January 2004 Archives

Today I had planned on taking the time I usually put into (sort of) transcribing the MER mission press briefings and writing something up on "the hematite" that's the big news in Meridiani Planum. It's being reported by all the mainstream media outlets without any real context and I'd hoped to offer some of that. I got several paragraphs in when I ran across this good hematite primer, featuring Dr. Joy Crisp, right up front at the Mars Rover site. Well, needless to say, it covers a lot of the same ground I was trying to cover.

I do have a few notes I think will add to that story, though, a bit more about what hematite can tell us, and a brief note on what we've already learned from the surface. (note: I'm not a geologist, so please don't hold me to that standard.)

Now that we've got Opportunity on the surface with this awesome science payload, it's looking like we may have an ideal environment for a very productive study of the hematite at Meridiani Planum. Initial indications suggest that the hematite is probably strewn across Meridiani Planum but not wind-carried in from afar. In the floor of the small crater where Opportunity sits, we see the hematite in a dark, grayish medium gravel layer (grains probably about 1/12 to 1/2 inch diameter) sitting on top of a shallow, fine-grained, not-hematite, soil layer.

Even more exciting than the readily available hematite, in relatively large pieces (one fear of the mission scientists was that the hematite would be a finely ground up sand or silt and therefore difficult to study and to trace to its location of origin) is the possibly that Opportunity will have access to hematite in original beds sitting atop and possibly underneath the light bedrock layer within Opportunity's small crater.

Dr. Phil Christensen provided two very exciting pieces of information at the last press conference: first, that we may be able to trace the coarse-grained hematite to its in-place origin, and second, that the spectral signature we see from mini-TES points to a low-temperature formation process for the Hematite.

If there are exposed beds of hematite sitting on top of or below the light bedrock layer, we may be able to see physical characteristics like smooth layering, veins, cementation, differential erosion, or other physical indicator as to whether this hematite was precipitated in low-temperature waters in a lake or sea, precipitated from higher-temperature waters around hydrothermal vents, or we may learn that it wasn't precipitated at all but created from a weathered ashfall or lava bed, or some other drier mechanism. Close physical examination with the Microscopic Imager and the other Opportunity cameras should be able to help make these determinations.

In addition to the physical characteristics of the hematite material -- its size, shape and distribution, Opportunity is and will continue to collect spectral data. The temperature of formation, and the type of mineral precursors have an impact on the spectral signature of the hematite. So far, the available mini-TES spectral signatures seems to point to a low-temperature formation process with goethite as the precursor mineral. There are two basic formation mechanisms that the science team believe may be behind Mars' hematite, a low-temperature process and a high-temperature process. In the low-temperature goethite process, Christensen says, iron minerals "precipitate from water, at low-temperatures, forming a variety of amorphous iron materials -- an iron ooze, if you will -- that can then convert to a mineral called goethite which over time converts to hematite." A high-temperature formation process for Martian hematite would be where magnetite, a common volcanic material, is converted to hematite by high-temperature thermal oxidation.

TES data from orbit had previously indicated a higher likelihood for a lower temperature, goethite-based formation. The current mini-TES spectral data from the surface also indicate that the hematite likely came from goethite. With Opportunities great instrument payload, the science team can perform further tests to confirm this low-temperature hypothesis. One test, Christensen says, will be to look very closely at a sample of the hematite with the Mossbauer spectrometer, an instrument designed to determine with very high accuracy the composition of these iron-bearing minerals. If the Mossbauer identifies goethite remnants in or around the hematite, then we'll have a fairly strong case for a relatively cool, wet formation process. If, on the other hand, with the close-up instruments on Opportunity, they find spectral signatures for magnetite, that could suggest a higher temperature, volcanic formation process.

The data is flowing in and the science team's hard at work evaluating what it means. The jury's still out on how this hematite formed and what we've learned on the surface so far has, mostly, confirmed what we'd already learned from orbit -- but more important than that, what we've learned on the surface confirms the hope of all of the science team and everyone following this mission closely, that we'd land these tools, safely on the surface, in a location to go much, much further in our understanding of this hematite, where it came from, and how it formed. Solving this mystery, as Dr Crisp says, "will help us characterize the past environment and determine whether that environment was favorable for life."

update: For an alternate hypothesis, one that begins by challengeing the very existance of coarse gray hematite at Meridiani -- something that would moot just about everything I said above, check out this (PDF) article. An intro to this paper can be found at author Laurel Kirkland's site. And there's additional reasearch for your thermal spectroscopy reading pleasure at Kirkland's site too.

There is some good reading out there. Go have a look.

• James Cameron's Mars Reference Design over at Astrobiology Magazine

• My wheels are in Hematite! at Mars Rover Blog
• New NASA Budget Request Released from MarsBlog - Louisiana Mars Society
• Opportunity egress coverage over at Susan's 2020 Hindsight
• Opportunity rover a true Marsmobile at Spaceflight Now: Mars Exploration Rovers
• January 31, 2004 at Mars Mission News by Steve Squyres

As always, if you run across good Mars stories, please let me know in the comments or via e-mail.

And Susan's got the post-egress press conference. Great job, Susan! Everyone go read there so I don't feel like I need to type it all out here :-)

Susan's still kickin' my tale so go there for the best play by play available.

Jennifer Trosper just arrived. If she can make it, I can make it ;-) The gang's all there now, Pete Theisinger, Jennifer, Steve Squyres, Charles Alachi, Matt Gollembeck, Jim Bell, etc.

We're in the dirt. Rear Hazcam images! Beautiful, straight off drive. Hugs all around.

Front Hazcams! Applause. Sounds like most or all of the expected science commands were successful as well.

The photo looking back at the lander, tracks in the soil, just sexy.

We've got Navcam pan too!

2:55: nothing yet. Justin's gettin' ready.

2:49 - 5 minutes to Odyssey data (earliest possible). Also, press conference at 4am. I'm gonna try to record the press conference and maybe blog it in the morning, unless Susan gets it, in which case, I'm gonna just let her have the night. I'm really no good at this hour.

2:26 - 29 minutes and counting for the Odyssey pass.

(newest at the top).

Important: Susan's blogging egress too - and she's kickin' my butt :-) (you're doing awesome, Susan, and it's not at all gibberish.) Susan's notes are really much more complete than mine and she's even got the "luchtime lecture" that I'm just too tired to keep up with. Stop reading here and go read there.

12:57 - Beep! Chris: "We got our beep."

12:55 - Carrier detect and lock.

In about 25 minutes we'll get a tone confirmation from Opportunity that the first of the commands have completed. Shortly after that we'll get another tones as more commands complete. At some time between 3 and 3:30 am we'll get data from the Odyssey pass which should include at least Hazcam images from dirt.

12:27 - Command to egress sent :D The command sequence included some "last minute science" and the commands to roll off the lander and get 6 wheels in the dirt.

12:21 - Joke about testing one more thing in the testbed :-)

12:20 - Flight software is go. Fault is go. Imaging is go. Power is go. Thermal is go. Systems is go. Telecom is go. Mechanical is go. Activity is go for egress. All systems are go for egress.

12:12 - Final sub-system polling about to begin. If all is good at this final status check, the go command will be sent up to Opportunity.

12:02 - reports in that the "bump" (a short 10 cm move to test basic mobility function) telemetry has just come in and things look good so far.

Chris Lewicky is flight director tonight for Opportunity sol 7 which began with the wake-up call "Born to Run". Uniform of the day is Hawaiian shirts.

Not sure if I'll be up as late as 3-3:30 am when the expect to get the first batch of Opportunity egress data. I'll likely be awake for the command send but it's been a long and draining week so I don't know if I'll last until three-something. We'll see. If I'm awake, I'll let you all know whatever I know as soon as I know it. If I'm not awake, please let me know in comments how it goes.

This one looks really clean to me. It's a straight-off drive, there's no airbags anywhere in sight, and they lifted the backside of the lander so the egress aid is right down, actually poking into the dirt. I doubt they ever had a testbed run that was as clean as this one looks. That being said, let's all keep our fingers crossed.

Sounds like live coverage begins at midnight.

update: Live coverage about to begin on NASA TV

That great website I blogged about yesterday, Thom Bone's Mars Site -Gorgeous 3D Pics from the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers! is back online. I went down from the massive adotting* it received only moments after I linked to it. Not only is it back up, but it's got lots of new 3-D images. These are great pics, folks, lemme tell you. If you've been disappointed by some of the Mars 3-D images hitting the web lately, you really need to take a look at how good it can be when someone hand-tweaks them to get the alignments just right. I makes a huge difference and Thom Bone deserves great praise for his efforts. Go check it out.

* like slashdotting but not ;-)

The mini-TES data that the MER team were so coy about in this morning's briefing, and about which the reporters on the scene were questioning rather persistently, seems likely to confirm the existence of hematite gravel on the surface. More at the NYT article.

Oh, and in case you haven't heard, it sounds like they're going to reconsider the Hubble decision. Woo-hoo!

I've created a "community" over at orkut.com for Mars Exploration Enthusiasts. If you're into Mars and you're an orkut member, join up :-)

Sorry for the delays. I had a couple of phonecalls that interrupted things and my connection was pretty bad with video dropping out so I may have gotten some of the names wrong in the Q&A section. Enjoy.

Good morning and welcome to JPL. It's 10 am Spirit in Gusev . It's sol 27, 10am at Opportunity in Meridiani.

Mark Adler (mission manager): Sol 27 for spirit. Still working the anomaly. On sol 25 we did in fact start some normal operations. Took a front Hazcam showing arm on Adirondack. Shows we're still on Mars :D Everything right where we left it. We also got HGA working so are able to have normal HGA communications during day which is important for working on this anomaly. On sol 26 more operation with instruments. Got data from Mossbauer and APSX. Also took several color Pancam images. Show the next slide. Up at the top is the calibration target. Next is the Sun. On the bottom we have an image of Cake and Blanco. Jim Bell provided us with these color calibrated images. We also yesterday completed a scan of flash memory provided us with some important diagnostic info. Mounting flash takes more system ram than we have available. Helps confirm the theory we had that we're running out of memory when trying to mount flash. Still don't know if it's number of files or other characteristics of the contents of the flash. Today on sol 27 continue with task trace going on right now. Take some piece of memory when it's run up mode where it's not functioning normally and see if that shows trace information of what routines were running when the system got hung up. Then we'll bring system back up in cripple mode and delete from flash memory a large number of cruise phase files By doing that, it may provide enough of a change in state of the flash file system to not require as much memory to mount flash. Then we'll try to reboot into normal mode, non-cripple mode and see if the system comes up. We're hopeful that it will come up and if it does we'll resume normal operations and do some housekeeping on the system and begin to play back some of the data in the flash in preparation for a possible flash file format tomorrow. If that doesn't work we'll go back to cripple mode and get more diagnostic info and replan for tomorrow as to whether or not we want to do a format or what is the next step we want to take. Sol 28, if everything goes well, mini-TES checkout, flight software check. Sol 29 hopefully normal operations.

