tuesday press brief

I've got my hands full with another Mozilla BugDay! so I won't be able to get the briefing notes posted until this evening. If you're looking for something to do between now and then, why not download the latest Mozilla Firefox release and join us for BugDay! on the server irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine?

Veronica: It is sol 44 for Spirit at Gusev, sol 24 at Meridiani Planum.

Richard Cook: You can tell by the fact that Pete and I are both here that something must be going on. Obviously it's been a long Presidents day weekend and a number of the team have spent some time with their families but we did get a lot done on both vehicles getting good science. Spirit accomplished sol 44 earlier today. Last press conference on sol 40, we tried our 256 Kb/sec UHF communication with Odyssey and that worked fine, we got down 148 Megabits of data, a new record, another opportunity to boost the amount of science data we could get. We did a short drive to Stone Council area that day and spent the next day doing IDD on sand and repairing for sol 42 rock IDD. On sol 43 we did a 27 meter traverse but had plans to do something longer than that but got busy with IDD. Today, yesterday I should say, we did some more IDD observations on soil before the 22 meter traverse. We've done a total of 108 meters with Spirit which breaks the Sojourner record of 103 meters. Opportunity had another exciting few days exploring the outcrop and doing some trenching. Starting at sol 19 at Bravo site, one of the areas of the outcrop, we used the IDD on that, then did a drive to the Charlie location using visual odometry capability, first time we'd done that to automatically track to a feature and compensate for wheel slippage. On sol 20 we were going to place the IDD down and ran across a sort of IDD feature, a kinematic singularity, we can't move it the way we intend and have to approach it from a different direction. Sol 21 we drove to the trench location and did some pre-trenching on sol 22 and did the actual trench on sol 23. Very active, very busy over the last 5 days. Final piece of information is that there is a point in a project when you've spent a lot of time putting together a capable team and one of the unfortunate things in this business is that you have to begin to say goodbye to members of the team as they go off to do other things. The first person we're going to have to say goodbye to is the project manager, Pete Theisinger who has been asked to go work on the Mars Science Laboratory '09 project. I'm sure it'll be as big a challenge as MER has been and he's up to the task. Wish him a lot of luck. From my own personal point of view and what a pleasure it's been to work with him for the last 4 years. We talk a lot about the quality of the team, that the team makes it possible, and you cannot have a team without a leader and it's a credit to him that he's been able to assemble and deal with this group of people. We owe a great debt of gratitude for his ability to manage this diverse group. He has a zen-like quality, at times a requirement on a project like this. But there's also some hard points in there as well, he's been able clearly communicate to the team what are the important things to making this a success and at the top of that list is risk and making sure we always keep our eye on the ball. Getting the mission to succeed and achieve what we're supposed to is our number one objective, nothing else matters. Schedule doesn't matter, performance doesn't matter, it's getting it to be a success that's the number one thing. And finally from my own personal point of view, I've had the fortune of getting to work for some really great project managers at JPL and I include Pete in that list. This is a learning experience for each one of us, not like we do these things 10 or 15 times in a career and each one of us learn what is possible and how other people would do it and it's been a pleasure and an honor to work with Pete and he's taught me a lot about what it is to be a project manager.

Pete Theisinger: Thanks Richard. Laboratory last week went through a couple of steps in response the President's initiative and I was asked to become the Project Manager for Mars Science Laboratory which is in phase A scheduled for launch Oct 2009 and it was easy to do because I had such a highly capable deputy manager behind me so that there's not going to be a drumbeat missed as I walk out the door. This has been a very rewarding job for the 46 months that I've been the project manager for MER. It's been a great challenge. The team is great. As I've said this last week, this job has not really been very hard for me because of the quality of the team, the dedication of the team and the commitment of the team. MER will achieve great results with Richard's leadership. I'm going on to another challenge. We'll continue to have wonderful press conferences and wonderful data as you've gotten used to and I'll be back in a few years for a press conference like this to talk about the upcoming MSL landing.

Ray Arvidson: I've worked with JPL engineers since 1970 and I've known Pete I think since I was a kid and this is the best experience that I've had in terms of interactions of scientists and engineers and it starts at the top with Pete and Richard in terms of providing that camaraderie. Let me give you an anecdotal experience. The planning process is very intense. Begins in the morning of a sol and ends in the early morning of the next sol in order to get the uplink together. Last night, it was actually the case that the engineering lead was actually telling me to put more sequences in -- more science sequences in! I was holding back, saying do we really want to put this in. The engineering and science elements really interface beautifully and I think that's a measure of Pete's leadership and Richard's leadership that that's the case. This has been an excellent experience all the way around. Pete, you've got a really big job ahead of you :) Now, let me get you up to date with Spirit and Opportunity. Remember that we're doing robotic field geology. On Spirit we're in the middle of a long set of drives with traverse science, beginning at the lander and moving up to the rim of Bonneville crater. The idea is that impact crater would have overturned the stratigraphy and exposed it for our viewing pleasure. We're about 108 meters toward the rim of the crater. This graphic is a Navcam view that looks back at the lander. We've driven another 40 meters since this was taken. You can see our tracks where the lighter dust was disturbed. One of the things we want to do is look back and notice the extent that the dust settles out of the atmosphere onto the surface and decreases the contrast on our tracks. We're also looking out ahead and picking science targets and acquiring data. This next graphic is a Pancam panorama from sol 44. The horizon is a couple hundred meters away, the rim, our target and we expect to reach it in some number of sols and that depends on what we find on the way. We're looking for new materials. Our next target, about 20 meters away, a little hollow. This image is a noseprint of the Mossbauer plate next to the rock called Mimi. What we think we're looking at is a soil like material put together by wind and perhaps cemented a bit. Awaiting results of Mossbauer results to put the whole story together. Let's move on to Opportunity. We're in this 22 meter diameter crater, about 3 meters deep. We've driven about 35 meters. We've been keeping toward the bottom of the crater to avoid slippage but we've made some attempts to get up to the rocks and do in situ science. We've done a number of complex traverses on a slope. This graphic shows the complex traverses we've been doing. The spectacular event on sol 23, we dug a trench. I'll let Jeff, a rover planner, and Rob Sullivan from Cornell, tell you about this massive ;-) 8 cm trench we dug. This is part of a coordinated experiment where we're doing remote sensing and IDD deployment with MI, Mossbauer, and APXS data prior to the trench and we're in the process now of deploying IDD after the trench was dug.

