to develop a personality of their own. Spirit irritated at losing attention to Opportunity. Balky teen-ager refusing to go to sleep, not responding to commands, orders or pleas. It's now responding, just in time, hours before Opportunity. Opportunity's developed a personality too. Began on July 7 when it was intended to launch on a beautiful evening. Valve came loose and launch was scrubbed. It was launched at next opportunity and has been flawless ever since. Now we'll see whether or not it wants to give us images in the next couple of hours. So many valuable contributors from across the entire agency are here with us, have been asked to come in to deal with a range of challenges. Sergio Vitrella, president of Italian Space Agency, is with us. Glad to have you with us. Congressman Adam Shiff and John Culverson (sp?), delighted to have you here. Former Governor Pete Wilson, thank you. Governor Arnold stopped in and former Vice President Al Gore as well. My good friend Ed Weiller did not want to celebrate too soon. Let's just pop a soda here, he said, because the hard work is yet to come. It's the landing. Let's hold off on an champagne till then. Well...(Sean pops the cork on some nice Champagne and pours a glass for each on stage). "To the Mars Exploration Rover Team, the best in the world". (applause)

Ed Weiller: My boss is a tough act to follow and I'll be short because I want to hear what Pete has to say. Mars is closer than it's been in 60,000 years. We had a unique *Opportunity*. More importantly, we had the *Spirit* to try for two. The NASA team lead by JPL really swept a double-header. You did it. I got on the plane on thursday morning, I came here prepared for a funeral basically (spirit troubles). Talk about a rollercoaster ride. We resurrected one rover and saw the birth of anther today. I guess I'll have to stop using the excuse of Mars is a death planet because in the last 3 weeks we've gone from a US record of one for two to five for six. That's an 87% batting average. We've even boosted worlds average from 1 in 3 to almost 1 in 2 now. However, I wouldn't be in character if I didn't remind everybody that this is just one critical milestone. As we learned with Spirit, things can go bad. We've got a lot of critical deployments, some going on now. We might get some pictures at midnight or so. There's a long road to go but this was one heck of a critical milestone and thank you (nod to the others on the panel).

Charles Elachi: First I would like to acknowledge Dr and Mrs. Baltimore, president of CalTech. Mayor from Pasadena. A number of members of Board of Trustees of Caltech. I see Mrs. Woodson. And before I go to my speech, I want to thank my wife Valerie and her sister Christie and it's Christie's birthday. There is a quote in my office, and in Sean's office, Teddy Kennedy Roosevelt quote about daring to do great things and that's exactly what this team has been doing THat's exactly what in NASA we do every day. For the past few weeks you have been witnessing exploration and what it is really about. With its joy, its frustration, its glory Look in books of history at Cook, Lewis & Clark, it's about facing adversity and what you do when you face adversity and this team has done it with resolve, courage, and ingenuity. The second success is even sweeter than the first one. It's hard to get lucky twice. They succeeded the old fashioned way. They were excellent, they were determined and they worked very hard. So thank you very much.

Pete Theisinger: We are 2 for 2 (much applause). 36 hours ago I sat up on this stage and told you we had a serious problem with Spirit and Opportunity nearing risky part of it's journey and here we are tonight with Spirit returning and Opportunity on Mars. So many people that we have to say thank you to. This has been a stupendous adventure for all of us. Historic and monumental. We have done, this team, in three years, two of the five successful US landings on Mars. The people to my left have been instrumental in 3 of the 5 and everything since Viking. That's incredible. (applause) I'm glad Ed mentioned that we have retired this risk but we still have a ways to go. We still have a ways to go but clearly this is a big day and shows the excellence in design and a great team. I have a long list to thank but Richard will thank the same list so I'll let him get started.

Richard Cook: I've also been here for what feels like 24 hours now in dealing with the Spirit problems through what you've seen in the last few hours. Reoccurring theme is the amazing quality of the people that we're working with and doing this job. We're communicating with Spirit now. The day on Mars is really the middle of the night here. We were meeting last night at 2am and I can barely think. There were spectacular people on the team figuring out what was going on with spirit, figuring out how to fix it and making it happent. The rest is what you just saw, the amazing conclusion of 3 years of work. You got to see the EDL team and as you can guess, they're not gonna hide what they've accomplished (hoots from the EDL team and room-wide applause). For every one of them standing here, there's a whole line of people behind them that contributed in significant ways. The cruise operations team and Jim Erickson have done a great job. The launch team and ATLO people, includes quality assurance and people who have tasks big and small, without them we could not have gotten where we've gotten. They deserve a round too. And the designers, software developers and the people who built the pieces that we put together. We've gone back to these people with the Spirit problems and they have the answers. They have a big stake in this. All those people, and fabrication and procurement all deserve credit. And finally, obviously, the friends and families who put up with us are really the heroes of this night. (A big chant of "DSN" from the back of the room). I have found that I always forget one. Certainly the Deep Space Network. Our colleagues at Lockheed-Martin. One more group I wanted to mention, the stupendous accomplishment they've achieved, the Navigation team. When you think about what they're doing, to get the accuracy at 100 million miles away. One thing they can't control is the atmosphere on Mars, and the Navigation team has been working to figure out where we landed. Looks about 24 km downrange from the center of the landing ellipse. Still some uncertainty. Place that we landed, the scientists are very excited about where we came down. All the credit to the Nav guys. (applause)