Daniel Limonadi (rover system engineer): Sol 6, about 10 PM at Opportunity. Good couple of days, a bit ahead of schedule. We've deleted same files that they'll be deleting on Spirit. That went well. Gave a boost to Spirit guys. Deployed rear wheels, moved rear lander petal down to get our egress path better. Retracted rear airbags and moved lander petal down. Made our egress path better. Now have a very benign egress path. Released rear wheels, that went well. Released middle wheels. Then we deployed, wiggled, and stowed IDD for drive. Tonight doing instrument checks on Mossbauer and APSX, both a functional check to make sure everything still works after the pyro fire for IDD as well as an overnight calibration. Tomorrow, sol 7, we cut the last pyro device of 60 plus devices. We will then do a small egress bump to drive forward to test mobility actuators. If all goes well, we'll egress at the end of sol 7. We're ahead of schedule. Take advantage of the fact that Opportunity treats us well, and get into a better power state, get the rover on the ground for science. We have some egress video. Preview of what is going to happen tonight. Rover roughly the attitude we have on Mars, recreated in the Issel(sp?) sandbox. 10° nosedown pitch on rover. Egress aid tips are in the dirt. Recreated anatomy of the crater. Very benign egress path. Not too worried about the egress path so we're gonna get on the ground, six wheels on the ground in Meridiani Planum.

Dr. Ron Li (science team member from Ohio State): You've seen spectacular Pancam mosaic from Opportunity taken on sol 2 and 3. Stereo images in 360 degrees. We've processed them and turned them into 3-D model. The process we have applied to get this model is pretty precise and we use a method called barner(?) adjustment that increases accuracy of pointing angles. Next is contour map derived from the 3-D provides elevations. The fact that the lander is inside the crater provides good opportunity to map inside of a crater. Ray Arvidson says first time we've mapped from inside a crater. This data will be used 1. to characterize crater itself, so here we see variation in terms of shape and elevation and size of different features. Each pixel is about .5 meters and you can use it to characterize geologic features in craters. 2. we see terrain pretty clearly here. Pretty good slope to northwest direction. Gives you several candidates for planning rover exit paths. 3. we have size and shape so we can match it to images taken overhead by orbiter or DIMES. Can match to localize where the lander is.

Ray Arvidson (deputy principal investigator): This is really a day of firsts. First time mapping planetary crater from inside. 22 meter diameter, 3 meters deep. Not a brand new crater. Meridiani Planum deposits look like they're being stripped by wind. Some sediment on inside, on outside, bedrock being exposed. We'll be combining this topo with morphology and color and spectral properties to determine relative age of the crater and how it fits into the geology . Second first will be the first microscopic image ever taken in situ on another planet. We have a series of 7 MI we acquired from sol 17 on Adirondack. It's about 20 cm high. First Hazcam image of Adirondack. Now a Pancam view. And finally a little square about 3cm across with the MI. Orders of magnitude change in spatial resolution. Looking at a rock that if you were a geologist that if you were there and whacked it with a hammer it would ring. Very hard, very fine-grained. Third first is first ever Mossbauer view of a rock in situ on another planet.

Bodo Bernhardt (university of Mainz): This graph is the first ever Mossbauer spectrum on a Martian rock. Taken some days ago and was recorded for a period of more than 12 hours. Why stare 12 hours? Answer is that the longer we acquire, the more details we can see so the more patient we are the better is the signal to noise ratio. We were extremely happy to see the small peaks you see to the right and left. The intensive lines we already know from the earlier spectrum but the small peaks are now visible. No doubt what we see here. To explain minerology over to Dick Morris.

Dick Morris: We really do appreciate engineers rescuing this cool spectrum. Thank you guys. What does it tell us. The positions and peaks tell us about oxidation states and minerology of iron. We only detect iron. Tallest two peaks are iron2+ and olivine. We detected that in soil a few days ago. Less intense doublet in light blue pyroxene, irn2+ and pyroxene. Really light blue due to iron3+ but don't know what mineral. May be associated with weathering. Bodo alluded to the not so intense but very special lines , this pattern is the fingerprint of magnetite, an iron oxide. Together Olivine, Pyroxene and Magnetite tell us it's a good volcanic rock, an olivine bearing basalt. Is this unusual? We don't know for Mars yet. On Earth it's one of the most common kinds of rocks we find.

Q. Opportunity questions. Has mini-TES on Opportunity found hematite? Are you not where you thought you were positioned to those craters?

Ray: We did acquire an octant of beautiful mini-TES data a couple days ago. Team busy analyzing it. There are intriguing variations from place to place that seem to correlate with the different materials in the plains and the bedrock and the interior. You'll have to come to a subsequent session to hear the data.You'll be delighted at the result but we're still in the process.

Daniel: we're obviously in a crater. I Haven't heard anything that says we don't know where we are.

Ray: We're definitely in a crater :D We're waiting on the EDL data from flash to reconstruct the bounce history. We've done radio science and it's a different position than where we thought we were. We need to look at images, combine with radio and EDL reconstruction data. We don't seem to be in the crater that Tim Parker put is in initially. (Tim from the back of the room "sorry" :)

Daniel: EDL did come down today. Waiting on MGS for high-res.

Q. Mark, do you have any thinking of what Spirit will be doing when it's up and operating. Ray, did mini-TES not work well? Why the mystery?

Ray: mini-TES is complex instrument and spectra are a bit difficult to interpret. They need time to get this done. They have huge smiles on their faces in mini-TES team.

Mark: Trying to decide if we'll brush or RAT, first, not sure but we do want to finish science on Adirondack and then move to next target.

Q. Ray, what are they smiling about? They've seen something, probably hematite. They're familiar with that, I'd assume. It's hard for us to understand why it's not available. Also, it seems the process is a little different with Opportunity while still on platform. Spirit did more science on the lander, a full pano of Pancam and mini-TES. Is that happening with Opportunity.

Ray: Information is new and they want to check and double check before they make an announcement. Remember we're just on sol 6 going into 7 with Opportunity and we egressed on sol 12 with Spirit. We do have a full panorama from Pancam and we do have one full octant from Mini-TES. I believe we acquired two octants on sol 6 and bits and pieces of other targets. Feeling is to get off the lander and on to the surface, do some soil observation and get over to the outcropping. Tradeoff between acquiring complete pancam and mini-TES panoramas and getting over to that very exciting outcropping.

Q. For Dan, PST egress time?

Daniel: Go for Egress at 12:30 am PST. Command takes about an hour. Data at about 3-3:30 am.

Q. For Mark, Spirit been there almost a month, is it a third of its lifetime over? Ray, are you happy with the science?

Mark: We have observed the experienced the solar degradation we expected. Because of better power and thermal characteristics we've observed it may got month or two longer than plan. We have gone through a third of our warrantee but I expect we've got a few more months to go.

Ray: Science with Gusev on Spirit. New info on Adirondack. Seems to be a good hard volcanic rock, maphic rock. A basalt, suggests it may be excavated from below by craters or broken out lava flows or transported in. Not the kind of smoking gun evidence for climactic history. I suspect we'll take a look at some of these white rocks. If they don't look interesting then as quickly as possible try to do a traverse over to Bonneville crater about 250 meters away. Try to use the fact that nature overturns stratigraphy to see if we can determine other rocks that might tell us about the lake history of Gusev crater. Science is just beginning. Strategic plan to do this radial traverse. For Opportunity it's less than a week and we totally lucked out landing in this crater. 22 m wide, 3 m deep. Fairly easy to egress from but take some time looking at this outcrop. After we're off the lander, sol 7, tonight we'll be looking at the soil and then getting over to the bedrock outcrop and doing some Pancam and Microscopic imaging. Help explain if the process is due to windblown, volcanic or lakebed. All the instruments we'll use to infer what's going on. For Opportunity and Meridiani, we're just at the beginning of the process. Totally ecstatic that we might be on the surface tonight.

Q. Can you tell us more about the arm heater. Best estimate of when we'll see the full Pancam?

Daniel: Nearterm no impact. Longterm still looking at our options. Pancam acquired. Within a couple of sols we should have everything down.

Q. Was that the compressed version or full Mossbauer.

Mark: Compressed version.

Q More spectral traces, data on lily pads? Any newer thought on compaction?

Ray: turn it over to Dick Morris. I haven't seen recent data.

Dick: I've been busy working on Mossbauer so I can't address that yet. Stay tuned.

Q. Which rocks did Mini-TES look.

Ray: Papa395 points right at bedrock, kinda northwest.

Q. For Daniel. Can you shake dust off the solar array.

Daniel: We don't have a mechanism for that. We didn't plan for that. Not a design requirement. At one point we were contemplating lifting solar arrays. Evidence with pathfinder that the decay slowed at the end.

Mark: Dust is very very fine and electrostatically binds. Even if you turned them upside down and shook them, it probably wouldn't come off. We simply accepted that we'd get the lifetime we needed with this design.

Q. Do you have enough Opportunity Pancam to know where you'll go.

Ray: pretty clear we'll egress in +X direction. (I got a phone call and missed quite a bit here.)

Ray: low dunes are interesting. It may be that we want to traverse to this nearby crater that's in the DIMES image. Moving to that crater would allow us to do another radial ejecta survey.

Ron: The outcrop in the right direction for exiting the crater too.

Q. When will you RAT?

Ray: There is a lot of interest in the coatings and that relates to whether or not the so called white rocks are different than the standard volcanic rocks with a dust coating. So brushing first to see if we can remove some of the coating, then RATting and then looking at the mineralogical and chemical difference is in the plans. Then hopefully we'll head for the ejecta deposits at Bonneville.