Jeffrey Biesiadecki: Yesterday we dug a nice big hole on Mars. I've been working with Rob, and Ray and a number of other people over the last couple of months to develop sequences that causes the rover to dig holes and trenches using its wheels. We ran one of those sequences yesterday on MER-B. We took a patient gentle approach, a gradual process that digs deeper and deeper as it goes on. We started with the wheels in a turn in place position. We start with the right front wheel digging by itself, half a degree in the negative direction and we image that with the front Hazcam so we can see the initial scraping of material that we dig up. then the rover will turn in place to the right about 12 degrees and followed by another running of the right front wheel, this time in the opposite direction, kicking up material behind the wheel. We'll turn in place back to the left, running the right front wheel and it continues this process over and over again as long as we let it, growing a wider and deeper trench as it goes. On each end before we reverse directions the rover will drive onto the material to compress and compact the material so it doesn't fall back down into the hole we're digging. Finally, as we're driving from one end to the other we have the rover pause and do an extra scraping maneuver to prevent a mound from forming in the middle of the trench. On flat ground we let this sequence run for 11 passes and we can get quite deep. But on Meridiani we're on the side of a crater on a 9 degree slope so we made adjustments so we just did 6 passes. We also started with an initial turn to make the trench downslope. This animation is rover data. It ends with a 2 meter backup so that the IDD is in position to view the trench. These images are the trenching in progress. 6 minutes of motor over 22 minutes. 66 mobility commands. We grabbed about 8 images. Time for imaging and cooling motors.

Rob Sullivan: This is the best view we've had of the trench so far. We don't have color images yet because we can't see the wheels with the Pancam up on the mast so these are the Hazcam during digging before we pulled back the 2 meters. This image takes the stereo data and turns it into a 3-D model. The trench is a little over 20 cm wide and about 50 cm long. Deepest area is 10 cm. Most areas are about 9 cm. We've only had this final image for a short while but so far catching the science teams attention is the high contrast and the cloddy nature of some of it. Not sure the cause of the contrast. Could be a distinctive material or just compacted fines that reflect differently. We're looking at the cloddy material with MI. Then the MI and the arm are moving down to that brightest spot then the Mossbauer and APXS will perform long integrations. We'll compare with the before shots. We'll also compare the MI images taken down at the bottom with those taken right of center. Over the next couple of days we'll be getting more images in. Science team considering taking an extra day to look at the wall materials more.

Q. Are you seeing the pebbly things in the trench?

Rob: the reason we're here, and let me pause to congratulate the engineers who got us here, a really difficult and ambitious drive, so why are we here, well Mini-TES determined that it was richer in hematite. We drove here to determine if this hematite is a lag deposit or something more intrinsic to the soil and can be found at depth as well. That's one of the reasons we're spending the time to look with our spectrometers out on the arm. The Sperules, we found looking at our tracks that those tend to get pressed down into the surface so I wouldn't expect to see those sticking out of our tracks in the trench. We might be able to spot the tops of them with the MI images.

Ray: we'll look at the walls of the trench to see if they're embedded there.

Q. Pete, what was your favorite moment out of this mission so far?

Pete: There are four favorite moments. Pictures after landing on the 3rd and 24th and the pictures of the empty nest on egress days. That's why we do this, to get to those moments. Those are my favorite moments.

Q. And what will you take with you?

Pete: hopefully a lot of good people :D Any effort like this has a lot of lessons learned, good people with great experience, so a lot to take with me.

Q. (lost the stream here and didn't get the question)

Ray: for Spirit, the focus is on the traverse science. We should get to Bonneville expeditiously and depends on what we discover of new materials on the way. Once we're on the rim the issue becomes can we get into the crater or do we head for the hills. We are using the DIMES images and the new MGS c-proto high-res images. The other thing we're doing is using Mars Express assets. Those data are just being digested now to help with Spirit. For Opportunity, we did this great excavation so we want to take advantage for a couple of days then the intent is to move back to the wall rocks and do a whole suite of measurements including pre and post RATting on the outcrops. After that we'll exit the crater and head to the crater that's 600 meters east and the idea there is to do a radial ejecta traverse similar to what we're doing with Bonneville. The orbital assets are being used to advantage to get topography, morphology and to place us in a regional context.

Q. Was the right wheel designed differently from the other wheels for trenching?

Jeffrey: none of the wheels were designed expressly for digging but we are able to dig nice holes with them anyway. We have a mirror sequence for the left front wheel but we picked right because we wanted to dig with the downhill wheel. Front wheels tend to work a little better than the rear and center wheels because they have a little bit more pressure because they don't have the bogey.

Richard: the features you saw on the wheel there are actually on all of the wheels.

(stream signal problems, missed the last few minutes of the briefing.)

Next briefing is Thursday at 10 am PST.

Posted by asa at February 17, 2004 10:00 AM