pixies and briefing

Get your fresh Opportunity pics here, hot off the press.

2 am briefing notes coming up.

Color pictures!!

Charles Alachi: I'm just speechless so I'm going to be brief. Good things happen slowly, great things happen suddenly.

Pete Theisinger: We done good. We seem to have a well performing vehicle. No problem with critical deploys. Loosing my voice so over to Richard

Richard Cook: We're in shell shock. Things have gone amazingly well in the last 24 hours. Pictures just blow me away. We've certainly not been in this place before. I can hardly wait for scientists to tell us what we're looking at (Steve: don't hold your breath). We've never opened from side petal down orientation and we did this time. The actuators have the torque capacity to lift a car and they probably didn't need all of it but it worked. Great to see critical deployments went well.

Matt Wallace: Just yesterday (Steve: when was yesterday?) there was a good chance we were gonna be fighting war on two fronts. Today we have the best party in town. That's saying something for Los Angeles on a Saturday night. Thank you to the cruise operation team that got us down here. You guys did a just outstanding job getting us here. (applause) And thanks to our EDL team. You guys do miracles. A couple specifics here. We did land on +y petal, rear petal. Allows us to fully retract those pesky airbags in the front of the lander. That forward path is beautifully clear for us. We are pitched up about 5° which is not unexpected. We are rolled slightly to the right by about 1.8° which is fine. Our ACS team has some data on heading. Good for pointing our HGA. They are calling out 26° which is North-Northeast. We'll be spending some more time refining that with shadowing and sunfind with PMA. No fault responses. Power indicates that we are healthy. Solar array current was as expected for a tau of .77 which is reasonably close to what we had at Gusev. Thermally we are very close on internal temperatures inside warm electronics box. They predicted 32°C and we are in fact 32°C. All the contact switches for solar panels are where they should be for full successful critical deploys. Time to get to the good stuff over here from Dr. Squyres. The plains of Meridiani

Steve Squyres: I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in a bazaar and alien landscape. As I was looking at the pictures I was looking for words and I still don't know what we're looking at. This is truly different. Roll the panorama. A few initial reactions. Humakee along the skyline. There is topography on a smaller local scale that is very interesting indeed. I will speculate that we may actually be in a crater, we may be inside some kind of impact crater. That will become more clear. Certainly if we are in a crater, it's one I don't expect to have any difficulty climbing out of. In terms of rover trafficability, it doesn't get any better. This is the first bedrock outcropping we've ever seen at a landing site in Mars. These Navcam images have been crunched down by a factor of 4 in both directions. What those outcrops are gonna look like when we get there, I don't know. This is a great picture taken with Navcams before we deployed the PMA. Shooting down toward the toes of the Pancam mast assembly and off in the distance dead ahead is this fantastic rock outcropping. I think we're gonna be able to get to it ;-) The thing that strikes me about this is the apparent slabby texture. Different ways to make slabby rocks. If I had to guess, I'd say volcanic. You can do it volcanically. You can also make it by sedimentary. Let's look at this soil. It looks sort of pebbly. When you see how it responds to airbags, it's something different. I don't claim to understand. These are the marks made by airbags pulled in and has taken that apparent pebbly surface and smoothed it off. It has taken what was a crenelated surface and smoothed it over. These are airbag marks and you can actually see the imprint of one of the seams of the airbag. Wheel tracks and trenching is going to be very, very interesting. To try to interpret history, it's far too early to tell. We have Pancam ahead of us. We have mini-TES to find the hematite. We're gonna traverse over to them. We're gonna RAT into them.

Dr. Squyres, we've just received a gift for you from Jim Bell (color photograph!)

Larry Soderblom: Wow. Crescendo has grown. Martian paydirt. We followed the water and at the bottom of our rainbow is a pot of gold. This is one of those nights. Rates with Viking and discoveries of volcanoes on Titan. We've talked, but not enough how excellent these engineering teams are. It's one thing to be very, very good and it's better to be very lucky. Going to Mars, finding a place safe enough to land and then finding something interesting when you get there. We looked at the high-resolution images, even Mike Malin's high-res images and it's a shot in the dark and after 5 tries, we hit the nail on the head and we have a scientific jackpot. Let's go for it.

Q. Steve, could you have imagined a better site for Geology in your wildest dreams.

Steve: this is exactly what it looked like in my wildest dreams.

Q. Is this the texture of talcum powder?

Steve: sort of like that. To be able to settle out to that extremely, to pick up the inverse of the airbags like it did looks like a fine grained powder. Wheel tracks and then looking at it with the MI, we will be able to characterize what the physical properties are.