Q. which way facing with Opportunity. Where does outcropping lie. How long to drive ther

Ray: outcrop is northwest we're facing west. Once we do initial soil observation it will be at best a couple of sols before we get there. Then we'll need some fine positioning to get the particular rock. I can't wait.

Daniel: template from spirit was about 3 sols to get on the ground and the instruments positioned.

Q. For Dr. Morris. Can you explain scientific value to finding a bog-standard basalt that you could find in any mountain range on Earth. Is it smoking gun for no water? All this olivine speaks to an absence of water.

Dick: Yes it does but the weathering rinds and ferric dust speaks to pervasive weathering processes on the planet that could be water driven. So even though we're seeing these rocks that formed under dry conditions, all these dry things have been weathered and that's seen aqueous altering.

Ray: on Earth where you find basalts you can also find limestone. Mars is a real planet and we hope that as we do this radial traverse to Bonneville, to see ejecta that comes from beneath the Basaltic layer, if there is indeed a basaltic layer. If not we'll head for the hills. May not get there but we'll get higher and higher resolution views with Pancam and Mini-TES data.

Q. For Mark, given Spirit glitches, any operational characteristics driving it that will be different?

Mark: We don't expect any impact at all in driving. In our current mode, we could go driving if we wanted to. Main limitation if we can't get flash working which we expect to is we couldn't store images over night. We'd have to make sure we get the hazard and pancam images down each day. Once we get flash working it's back to normal operations.

Q. Mark, more on Spirit software. Before you do what you do on Mars are you running the commands on boxes here.

Mark: we have a lot of very tired flight software guys running all of our commands, scripts and software uploads here in testbeds before we send them up to the spacecraft. Essential during the anomaly phase to characterize the problem and try to replicate the behavior we see on the spacecraft. A lot of work on replication and testing commands we send to the spacecraft

Briefing note: We'll have commentary of rolloff 3-3:30 am on NASA TV, possibly earlier. Check the website for time updates.

Not enough Space Exploration Enthusiasts near San Mateo County, CA can make it, so this month's Meetup is cancelled. Don't despair! Your Meetup may well happen next month - be sure to spread the word!

OK. Consider this "spreading the word". Sign up. Surely I'm not the only "Space Explroation Enthusiast near San Mateo County" but apparently I'm the only one in the area signed up. The next closest is all the way over in Sacremento.

From Joel McKinnon, in the comments, comes great news that Pete Theisinger and Jennifer Trosper say that Spirit's going to be "perfect again" and "back to normal"!!

Spirit has already started acquiring science data again and she's talking to us with her HGA so things are moving much faster now.

More information is available at today's press release.

Today I was alerted to a really amazing website for 3-D Spirit and Opportunity images . Most of the 3-D images that I've seen so far weren't registered very well and just plain didn't look good. Well, these ones are spectacular -- just beautiful. You're gonna love 'em.

The website is titled Thom Bone's Mars Site - Gorgeous 3D Pics from the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers! and they are indeed gorgeous.

Getting 3-D images right isn't easy. Most of the MER 3-D images I've seen so far were not just less than perfect, they were plain bad. That's mostly attributable to the fact that they're not hand-done. It is certainly a laborious process to get it right and so there's no doubt but that Thom has put some serious time and effort into very carefully aligning and tweaking these more than 30 images so they look this stunning -- and he promises more!

I'm surprised nearly every day at the community that has sprung up around the MER mission and I credit NASA/JPL/Cornel for their openness and the volume of information they've made public. I work in open source software development, on a project with literally tens of thousands of contributors, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by what's happening around the MER mission. If you release the source/data, people will want to play with it. If enough people start poking around, chances are good that some great products will result. This 3-D image resource is a perfect example of that. Great work, Thom! I'll be checking back regularly.

It really bears repeating; Work of this quality is difficult and time-consuming, but when it's done right it's just stunning. So get out your red & cyan glasses, head over to Thom Bone's Mars Site, enjoy it, and be sure to spread the word.

update: And there's more! 12 new images since I posted.

As far as I know, there was no MER press briefing today.

Yesterday we got more good news from Spirit, who began sending back photos for the first time in many days. I've got a really good feeling about this one and think she'll be back up to 100% real soon now.

I'll be back tomorrow with the morning press briefing report, but in the mean time, run, don't walk, to check out this great post over at periapsis.org. I couldn't agree more with Robby on this one.

In case it went unnoticed, I updated the image and the milestone table over at the Mozilla Development Roadmap.

I'm still hunting for an application that will harvest CVS data and retroactively build a picture that looks something like mine. CvsGraph looks nice but the output image isn't particularly exciting and what I really want is something that will give me the volume of CVS activity (lines changed) as the "thickness" of the branch/trunk line so that we can evaluate checkin volume over time.

That, of course, wouldn't work for dates that haven't arrived but I could certainly make "projections" in the image and then fade those into the background when the real data comes in.

To get some idea of what I'm talking about, compare the current roadmap image with the one below it of what I'd like to see.

(note that I just made up the checkin volume. I've not go so much free time as to actually figure that out.)

A graphing module for Bonsai might be a step in the right direction. If Bonsai could give me graphs like Bugzilla, I'd at least be able to hack that together with my roadmap image.

So what do you all think. Anyone know of anything that would make this easier than manually querying each day's checkins and then photoshopping it up?

Want a peek at some sol 5 images? Check out these pix from SAIDias, of Ottumwa, IA.

And while you've got Mars on the brain, go sign the petition requesting continuous live coverate of the MER missions.

Ohhh, and a nice quicktime vr of the Spirit and her lander!

It sounds like the MER team won't be holding a briefing tomorrow morning (well, at all tomorrow, actually) so I thought I'd point you all at a few recent blog posts that I think are totally worth your time and encourage you to take a look at the rest of their posts. These are some great blogs, and not just within the circle of Mars and space exploration, but across the greater blogosphere. Give 'em a look and if you're so inclined, a bookmark.

"Follow the Fire" at Martian Soil - Daily news on the Planet Mars.

"A Get Well Card for Spirit" at Mars Rover Blog.

"Of color outcrops, Rover computer brains, flash memory and more" at Susan's 2020 Hindsight.

"Song lists from the Man himself" at periapsis.org The closest thing to a home page for Robby Stephenson.

"Correction: Water and Life are not�" at Alcaide's Cafe.

And while weblogs are a great resource, there's lots else out there for Mars fans. Check out these sites for some additional great resources.

Richard Krupski's Mars Exploration Rover Image Library (MERIL) - an excellent way to browse MER images.

Axon Chisel's 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History - a great list of resources.

NASA Quest's biography and journal locator - lot's out of date, but still quite useful. For example, here's Wayne Lee :) and here's Rob Manning in 1999 ;-) (the old Mars team many of whom are the new Mars team).

NASA/JPL press briefing notes will be late today; I 've got a dentist appointment. Back in a bit.

Natalie: Opportunity completed first part of standup. Spirit continues to improve.

Rick Welch: Really another great day for Opportunity at Meridiani. We did complete the first two parts of our four part standup. Graphic? Images we acquired during standup process, starts with wheels stowed, now released, lower now on deck. Last little raise up and set down to ensure rocker bogie mobility system latched. Very successful day getting standup done. We did other good things. Mini-TES actuator test good. Tomorrow for sol 5 complete standup activities including retracting lift and deploying rear wheels. Also do some prep for egress. Front direction pretty clear. We see a lot of airbag out the rear so we really want to drive off the front. Right now the lander tilted up at the front about 4 or 5° what we want to do is lower that front edge down about 5 degrees. Tomorrow afternoon we'll be dragging in the rear airbags to get them really bunched up and then we'll push down with that back petal about 40° further to push the lander up. Depending on how well that goes will determine how quickly we egress. Right now we're sort of planning for an egress on sol 9. That would be Sunday night. Ready for rest of standup.

Matt Golombek: 3 year effort to select sites. Most important aspect is a safe site. We had extensive evaluation using data gathered from MGS and Odyssey. Sites selected were best imaged and best studied sites in Mars history. We evaluated all data that existed to come up with predictions that the site would be safe for the lander and scientifically interesting. We used images down to 3 meters/pixel, thermal emission for albedo. Looked at topography and relief\ . Looked at radar to determine roughness of and competent soil was. Predictions: 1. safe for landing. 2. safe and trafficable for rover. 3. very few rocks. 4. look completely unlike any other place on Mars. All these predictions seem to have been the case. We expected a dark surface with little dust, basaltic sand like surface with a discontinuous outcroppings. Meridiani Planum also turned out to be the smoothest flattest surface we've ever seen on Mars. Since landing all our predictions matched. A "ground truth". Image tour of landing sites. Hubble view shows bright and dark regions. Four previous landing sites were in bright red areas dusty. This site is in a dark gray black region dust free. Next image postcard from Opportunity, dark, outcrops. Next shows topography outside the crater rim is flat. Spirit site at Gusev is brighter as you can see, more rocks, reasonably flat. Next shows gradient as we go to brighter and brighter locations. Pathfinder, rockier, brighter, dustier. Higher albedo. Next is gradient at Viking too. Brighter still. 20% rocks. Viking on even dustier and brighter. Final visual shows significant dunes. All of the predictions we expected for Opportunity site have come to pass. Bodes well for our ability to use remote sensing for picking sites. Final panorama of Opportunity site. See in the distance outside the rim how smooth and flat it is. In accord with our predictions. See pebbly surface with small outcroppings of white material. Seeing rim dive down and background picks up some of the flat terrain outside of the rim. Horizon is as flat as any place we've seen.