Rob Manning: (chants and cheers) Thank you. I feel like Richard, to thank everybody would be too hard. The talent in this room is amazing, scary. Represent a cross-section of this country. They're all around us. That's what makes us special and as human beings we should be proud of this accomplishment. Two important events in the solar system. One at Mars, and one here at Pasadena. We had a great night in this solar system of ours. We weren't paying a lot of attention to the data but it was very interesting. It went very well all the way through the atmosphere except as you heard from Wayne, it turns out we were behind the nominal timeline. We flew past our target because the atmosphere was a bit uncooperative. Not a bad thing. Still inside our target ellipse. But, fair enough, we landed. Things went very well. Interested in how much time we had before we hit the ground. Polyesther calmed me down. We saw the signal all the way down on both Canberra and Goldstone. They did a wonderful job. Again, the DSN phenomenal job. Phenomenal capability. We like to, we tend to want to listen to our craft throughout the solar system but this is really phenomenal, it is really a phenomenal physics experiment that worked. Let me say a bit about what we seem to have seen. The radar worked. The signal never went away. We saw the right and left poles of the signal. As the vehicle is swinging on the bridal, Earth is low in the Western sky, the rockets fire, the airbag is bouncing on the surface and we were able to keep in view this antenna. I was wrong about the bouncing and bouncing. Our truths are often temporary (applause and laughter). We quickly rolled to a stop and we were riding on the +y petal. Earth over in the West, North is that way and we're seeing a clean signal but it's bouncing off the surface of Mars and going straight to Earth. We get these two signals that interfere with each other and that confused us. We realized after a while that's what we were seeing. That means that, we're still up on the airbags while this is going on. One thing that's never happened before is that the vehicle is going to right itself, probably already happened. These petals open up like a flower to right itself. The rover will be pointed toward the East. My prediction. We did get some data back from MGS which recorded, phenomenal capability to record in realtime what was going on. Spirit, you remember hit a wind gust that accelerated us and our little rockets fired to push the vehicle straight up. Tonight, very difference. We didn't have as much wind but we did have some velocity. The DIMES camera took pictures and the software used these three images to figure out horizontal velocity. About 10 m/sec Nor and 2.7 m/sec West. The angle of the rocket was going in the opposite direction. Rockets used a 7.7 m/sec south and canceled. We were going 2.7 N and 1.5 East and that's not very fast (ed. I may have gotten some of this wrong). We cut the bridle and I don't know how high we were. We didn't hit hard. We didn't need to fire the correction rockets. We'll see tomorrow how far we fell, how far we bounced and maybe have a view. With some luck the vehicle has opened solar arrays to get power on Mars.

Charles: it appears that we've made an odd discovery on Mars and they'd like to transmit it you right away. "Happy Birthday, Sean" (a slide of a cake on the surface of Mars) Singing "Happy Birthday" song to Sean O'Keefe. Presenting Sean with a Lego MER.

Q. Significance of having two rovers on he planet at the same time?

Pete: we dont' know yet. being at two locations with great instruments. (lost connection).

Richard: landing on Mars is hard. we've got to stay humble. (my connection was flaking out so I missed most of Pete and Richard's responses.)

Rob: It's not just the effort but it is amazing to me how far and how close Mars is. We have two stations on Mars. It does represent progress for us.

Q. Being a little downrange, are you near close to the things science team wanted to get to with the TCM6 burn?

Pete: We got out of what they didn't like but we didn't get into what they did like. We didn't expect to get them where they wanted. More likely land long than short. I do think they're happy to be on Mars though.

Q. You said 6 months ago "never again" doing a project in this manner. What are your thoughts now on that.

Pete: unchanged. This sucked up a tremendous amount of energy, talent and commitment. We were capable but we don't want to be asked that regularly. I don't think this is the normal mode of operation. We should not be unwilling to do it but we shouldn't do it every time. (applause).

Sean: (pointing at Pete) What he said.

Q. You must be doing something right. How do you take this energy and feed this out for funding and how do you do it quickly and well.

Sean: Certainly the imagination and the energy. Remarkable interest out there. There were 4 billion hits on the website in recent weeks exceeds all of what we did last year. Website hits are testimonial to that. Blah, blah, blah. It's hard and it's a drain on people but it's worth it and it's viewed as such by a lot of folks out there. Feb 3rd Bush will present to congress a budget.

Q. Are you not close to the hematite outcrops?

Pete: Hematite deposite is much larger than the landing site. I think we're firmly inside of that. I think they were hoping for topological relief and time will tell if we lucked out on that or not.

Q. Given what you know about Spirit, how will that impact pace for Opportunity.

Pete: Matt Wallace put out a go forward plan and we'll let the next day or so play themselves out. We may be cautious on a couple of things. I don't think we'll have a serious issue with resources. I don't believe we'll be driven to stand down on either one. We still have a sick child and there's a lot of work to do before we get Spirit back in nominal operations.

Q. The first lander was given a name. Plans to name the second lander?

Sean: not prepared to announce that at this time. Stay tuned.

Q. Happy Chinese newyear. Year of the Monkey and we hope that the rovers can be as energetic and active as a monkey.

We're gonna let our team members get to work. At 12:45 commentary on Odyssey pass at 1am. Next briefing at 2am.

Posted by asa at January 24, 2004 10:36 PM