Q. When you say you've hit bedrock, is this the layer underneath the hematite layer?

Steve: there is a chance, this is wild speculation but there's a chance that what we may be seeing here in that outcrop is that underlying unit and what we see in the surface is the hematite. That's the beauty of this payload.

Larry: We're seeing bedrock. Whether sedimentary or volcanic, they're bedrock.

Steve: first rock outcropping we've seen on Mars.

Q. Since we're doing wild speculation. I know you're in an odd looking place on another world but anything on Earth that looks and behaves like this?

Steve: The outcropping yes, but the soil... Larry? (maybe in a cement yard). I don't know.

Q. Does the color surprise you?

Steve: I find striking the gray that goes to red when pressed upon. That it has grayish tone on top and that it goes to red when pressed down is striking. One of the things we'll want to do is get an APSX or Mossbauer on that. Then scrape some away and measure again. It's the darkest stuff we've seen.

Larry: perfect for our instrument package. We'll put our instruments on the soil here, move over and spend maybe a week at the outcrop.

Steve: Only a week at the outcrop?! :D

Q. Why do you think you're in a crater.

Steve: looking at the skyline, slope up and away from us. A wild guess based on first impression.

Larry: When the near horizon goes all the way around for 360 degrees you must be in a depression.

Q. We're looking at bedrock. How old?

Steve: no guess.

Larry: less than 4.5 billion years. ;-)

Q. Landmark on Earth that resembles outcrop?

Steve: it looks layered and slabby but they look like that (gestures). You can make them with volcanic flows, falls, sedimentation in liquid water, each one of those mechanisms creates its own distinctive granular details. Once we get over there we can look at it with mini-TES, Mossbauer, MI, scrape away with the RAT and look again. It looks familiar.

Q. Can you tell us what you see that is dreamlike.

Steve: We are going to be able to really motor. The texture and response of the soil is fascinating stuff. To find bedrock, we've never found it on Mars before. All of those things, just fascinating.

Q. At the top of this image to the right there's what looks like a circular depression. When shown in detail, it had the same reddish color as foreground stuff. Could that be airbag bounce.

Steve: Could be. Who knows.

Q. You've emphasized excitement at seeing bedrock. What's exciting.

Steve: You know where it came from. Problems at other sites with loose rocks is where did they come from and how did they get there? No idea where they came from. Bedrock, these rocks grew up right in this neighborhood.

Larry: The goal with geology is to read a history book of time and we can't do age dating there but stratigraphy, we know with almost certainty that the youngest things are on top and the oldest on bottom.

Q. do you see signs of hematite here?

Steve: too early. Mini-TES and Mossbauer haven't even been through health checks.

Q. This dappled features at the top, is that windblown dust or lighting effect?

Steve: I haven't gotten a chance to look at this close up. It sort of smacks of wind activity. Maybe something old.

Larry: Could be a fossil dune, an old inactive dune.

Q. How does this depression look to be a place you can site from orbit.

Steve: As you saw a couple of days ago, MGS MOC is capable of finding our hardware. Our superlative navigation team will try to dial in our position as close as they can and Mike Malin will unambiguously determine our position.

Rich: We'll also get DIMES in next MGS pass, hopefully.

Q. Any chance of procedure because of Spirit problem

Matt: minor changes. We're gonna slow roll the first day. Avoid one or two activities. Nothing that needs to get done early on, some motor actuations and a little bit of care with respect to how we're dealing with our flash memory system. Not a lot of impact unless we learn something new.

Q. If this is 10% albedo how does that compare?

Steve: this is like half the brightness of other things we've seen on Mars.

Q. For Matt, can you preview next couple of days and estimate of when you think you'll get rollin'.

Matt: we're interested as well. As you learned on Spirit it takes a little time to get the vehicle ready to become a mobile platform on Mars and we need to step through that process carefully. Tomorrow, and the things that happen today happen based on pre-programmed. We'll be making sure vehicle is healthy and establish good low-gain connection tomorrow. As we get into the third day, possibly our HGA. Some of our first cable cuts. One already occurred today, next on sol 2 or sol 3. Starting on sol 4 most likely begin standup process for a few days. On the order of a week and a half to two weeks.

Schedule tomorrow at 11:30 am PST for Odyssey pass and then briefing at 1PM.

Q. Any essential differences in the science.

Steve: payload is identical, the science is going to be dramatically different. What we do is going to be completely different. At Gusev we don't have bedrock. Look at what we did at Gusev. Here, we're going to go to that outcrop as fast as we can. A week won't be enough.

Posted by asa at January 25, 2004 01:42 AM