Jim Bell: Morning, afternoon :) Update on Pancam today and also mention that mini-TESS passed healthcheck. Science team happy about that. Pancam investigation going well. Completed acquiring mission success panorama with thumbnails. 75% down on the ground. We've had opportunity to insert some little sequences when we had a few extra minutes between engineering activities. Exciting for science team. Nice bonus. For Opportunity, we've acquired 514 full-frame Pancam images for about 240 Megabits. On Spirit 2239 Pancam images or 1.3 Gigabits of data. This image is the first part of the Pancam mission success panorama, full resolution, in color. Stitched together one part near outcrop. Covers about 130° so it's less than 20% of full panorama. Color is dark and reddish consistent with coarse basaltic particles Matt mentioned. No direct compositional info yet though. Background is the brighter and still reddish rocks. Color of those rocks is consistent with the color of the bright dust we see in the bright places that Matt talked about. Near the end of the pan here, see this beautiful outcrop showing layering and other stratigraphy. About 8 meters away and really tiny, only about 10 cm tall, somewhat of an illusion. Next is a zoom up on part of that panorama. Very high-res view of one part of that outcrop. Taken with blue filter, highest possible spatial resolution. Low compression at only 2:1. Challenge to creep up on full resolution because we're being careful around the flash situation and. Some of the detail is pretty phenomenal. Start to see small grains, pebbles, cobbles you can't see in lower res Pancam or Navcam images. Some of the layers seem to be composed of these grains and pebbles. There are many hypotheses as geologists almost ranging from volcanic lava flows, ash falls, sedimentary deposits from wind, from water. We don't have direct info on composition yet but these images help us decide where to go with the rover. For scale, little rock in very middle of scene just past outcrop. It's about 10 meters away and about one inch in size. Next visual is a color part of panorama. Circular smooth spot is a class of features resulting from airbags. Nice example in next visual. Zoom of two high-res Pancam images. Marks show the radial spokes in the circle. Right image about 3 meters or so away. These patterns come from (show slide of airbag inflated test at NASA last year). Each airbag is a big balloon with a circular center area and radial straps, support spokes. Seeing in Mars picture where it rolled across the ground. Perhaps EDL team putting together animation. We can see it traces out a figure-8 pattern in crater. Central circle in airbag print about the size of a basketball. Cool to think about but physical properties folks on science team having a blast with these. We're leaving an indent and it's acting like a fine grained material but material not sticking to airbags like at Spirit site. Physical properties are telling us about the grain size, electrostatic or other physical properties. Spectacular images and great debating. We're still mindful of Spirit out there and many of us on the team want to get back into that investigation and start solving some of that puzzle at Gusev.

Jennifer Trosper: Yes, we are very anxious to get Spirit back to science mission. Last week very little control. Over weekend, partial control. Now working to get complete control. Still not quite there. Yesterday determined it was safe to use HGA and today while we're communicating with Spirit over LGA, we're actually moving the HGA to calibration position and then to stow position. If that goes well, in a few hours we'll do an HGA communication session and be back on the communication plan that will allow us to transmit 11,000 bits per second instead of the between 40 and 120 bits per second so you can imagine the additional debug data we'll get. Other plans we have for today, I mentioned yesterday we are attempting to get a trace from flight software of the problem to see if our hypothesis was correct, to compare to the testbed and if so then begin to delete some of the files from flash files system. Had some difficulty getting script to run on the vehicle. Method is kind of a backdoor into flight software fairly surgical technique. If not able to complete surgical technique, we have larger hammers we can use to solve this problem. Plan is to maintain flash data, probably not corrupted. If we can't do that then we can delete the data in the flash memory. Talked to science team and almost all of it is replaceable. APSX and Mossbauer is replaceable. Moving forward. Getting on HGA. Attempt surgical technique for one more day. Hopefully be back doing science early next week.

Q. Status of that heater? Could it shorten surface life.

Rick: Issue maintains. Heater that stays on over night. Additional info from last night's data which corroborates that it is actually the mini-TES shoulder heater that we thought previously. Longterm issues, we're still working on that. Near term, not impacting us at all.

Q. Specific areas in outcrop that are best target? Selected area to recommend targeting?

Jim: we don't know how trafficable yet. Haven't done the driving detail approach. May be areas we can't access. May be easier or harder areas. We've seen the whole outcrop at modest res. Only seen one small piece in highest res. We have more data onboard that hasn't trickled down to earth yet.... (lost connection here, sorry)

Steve: ....those are the two hypothesis I've heard.

Jim: That coves the major ones. It takes high resolution to see that structure and detail. One sacrifice you make in heavy compression is that small scale features can be washed out. Being able to have the chance between standup activities to take these high res images is a real bonus.

Q. Acquired at Spirit site some high res images of crater off in the distance. May actually be exposed bedrock there as well?

Jim: this is subject of some debate. Unlike at Opportunity we had not had the opportunity to take low compression data. Most of the high-res was off on the distant hills and down at magic carpet and by our feet. The crater is going to be a near term target once we get back On he road. What we have is mission success panorama. We tried to take a long panorama across that crater but ran out of time and then the problems. Finishing that is a high priority.

Q. In terms of the dust, warned that 90 day life because dust clogging solar cells. What are you looking at for planned longevity.

Matt: Really question for engineers. The dust in atmosphere, tau 0.7-0.8 at both landing sites which is fair bit dustier than any time in Pathfinder mission and so far initial suggestions from solar panels is that dust is accumulating on solar panels at the same rate as Pathfinder. Longevity? Over to Rick.

Rick: Too early to tell. Solar input a little less than what we had expected because of the tau but we still have plenty of energy and watch it. 90 days is realistic.
Matt: optimists think twice that. (question "any pessimists?") Not among the scientists (laughter).

Q. Now that you've seen high-res views of pebbly surface, what does that suggest about the kinds of measures on soil before you get to outcropping? Maybe measures of the soil and of the area where the airbags hit?

Matt: preliminary discussion with science team this morning. Agreement we're in unique spot and we need to characterize these soils the best we can. Chem measurements, mini-TES, hazard cam and Pancam images. Strong desire to trench to try to gain the mechanical properties of that material it's all sitting there for us. Also tantalizing clues in remote sensing data. So far data, DIMES, shows these craters have dark floors consistent with basaltic granule covered surface. I predict when we get out it will be generally brighter surface, either redder or a modeling of that white outcrop that will come up in various places, overall brighter and different from where we are so more important that we characterize this wonderful spot.

Jim: the act of getting ready to drive, checking out the rover, will also serve double-duty for science experiments, wheel motions, test motions from engineers. Just driving will accomplish two things. Almost anywhere we go we'll run into airbag bounce marks. Secondly we'll be creating wheel tracks. That gives us two data types. Rich data set for physical properties.

Q. Some confusion during landing about how long it was bouncing. Now that you've see bounce marks what do you think?

Jim: haven't seen EDL reconstruction.

Rick: they're reviewing data and coming up with an animation and we're all waiting for it.

Q. Layer of dust, why is it not dusty?

Matt: swept clean at surface by winds. Dust beneath these small pebbles. Characteristic of desert where you have high winds and you'll leave the pebbles and cobbles, too big to be moved, but dust can be swept up. Soil processes that will keep the pebbles and cobbles up at the surface. Places in Mojave where there's a meter or more of airborne dust where there are cobbles of this size that are kept up on the surface, elevated up by processes like freeze thaw, and dust infiltration below it so this layer stays up at the surface.

Jim: and there must be some processes in the bowl of this crater that assist in that because we're in the darkest spot around and out of the crater it's brighter.

Q. What you're doing data handling with Opportunity now that you know about Spirit problem. Also, division of labor>.

Jennifer: We have a process in place we've been using and tomorrow Opportunity will be deleting the cruise phase products we believe are the source of the number of files problem we have on Spirit. We're also setting the limits to be lower. Keep in mind that we've tested in the testbed filling up this flash completely and we have software that throws out based on priority and we've done tests like that so there's something about the situation we're in that we don't completely understand because we've filled up our file system and not hat this problem. Because we don't understand it completely, we're working to limit the number of files onboard. Team makeup a lot of shuffling in the last week. We have one team that's split in half for each of the vehicles. Opportunity landing and impact to egress it takes more than half of our one team because of complicated activities to land and get rolled off the lander. In the case of the Spirit problem, we have people in reserve that have been brought onboard to, strategic people familiar with process and flight software, working on Spirit. Anomaly team is probably 15-20 people. Last night we added another 10 people to move toward getting to our nominal time line and over the next few nights we will go toward our full overnight time line of staffing with science and engineering teams in prep for getting Spirit back on its feet for the science mission.

Q. Are you really seeing pebbly layer in the outcropping and also could you talk about that picture where you can actually see out through, will TES be able to do work out that region?

Matt: smaller than pebbles, gravel. Geologists have these specific categories. Indication in high res is that they're embedded in that material, not just sitting on top, on vertical faces poking out. When you look out to lowest part of rim where the easiest drive out, there is a reddish layer in foreground and behind that a darker layer. There's debate whether topography or just a different color. My eye sees topography. Certainly want to hit that with Mini-TES.

Jim: biggest area of debate about pebbly layer in outcrop is whether it's a continuous layer or a unique aspect of one rock, holding out judgement on distinct discreet layer.

Q. Gravels, pebbles and cobbles, are you seeing different colors.

Matt: certainly a dark small dark particle resolved in high res. For the first time an indication of different hued particles. No color yet but it looks like different color small particles among the dominant dark gray. Ideas are that they are particles weathered out of the brighter outcrop. Also possible carried in from impact or other processes. Way too early.

Jim: High quality images take longer to get off the vehicle and engineering takes priority. We're not complaining but it's gonna take a little while to leak off that high-res data.

Matt: we're horribly impatient scientists :D We want off now! (laughter).

Q. Magic carpet different from retraction of airbags at this site?

Jim: We've been discussing it today. Larry Sodablom (sp?) and others looking at this closely. Some indication soils are acting quite different. There was some apparent cohesion at Spirit, some different physical property. At Opportunity it was more like you ran a rake through it, very fine grained and not as cohesive. Some differences and we need some really good compositional information. We got data at Spirit site lot of sulphur and chlorine. Less cemented at Opportunity and one prediction is less salts.

Matt: don't see duracrust at Opportunity.

Q. Mapping out mission course from inside the crater? Do a second evaluation once you're out?

Matt: landing in a crater is a blessing. If we'd been on the plane, we'd have a devil of a time located. We are in a crater with a 20 meter diameter and there are only so many of those in the landing area so narrows it down. Using photogeologists mapping terrain around us using particularly DIMES images and using the inertial space from navigation in the spacecraft and so far we have relative agreement between those two but we're not there yet. We only have one DTE solution and a single odyssey coherent pass solution which gave us a navigation location. We need a second one of both of those to confirm. In addition there's the spectacular effort of taking the stereo images from camera and flattening it out and making a topo map which allows you to more easily compare it to the images. Like with Spirit, we'd like to know exactly where are located before we start traversing so we can pick the best location to go to. Debate if that 150 meter crater to the northeast is the best way to go because it might just be more of what we have in our current crater. So, you could go to the south what's in images we don't yet have (from MGS) there looks to be mottled terrain that has bright material coming up frequently. Driving to the south might be down the stratigraphic column which might be tremendously interesting. You can tell my bias (south).

Jim: Ray Arvidson and others have said how lucky we are to be where we are so we have to, it would be irresponsible not to study this location. We have to exploration here. Second thing is that this big panorama only covers a 20 meter diameter circle. When you look at Spirit's panorama, it covers several, 2, 3, 500 meters of stereo coverage. We have to get a bigger panorama when we get out. We'll want to obtain the kind of panorama we got at Spirit. Find where we are and determine traverse directions.

Natalie: Friday at 9am next briefing.

While we all wait on Mike Malin for the definitive proof, some brave souls have taken to some very sophisticated guessing (hypothesizing). Nigel Dobson-Keeffe has put quite a bit of effort into this question and he's updated his results for us.

(If you're not, you all really need to read the comments, there's some great info there).

I'm going to take a wild guess and put my money on one of the three craters in the top left of the DIMES image. If I had to pick one, I'd say it's the smaller, southern-most crater of those three.

What's your guess? And remember, this is some pretty flat terrain and the bouncing lander could have easily traveled a kilometer or two putting it outside of the photograph completely (though I doubt it made it that far).

As raw as they get. Expect typos and missing chunks of content. I think I got about 90% of what was said and haven't even re-read them to see if they make sense (no time this morning).

Steve Squyres: Good morning. Opportunity has now sent us the most striking photographs yet sent us by the MER mission. Wonderful finely layered rocks. Pancam panorama. Jim Bell still working on putting together color. We have all the color frames, just want to get it right. This is a 7x2 frame full resolution, still highly compressed Pancam mosaic. As you pan left to right it just gets better and better. Sense on the left of flat tabular rocks. As we get further to the right more layering. Upper part of outcrop eroded to create a more massive appearance where lower shows more layering. Overhangs higher up. Some things that hint at crossbedding. Some of the best layering exposed here. Appearance of layer cake structure. Some of the layers weather to different degrees. It's gonna be fascinating beyond words to get up close and personal with this thing. Next visual shows 3-D reprepresentation of this. Looks massive but it's actually tiny. Showed the rover on top of the rock outcropping demonstrating how small it is. Scale suggests it isn't lava flows. Units too small.

Andrew Knoll: (Harvard) Let me just take a moment to tell you why I'm excited. In my day job I study history of geology of Earth. Layered rocks help us develop a history. We have a "document" in front of us at Opportunity. At Meridiani Planum we have the opportunity to make measurements with the Microscopic Imager, from 1mm all the way up to orbital observations. At this site we're going to be able to link them all together from the microscopic to the outcrop to the spatial scales seen from the orbiters. Clearly you're seeing layered rocks. Many could say I have something like that in my back yard. Problem is that if you live in KY, you probably have a sedimentary layering but if you live in Hawaii, you could see a similar scene laid down by a volcano. It could be a fine scale volcanic layering, not lava flows, but maybe ash layers. Other option is that they're sediments transported by water or wind. These are I think not ice-born sediments. Those two hypothesis would lead to very different natures of this site. The good news is that we have the tools to evaluate the two hypothesis. They each have a set of predictions that we can measure, sizes, textures, cross-bedding (only thoughts, still difficult to resolve at this distance) Once we get better imaging in the next few sols we'll confirm that we see cross-beds or we'll see textures that convince us that these are volcanic rocks.

Jim Erickson: Status of Opportunity rover and what we're doing now. Wonderful science (gesture to Steve). Still working to get rover in the dirt. Last night we began lifting up the rover to get the wheels down. We've successfully deployed our high gain antenna and everything worked fine on our trail run. That datapath is now available. We verified operation of the lift mechanism. Tonight we'll begin that. We have fired one of our last remaining cable cutters, one to go. One new issue. We discovered a power loss going on in the vehicle. A set of thermostatic controlled heaters, one in the shoulder joint of the instrument arm. Heater in the arm. We don't normally always want it on when the arm isn't in use. Right now we're believing it's going to be continuously on when it's cold enough. Teams looking into what's wrong, possible workarounds. Tonight we're going to start jacking up the rover, front wheels will be turned out, verify all the components are secure, lock joint in wheel arms, verify all that's happened and I'm sure we'll have a little bit of science for you too.

Jennifer Trosper: high noon on sol 24 at Spirit. First comm window of the day is happening as we speak. Not a lot of new data yet. Subsystems all nominal. Batteries are in good shape. No degradation from discharge a couple nights ago. Thermal working. Today our intent was to try to get a trace of the task causing the problem. We don't have that data yet. Maybe at a later comm today. We've done some analysis of data we already had on ground plus some testing in testbed. One data is the position of the HGA based on potentiometers. Rover doesn't rely on that, just for measurements. HGA was active when we started to get problems. We got info that in the mooring of sol 18 our comm dropped out 10 minutes early. As a result we attempted to command a HGA session. We saw nothing. It had a calibration where we move to hardstop and then track earth. Position now indicates that it only moved through calibration half way. Important because activity that started the reset was not in the HGA because it moved fully to the correct position after the reset problem. That's good news. The other information we got was a result of running tests in our avionics test environment. Loading up a bunch of files. Couldn't reproduce it fully. Got some key aspects of the problem. Looking forward to getting more data down. Continuing to dump out the flash memory, get that data down. Yesterday only about 18.5 megabits. Expect to get 80 megabits today.

Q. Elaborate on power problem. (arm thermostat problem)

Jim: It's too early to think about worst case scenarios. Right now we're seeing about a 15 watt resistance being dissipated somewhere and have evidence that this is where it's happening.

Q. All things being good, sol 9,10,11 driveoff?

Jim: We're taking a lot of care to pay attention to Jennifer's findings. Being very careful. We'll get the rover off when the rover's ready to get off.

Q. When will we start seeing mini-TES.

Steve: expect to begin acquisition tomorrow. A sol or two before we get it down and calibrated. A little while before we begin releasing mini-TES results. More complicated to calibrate than a camera. Two big questions are where's the hematite and what's that outcrop made of. We'll see. Hematite itself may not be in view from here. Three materials, stuff down in the crater, the band of rock and the stuff out on the plains.

Q. Specifically what do you look for to distinguish volcanic, wind/water.

Andrew: Textural and chemical. Mini-TES to give us chemical. As parent rocks are stripped down and weathering and erosion alter chem of parent rocks. If we see mini-TES profile with mineralogical and chemical constituents that represent processing of volcanic rock then we have to have sedimentary component. It is possible that we could have a parent rock that was volcanic eroded physically without undergoing a great deal of chemical alteration like in the Earth arctic today. In a cold Mars, one could have transport without the chemical alteration. The textural issue is one that when we go and look first at the level of a couple feet across we should be able to see the finest layers situated relative to one another. If they're volcanic rocks that have fallen out of the sky or transported by gas driven fluid, fine layers. If they're sediments, they tend to erode into the layers below them a little. If they're sediments one layer might truncate the older one. Finally, at the microscopic imaging level, if these particles in this bed have been transported by sedimentary processes they will tend to be somewhat rounded, not true of volcanic. If they're sedimentary particles they have to be cemented in place and at the level of MI we should be able to see that.

Q. Sense of scale, how thick are the layers?

Steve: thinnest layers are a centimeter, something like that. The total height at highest point of outcrop is a foot and a half, maybe. That's good news. Less threatening to the rover because you can drive right up on to it.

Q. Deleting cruise files on Opportunity?

Jim: haven't started deleting cruise files yet because that's not normal so we're primarily deleting ones we've created recently.

Q. Heater issue a problem?

Jim: not on continuously, just when it's cold out. We're paranoid people :) so we've already asked people to look into whether it could be long term an issue. Always assume a problem until we prove otherwise :)

Q. When you get mini-TES images, will you be able to tell about mechanism that formed those layers. If water-born, where'd the water come from. Lake? Muddy bog? What?

Steve: The answer is we have high hopes that acquiring mini-TES data on outcrop will help us in revealing what the material is. Understanding minerology, if we see chemical alteration it would favor sedimentary process over a pure air fall. Don't know when we'll have mini-TES data that will reveal that. Pretty small rocks. Best in the middle of the day. Best data when we can drive up and get mini-TES right on it. When we get close, we're going to do a very good job of verifying.

Andrew: Thin white unit is very widespread. Covers thousands of miles of Meridiani Planum. We can ask does the topography suggest a deep basin? as near as we can tell, no. If you poured a lot of water in this area today it would simply run downhill and out of the Meridiani Planum. Doesn't preclude water from rapidly melting ice. The scale of the outcrop. We're used to think about sediments accumulating in long-lived basins. I think that's unlikely for the scene in this image. Timescale if it was sediments could be a single event, a Thursday ;-) or long timescale perhaps a thousand years. If this is a sediment, it doesn't indicate long-term standing water. If we see crossbedding that's even more evidence against longstanding water.

Steve: this bright rock unit extends over distances of hundreds of kilometers. Hematite extends too. Because this extends, we are able to learn something about widespread geology by understanding what's in front of us.

Q. missed.

Jim: eliminated that.
Jennifer: a victim and not the perp but we're not absolutely certain.

Q. Crater still 20 meters in size?

Steve: haven't scaled down the size of the crater. Outcrop is 6 to 8 meters away. Dimensions are as we had worked them out. More Pancam stereo will help better work that out. Tim Parker is still trying to make his mind up which of the two craters it is. Mike Malin's photo will tell us definitively. Only two prime candidates in the DIMES image that are 20 meters.

Q. Two distinct levels in outcropping, implications?

Andrew: upper layer appears more massive, may be courser materials. That would tell us only that there is heterogeneity. Doesn't help us differentiate between volcanic or sedimentary. You can see in Hawaii it done only by volcanos and in Appalachia only by sedimentation.

Q. What kind of environment based on those two scenarios.

Andrew: if it is volcanic then all bets are off for liquid water. Simply wouldn't need it. If it's sedimentary I think you need water, I doubt these are windblown. Doesn't tell you about the duration of the water though. There has to be a roll for liquid water in sculpting the surface of Mars. The question we're trying to answer is was it a short burst or persistent water. Both Gusev and Meridiani are interesting because they could be consistent with persistent water. What we see in front of us today makes no strong claims for longstanding persistence of water.

Steve: if we find out they're volcanic that would rule out liquid water as medium for depositing those rocks but would not rule out liquid water being active in this site.

Q. A week to a month at this outcrop still the plan?

Steve: we got a lot of places to go and things to do. My estimate of a month was that it was going to turn out to be a tasty target and that turned out to be a pretty tasty case. At Gusev we're almost a month. You don't want to make assumptions and find out later you were wrong. We don't want to run away from something interesting until we learn what we need to learn. We'll spend the time to do a good job on it.

Q. When did these rocks form.

Andrew: think they're very old based on distribution of large craters in the area. I think the features we're talking about you would describe in multiple billions of years in age, a remnant of a young Mars. There are large volcanos known at Mars. Mars is smaller with thinner atmosphere and it may be that the dynamics of ash expulsion are different than on Earth. I'm not bothered by the idea that there isn't a volcanic cone nearby. Anything that can happen did happen :-)

Q. Software for flash memory developed in house? Not developed with enough capacity?

Jennifer: it's actually the capacity is manageable and we have the volume we need. We're 2000 products away from capacity. The problem is more subtle than that. It's what it takes to manage that flash from the software in RAM. Not apparent in testing because we never operated for 8 months straight. Lots can happen in that 8 months that you can't simulate exactly. Natural for things like this to creep up. I don't know the details of that, the majority of our hardware developed in house and we do use commercial vendors for that (?)

Q. how do you explain billions of years at the surface like that.

Andrew: very little happened :) On earth, we're at a disadvantage because plate tectonics rework the planet. There may be more reworking at Mars then people thought 20 years ago but relative to Earth, Mars is a quiet planet. If you think about a rover being plunked down on Earth, you would probably see hundreds, maybe thousands of feet of sedimentary or volcanic rocks. We're looking at a finer scale of features on Mars.

Q. You're looking at a light layer, might be a water feature or air fall feature. Where's the hematite?

Steve: believe hematite is most likely to be present in finer grained soil. In floors of craters the soil is strikingly dark. Surrounding plains somewhat lighter (though still dark relative to rest of Mars) We think that soil has hematite. What we don't understand is the relationship between the soil and this rock layer. Not a surprise to find no hematite in this layered rock unit. We'll find out soon enough.

Andrew: Intriguing in the hematite and this rock layer, if you back up and look at the distribution they're co-existent. The light rock unit and the hematite are found together. While there's a range of processes going on, if we can understand this bed in front of us it will be helpful in understanding this co-existent pair.

Q. The weather differences between the two rovers?

Jennifer: only bearing it has is, a little warmer than predicted environments, we're updating all our models, we've been tracking with updated models closely, it impacts at night we have mini-TES instrument is waiving in the wind and gets pretty cold. We have survival heaters that would get turned on for that and the electronics even if they're not operating. We're not using those regularly because it's a bit warmer. We'll use them more later in the year when it gets colder. We have to heat the various tools that we're using at the moment. That's all standard operational process.

Jim: At our site, in our own little crater we get a little colder because of shadowing of crater walls in the morning and late evening.

(briefing note: back again tomorrow morning at 9am)

Q. There aren't many 4 billion year old rocks on Earth to study. Can you learn something about early Earth by studying these old rocks on Mars.

Andrew: short answer is no. Early Mars had somewhat different history than Earth. We do know something about Earth 4 billion years ago from chemistry of some crystals on oldest outcroppings. They tell us that Earth already had a level of chemical differentiation in lavas that never happened on Mars. We were making granites in some abundance then on Earth and that never happened on Mars. Happy to learn about old Mars but cautions about making assumptions of Earth based on that.

Lots of folks around the marsblogosphere are citing this Astrobiliogy Magazine article that points to the what they're describing as Opportunity's location in the large MOC composite. I even made that mistake late last night and I hope this posts can clear it up some.

Astrobiology is wrong. The blue arrow in their image is pointing, not at the 150 meter crater in the DIMES image, but at a much larger, possibly as wide as 250 meters, crater that sits more than 10 kilometers too far to the east.

It was Doug Ellison who got it right. He's identified the DIMES craters in the MOC 10 m/px image and I'm quite confident, after taking a close look myself, that he's nailed it. Slinted has some nice confirmation of the MOC data in a THEMIS comparison.

Keep your eye on any updates to the area covered by this MOC image. I expect we'll find the rover in the lower right quadrant.

And don't miss another cloes-up of that weird soil. Man, what's up with that stuff?!

Robby Stephenson, at periapsis.org, has taken some great photographs from around the JPL campus. I like the two sandbox pictures. They really are sandboxes :-)

New images from the Opportunity navigation and panoramic cameras have been posted. Michael P. Lyle's wonderful scripts have processed some of those new raw images at Mars Exploration Rover Imagery creating both stereo anaglyphs and pseudo-color images.

Also, David J. Fred has posted some preliminary analysis of Opportunity location in the final DIMES image at the MER-B landing site.

The Spirit and Opportunity briefing begins in just a couple of minutes. I'll post some notes when it's done.

Veronica: Spirit in sol 23. Opportunity has completed sol 2.

Steve Squyres: Good morning. I'll be brief. News from the rest of the payload is also very good. We did the first healthchecks yesterday of APXS, MI, and Mossbauer, and all are in good health. Mossbauer had problem with calibration in cruise as with the other one, it has healed itself. We do not understand this. It works perfectly. Mossbauer team thinks most likely something about the environment during cruise, zero G, spinning, something about that environment. that went away. We have a perfectly functioning Mossbauer spectrometer and given that we are perched atop the hematite capitol of the solar system, that's a good thing. Whole payload doing great.

Jim Bell: About 3 weeks ago I had the pleasure of telling you how well the Pancam was working in Spirit. Today happy to tell you about good health of Pancam cameras on Opportunity. First thing we try to take quick postcards, snapshots of the landing site we hope to return to Earth quickly to get general flavor. We tried that with Spirit on sol 1 tacked on at the very end of the day and we got through a few of them on Spirit. We had a little bit more time on Opportunity so we got all the way through the postcard sequence. I don't think we ever dreamed we'd get all the way through. So I wanna show you this first postcard. Full view here. Looking out the back of the rover. See back solar panel and lots of crumpled and crunched airbags. LGA is the pipe to the right. Spectacular landscape. Wonderful, fascinating place, for geologist to explore with our rover. Blue, Green, near infra-red filters. 8000x3000pixels. Huge data file. Animation of it where we'll zoom in. These are millimeter sized grains here a few meters from the rover. Approximately the color you'd see on Mars, reddish-brown, chocolate brown, similar to soils at Viking site. Darkest landing site we've ever been to. Reflectivity is only 10-15%. Seeing examples of airbag scrapes and compaction marks producing what we're calling lily pad like features, imprints from airbags. The proprieties of soil cause it to brighten on when it gets compacted. Pebbles and rocks. Maybe wind carved light features there. You can see out of the crater and off on the flat horizon. Here's a first tease of some of the outcrop material. Whitish-reddish deposits. Starting to form a layer just under the surface in this area. Outcropping, like holly grail for a geologist to be able to see these incredible rocks in their native habitat and we're going to go explore them with the rover. It's just a little snapshot, postcard and what we've got following on this will be even more spectacular. That was just a little wedge. We've started collecting mission success panorama, 25 wide, 3 high, 5 colors including far infrared, 1 micron band. We collected 180° of it yesterday centered on the beautiful outcropping. Got thumbnail confirmation images were collected. Start streaming down on the UHF passes tonight. Today we'll be collecting the other 180°. By the end of sol three we could have the entire thing in the can. Collected at 24:1 compression rate so not the best this camera can do. A lot more coming. We couldn't be happier. I wanna end by on a personal note and try to impress upon everyone the imaging achievement here. We have 20 cameras operating on the surface of Mars, two buried under landers because they did their job on descent, :) but 18 working on the surface of Mars. We quadrupled the number of cameras on Mars. Thanks to all of the people. Many at JPL, Mark Schwochert, Dave, R Schumuly, Dave, Darl Tom, Andy, Greg, Mark, David, quality assurance, all of the people in the different groups here at JPL who made this incredible thing happen. We actually built 43 cameras. Spares and test cameras. Matt Wallace, Romero and the ATLO team, EDL got us on the surface, Ops team driving this team, Sequencing on Athena, calibration group... It's an enormous effort. When you see these pictures go out on the web in the news, you see that little tagline "NASA/JPL/Cornell" or something like that. I want to impress that tag line has so many people, so many hours, so much effort, to make these things come to life for us. They're going into the history and astronomy books and it's been an amazing effort.

Jennifer Trosper: Here to talk about Spirit this morning. Joking with Jim that Spirit doesn't have any images to send down today but my favorite image from Mars so far was after not hearing from the rover for a while when the signal went from a flat line to a bleep. Spirit is doing better. A patient in rehab. Nursing her back to health. We've gotten a few bits of data in the last few days. Problem is associated with our ability to collect and maintain recorded data. The flash memory that would hold the information about our problem is actually part of the problem so we don't have a lot of information. What we have is essentially what we had on sol 18 and then the state of information as of yesterday and then the chances in state we've seen through today.. We're making a lot of progress now that we've got telemetry on the vehicle. Lemme go back to sol 18 and tell you about it. We had weather problems at the station and about 10 minutes early we lost the signal. Not clear if craft or station problem. We've done some tracking. Entirely possible it was a spacecraft problem. Possibly a reset on the spacecraft that would have caused our signal to be lost. Due to the reset we have actually confirmed that the morning activities did not complete, if you recall, moving the IDD,getting ready to RAT. In the IDD the arm still in same place. Some time the morning of sol 18 we encountered the problem. That problem which initially was most likely a reset, not sure where it came from, caused us to get into this belief that the flash was corrupted that we got into a series of reset loops. Then in the afternoon we sent a command signal and received the beep. Then we expected a communication session on HGA and didn't see it. Early indication something was wrong. Then we didn't see any data from afternoon Odyssey and early sol 19 MGS pass sent only about 2 minutes of bad data. Morning Odyssey pass then sent nothing. On sol 20 we attempted to command rover and received no data. We commanded and didn't receive data. In the afternoon, one of the things the vehicle will do if it encounters a fault is to change rate it accepts commands. So in the afternoon we sent at a different rate and we got a beep. Rate was the rate autonomous systems would be if we had a fault. We knew at that point that there were 4 scenarios that could have put us at that rate. That's my favorite image on Mars, getting that beep. We didn't receive overnight UHF pass data. On sol 21 we were trying to establish same commandability as we had the day before. We knew we had a system level fault. Didn't know what kind. We sent essentially the same command and didn't get the beep. As we were getting ready to send another, the vehicle decided to talk to us. We got very little data from the year 2053 and we thought, this is not good. :D Corrupted data. There weren't a lot of scenarios that would put us in 2053 on Mars ;-) That signal dropped out 9 or 10 minutes after we got it. That was at 10 bits per second. Then we immediately sent another command to give us a 30 min communication session at 120 bits per second. That command was received. We got one frame back telling us it was sending and then it stopped. We tried again and we got a different set of data parameters and that different set of data gave us a very limited state of vehicle and that's where we got the big reset number. We realized reset problem was causing it not to do what it was supposed to do. As a result of that knowledge we realized the vehicle might not be shutting down. We tried to shut it down and it wouldn't shut down. Several attempts failed. Reset causing a problem with the shutdown. We knew that the power system was struggling so we deleted, tried to, our overnight UHF passes to conserve batteries. We got an Odyssey UHF pass and so we asked Odyssey and MGS to turn off their radio beacons because we were getting ready to go into low-power mode. We woke up on sol 21 on solar array wake-up power. Fault protection worked as designed. In low-power mode we don't get morning session until 11am. We realized that we did have this reset problem and so, based on a hunch of the lead flight software architect, he believed that the problem was associated with mounting of flash. There's a command to not mount flash on initialization. The next day, when we sent that we got into a mode we could command the vehicle to get into a software state that we understand and began to start collecting data. Narrowed down. It's really an issue with the file system in flash. Space required in RAM to manage files in flash is apparently more than we anticipated. In the initialization, we've been collecting data, we have lots and lots of files on the space craft and this is a new problem based on having many files. We're currently in a much more specific debugging activity, dumping out some of flash, loading a script to get a task trace to identify where problem was in code to verify our hunch. Tomorrow we might try to access flash and get a healthcheck on it. The next day we might try to delete some files to see if our hunch is correct that it's due to the number of files we're trying to manage in flash. In parallel there's another less likely scenario that there's something wrong with the HGA and motor control board so we're working on that in parallel to make sure we can get back on the HGA in a cautious way. Humbling to work on a team with such excellent people. Folks working on this are the best of the best. Their talent, persistence, hard work humbles me, almost overwhelms me. That's what's got us to where we are today and what's gonna get us going again.

Jim Erickson: Opportunity is in excellent health with all sub-systems reporting nominal and no faults. Yesterday was a full science day and used up a lot of the time we had, but we did manage to squeeze in some engineering activities :). We tested LGA and that checked out fine. Also to do a sunfind to have knowledge of where the rover was pointing. Our attitude is excellent. We are correlated to within about a degree from day to day. More than sufficient. Overall we're continuing to make steady progress in our goals to get the wheels dirty. Jackie to tell us about tomorrow Jackie has a new job of activity lead for impact to egress.

Jackie Lyra: Opportunity starting third day. Flavor of the day is let's go ahead and do more engineering but we love Pancam imaging. Almost as much engineering as imaging tomorrow. Waking up at 8:30 in the morning, communication with LGA. At about mid-morning starting engineering initial deployments. Main activity is to deploy HGA. Then we'll have a LGA session to confirm success. Following that, at about 1:30 in the afternoon we'll try HGA. In addition to HGA, we'll be taking a series of Pancam imaging that hopefully tomorrow we'll be seeing. Especially pictures of the outcrop. We'll go to sleep at about 3:30 and wake up at 5:30 local solar for Odyssey pass so for the next briefing we should have pictures.

Q. Was this not well tested? Will Spirit ever be perfect again?

Jennifer: Software could fix the problem if our theory checks out. We believe in test like you fly. We exercised the vehicle like we expected to see it on the surface. Longest tests were about 9 days. We're on sol 18. You can't fully simulate that and we found an issue that we were unaware of it because of the accumulation that happens

Q. What precautions will you take for Opportunity.

Jennifer: we have a file management process we have every day. We're getting ready to delete a lot of cruise files from Spirit and we recommend Opportunity do the same. We'll be more conscious of this limit and manage it.

Q. Where are science groups right now.

Steve: not really anything from atmospheric group. long term planning thinking ahead a bit on where to go but we have very little information. We don't have to decide until after we finish up the ones we're on. Eagerly awaiting Mike Malin's imaging. After we've had a good look around we'll be ready to plan. Minerology group not engaged yet. No full Pancam, let alone Mini-TES or Mossbauer. Soil and geology are having a field day. In wild speculation mode because we don't have the Pancam images we need to see the full outcrop. Geology group practically foaming at the mouth. Soil physical properties group having the most fun. What the heck are we lookin' at. One, we've got a soil with two distinct components, coarse grayish grains and much finer red stuff and airbags push gray down into the red. Two, we have aggregates that when you squish them they turn red. No one knows and we're arguing.

Q. how do you keep two teams straight.

Steve: We did dual rover readiness tests. We've practiced this. What we've done is for people in mission critical roles like Jim's Pancam team, those people are on a fixed schedule. Determined long ago. For the science team group members we've pretty much let people go to which rover they want to. Worked out, pretty even. Gusev people on 4th floor, Meridiani on 5th floor. Floors are color coded. Meeting schedule on good software.

Q. How many cruise files deleting? Is there a problem with flash memory or RAM?

Jennifer: all of them. hundreds. The scenario pete was talking about was when we don't mount flash and the data we would have written to flash we write to RAM. In that case we don't even worry about flash. Now, we can use RAM when we don't have flash. Confusing but it works.

Q. For Jim, the color image, can you review for us what the difference in quality between this and what's coming.

Jim: The quality of the MSP is comparable to this postcard. We started it in a different direction and we do add stereo, this postcard is left eye only. We also add one more filter at 1 micron. Image quality roughly the same.

Q. If the image you're showing us today, can you do any scaling of the sizes or dimensions?

Jim B: rough idea is that the crater we're in is 20 m diameter. The horizon is about 10 meters away. Outcrops are probably modest size, could pick them up and kick them and roll them over.

Steve: crater we're in is no bigger than this room.

Q. For Jennifer, solar flare discounted? Jim, given straight off egress, any projection on when?

Jennifer; haven't totally discounted solar flares. Have an anomaly team working on that. Lower likelihood scenarios.

Jim: Looks good. We're watching Jennifer and we're taking it slowly and carefully.

Q. Pete's been saying 2-3 weeks. All troubleshooting or could you do science in that period?

Jennifer: hard to say. We have a theory and we're anticipating that theory is correct but I may come in tomorrow and tell you that one wasn't correct. I think the 2-3 week is a good estimate. Checking out science isn't high on the list of objectives. Most likely we'd have to have the engineering problems completely solved.

Q. Jim B, do you have images taken from Spirit that enable you to begin mineralogical analysis.

Jim: limited number of images using all of Pancam's geology filters. We've taken an initial look and those data are very consistent with previous data. In terms of mineralogic details, next week I'm hoping we can get geologists up here talking. We see differences between the rocks and the soils, a couple different kinds of rock spectral units and a couple of sol spectra. Dataset only covers a small part of the landing site so the dataset is small.

Q. Is the Mossbauer healing themselves something that will lead scientists to question results.

Steve: no, we're looking at an onboard calibration reference. It looked funny during cruise and now it looks good. If we continued to see the cruise look, we'd have to question the science but things look good.

Q. How does hematite fit in with the two schools of thought for the soil. What can mini-TES tell us.

Steve: I'm wondering the same thing. Mini-TES can definitively tell us before we get off. Mossbauer will nail it. DIMES image or MOC images, what you see is that if you look at the craters, they have a bright rim and a dark floor. That dark floor is not typical of the region outside of craters. We might not find hematite until we climb out. I don't know.

Q. can you tell how deep this crater is and how far off that bit of horizon is.

Jim B: Navcam data suggests rim is only a meter or two. Rover won't have any problem going up there. Where we see that small wedge of horizon, it's 5 or 6 km or so.

Q. With another 3 weeks of Spirit repairs, that'll take you to about halfway mark. What's lost by these delays.

Steve: I'm not concerned about tit. We're going to lose very little. That 90 days is when the warrantee expires. They're going to keep going. These systems are performing well. We're hopeful we'll get more. We planned from the outset that one of three sols was going to return nothing. Before this we were 17 for 17. Even if we blew 30 sols on this repair, we'd still get 60 days of science. I'm fine with this.

Q. What were the engineering challenges to getting these photographs and what are the sweet spots between imaging and science data.

Jim B: Steve and me and a few others sitting around a table coming up with requirements. What did we need to be able to see on Mars. They rose to the challenges of meeting our requirements. Months and months and months of calibration. A lot of time away from home and families and school. Extra hours and overtime work. These are very, very high fidelity cameras. Sending 20 megapixel cameras to another planet is not easy. Amazing thing. Heroic effort on the part of many people over the last 3 years of fabrication and 4 or 5 years of design before that.

Q. How close were you from loosing the spacecraft if the reset process would have continued.

Jennifer: One of the things that is a tribute to the design is the way that the power and thermal subsystems responded. We possibly stayed up for two nights and thermal maintained perfect. We can't break it :-) Robustness of the design. We can recover. The one thing you are concerned about is communication. The spacecraft communicated with us. Little bits, then the larger then more and that's how you put the story together. A fair number of us were part of Pathfinder, there were things that we learned there that we implemented here to last even longer.

Q. For Steve, stratigraphy in the crater, are you saying that you've got down through top layer, middle layer and something below?

Steve: no. What we're seeing inside the craters is a soil unit that differs somewhat from the surface soil unit. I don't think this is a third different stratigraphic unit.

Veronica: 9am PST update tomorrow.

Q. will you be overloading filesystem in testbed?

Jennifer: absolutely. We've already started that.

*end*

The big panorama postcard from Opportunity's first day is available at Photojournal.

Susan at 2020 Hindsight blogged up a storm this weekend, especially Sunday, and it's all really good reading. Go there now and read. Great stuff.

And somehow I missed word from Spirit that she's feeling better. Good to hear it.

And I've just discovered another great Mars blog, MainlyMartian, by a fellow named Oliver Morton. Great posts. Check him out.

This news on the Opportunity landing site just slipped in before I could get to sleep. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon looking at Mike Malin's 10m/px MOC image of the Opportunity landing site trying to locate the DIMES-imaged craters but without success.

I had on the blinder of bad information --that Opportunity was about 24 km downrange from the center of the ellipse (I'm pretty sure that's what Richard Cook said in the post-EDL press brief), so I wasn't having any luck finding what should have been pretty easy to locate. The DIMES image showed what was reported to be a 150 meter crater and no 150 meter crater could be found in the 20-30 km from center area.

Well, it looks like it was bit further than 24 km. By my rough Photoshop measure on the MOC composite, it's more like 37 km. Well, unfortunately it's also located in one of the lower resolution sections of that great MOC composite. I eagerly await Mike's IMC high-res photos :-) It'll be interesting to find out which of those craters in the DIMES image is hosting the Opportunity rover.

update: I guess it's possible I just mis-heard and Richard said miles, not kilometers. That would work out pretty well for placing the rover near that crater highlighted in the astrobio article. That crater seems a bit bigger than the 150 meters that's been mentioned several times, though. By my rough estimates, it's at least 200, maybe as large as 250 meters across. I guess we'll have to wait on Mike Malin's awesome camera to tell us.

So much for falling asleep. I've been playing around in Photoshop and I think I've managed to line up three of the much smaller craters from the DIMES image and the astrobio article location seems to actually fit quite nicely. When sized to fit with the 10m/px MOC image, the large crater measures approximately 220 meters across and located about 37 km from the center of the ellipse.

It's likely that the lander touched down near the center of the DIMES image and it probably bounced no more than about 1 kilometer. That should put Opportunity no further than 1.65 km from the big crater and possibly much closer.

another update from slinted, in the comments, comes word that Doug Ellison made the match here. That looks like about 25 kilometers to me and it sure does match up pretty. Also, that crater looks a lot closer to 150 meters in diameter. Excellent work Doug!

Wow. I just did a rough count and I think I'm up to 80,000 words blogged on the MER missions this month. That's just crazy. I should probably cut way back :-) I doubt that's gonna happen just yet, though. Here's me, back on January 4th, after the Spirit landing:

I just did a wordcount on my weekend of Spirit blogging and it comes to over 11,000 words. This was certainly a record posting weekend for me and I don't expect to repeat it any time soon. I hope that you enjoyed it.

We'll see. As long as they keep posting pretty pictures, I'm probably not going anywhere :)

Weird and wild stuff. What's up with that wacky surface? It looks like it's fluffy and textured until you press on it and then it collapses into something very smooth and supple, and very red. Oh, and they finally posted the other full polar panorama that shows the horizon. I can't wait to see what's up above :)

Also, don't miss this great resource, Mars Exploration Rover Links. It's maintianed by William Spurlock (William, you rock!) and it's got all the MER links a Mars junky could ever want. Go there now and bookmark it and if you've got the time, send William an email thanking him for what's got to be the best collection of MER links on the web.

To recap some of the current Martian events, here's where I think we are with Spirit and Opportunity:

Spirit

Pete Theisinger, project manager for the Mars Explorer Rover Project, said today he feels good enough about the state of things with the Spirit rover that he's likely going to be turning over the regular press conference duty to Jennifer Trosper, Spirit's mission manager for surface operations. I think this is a really good sign that things have turned the corner for MER-A.

Pete went into a little bit of detail about the efforts to track down the problem on Spirit. It sounds like there are three hypotheses. In descending likelihood they are: a) that the software which handles file management for the flash memory is not robust enough for the activities they've attempted to use it, b) that there exists some problem with one of the motor control boards, or c) that a recent, heavy, ion or neutron solar event caused problems writing to or reading from the flash memory.

It sounds increasingly likely that the problem is in software, and not in hardware as had been previously suspected. If the problem is in software, then it is likely to also be a problem for Spirit's (slightly) older sibling, Opportunity. Pete suggested that if it is determine to be a problem in the file system code, they may either devise and enforce a set of rules that avoids whatever failings exist in software, or they may patch the software to correct the flaw. Either of those solutions, Pete said, could give us "a very good rover when we get back up."

Right now, the team has a system in place that allows them to wake the rover without using the flash, and command the rover to test various components and return results to the team. The most recent data seems to have exonerated the flash memory (hardware) and the team has been working in the high-fidelity rover and software testbeds to try to reproduce the filesystem failures. Spirit's basic subsystems -- Power, Thermal, and Communications -- all seem to be in good shape. Pete estimates that Spirit could be rolling again in two to three weeks.

Opportunity

Opportunity, a.k.a. MER-B, touched down with a very gentle landing at Meridiani Planum just about 20 hours ago. The lander rolled to a stop with the +Y petal down. Landing on that back petal means she had to perform a first-time maneuver of lifting that petal to tilt and flip the lander onto its base petal. First-time maneuvers, of course, carry some extra risk, but this + Y landing had the advantage of ensuring that the airbags would all be fully retracted in the forward direction and that will dramatically simplify the egress maneuver.

The lander and rover currently sit facing north-northeast, nose pitched slightly up at just over 5°. The deck height is somewhere between 13 and 16 inches which is well within the rover's rolloff capabilities.

Opportunity has been sending back telemetry and, as of this afternoon's press briefing, all sub-systems are polling green. She's also sent back lots of great images from the DIMES camera, the hazard avoidance cameras, the navigation cameras, and the panoramic camera system.

The DIMES images will allow the project team to get a rough determination of the rover's location, but the real deal for location will come when Mike Malin trains his Mars Orbital Camera (on board the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter) on the area. If things go as well for Mike as they did in his Spirit imaging, we should have Opportunities location to within a couple of feet.

The navigation and panoramic camera systems have returned about 150 images which have the science team "flabbergasted, astonished, blown away". Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover program, said at today's press briefing, "we've scored a 300 million mile hole in one". The landing put Opportunity into a small and shallow crater, one that shows both an exposed, layered outcropping of bedrock, and a surface coating of fine-grained hematite. Additionally, the DIMES images suggest that Opportunity is well within driving distances from a much larger crater which is probably rimmed with this layered bedrock. When asked if he could have dreamed of a better landing site, Steve said, "this is exactly what it looked like in my wildest dreams."

Opportunity will be going through a cautious impact to egress process over the next couple of weeks. We can look forward to full-frame, color, stereo Pancam pictures arriving in the next day or two and maybe some Mini-TES data too.

Wow. I'm excited. We have two rovers, each packed with an amazing suite of exploration and investigation tools, sitting on the surface of Mars. We have a best in the world mission team and science team at NASA/JPL. We have an awesome information distribution mechanism in the internet. I couldn't be happier :D

The 1 pm press conference is about to start. I'm assuming they're going to show all the new images, maybe they'll have used the DIMES images to get a better handle on our location, and maybe they'll have a better idea what those "slabby" bedrock are.

I've been poking at the lastest images in photoshop and it sure looks like it could be big slabs of basalt and not the large-scale laters stacked vertically that I thought I could see in the early thumbnails. We'll see what Steve has to say...

Pete Theisinger: Good morning. Exciting couple of days. Forgive my hoarse voice. Spirit is still serious but moving toward guarded. Rough start with DSN but worked through that. Reset computer into the non-flash mode as planned. Expect to get Odyssey pass in a couple of minutes then we'll shut vehicle down for the night. Batteries are fully charged. Thermal looked good. A little cold but probably because we shut down early yesterday. Our truths are often temporary :) so let me describe today's truth. We went through a few resets because of DSN problems. Not the rover's fault, ours. We got the flash metadata indicating that the flash hardware is fine. File management software not robust enough for our operations. Two other theories not as well in competition. One, some kind of error or hardware issue on motor control board. Two, the solar event on Wednesday. Flash memories can be sensitive to high energy when being read from or written to. Tomorrow we'll have more of the same. I think we're kind of on the way to a normal recovery here. Likely you'll be hearing about status from Jennifer or one of the other managers rather than me. Good chance we'll have a very good rover when we get back up. Once again, don't expect us to be driving for a couple weeks, maybe three.

Arthur Amador: Spirit's older sister, Opportunity. We have two rovers on Mars on opposite sides of the planet. Now we have to talk about Spirit local solar and Opportunity local solar. 1 PM here, 5 PM at Gusev and 5 am at Meridiani. Spirit ending its day, Opportunity about to begin her's. Opportunity continues to send telemetry in excellent health, green across the board. She shut down at 5PM scheduled to wake up 8am local solar at Meridiani. ACS reporting all green, pitch nose up at 5 degrees. Data management says 140 megabits in Flash. Received 18 megabits from Odyssey last night. Excellent link quality with Odyssey. Another 20 megabits from Odyssey this morning. Mechanical deployments all nominal. Mobility reported a good egress path in the straight ahead dir, the -Y petal. Deck height in that direction looks like 34-41 cm. Pancam is healthy. Array performed as expected, batteries charged. Thermal in agreement with model predicts. 17°C on batteries. Internal temperature 30-35°C within 2° of predicts. Telecom good link performance on Odyssey. Didn't get MGS pass, didn't lock on carrier. Looking into that from MGS and Odyssey teams. Received Pancam and DIMES images in last Odyssey pass. Running master sequence on board and no new faults. Tomorrow is sol 2 and it's an assessment day. Looking at engineering data we got down. Looking good.

Andrew Johnson: To talk about DIMES. MER landers have a camera for descent on one corner of the lander next to the radar. As lander descends the camera takes three images to estimate horizontal velocity. Combines hardware and software. Here are Meridiani DIMES images. Main feature there is a crater, about 150 meters across. Image is about 1 mile across taken at alt at 1.25 miles. Next image, descending toward the surface. We expect that to happen ;-) Toward the center of the image is the location that we believe we touched down. We're definitely not inside the large crater, possibly one of the smaller craters. This is the final image and it's about 3/4 mile across. You can see a dark dot left of the crater and that is in fact the shadow of the parachute. We've come down somewhere in the center of the images. Software performed well, estimated velocity of 10 meters/sec and did not cause the rockets to fire.

Steve Squyres:I wanna start by congratulating Andrew and the whole DIMES team. Great pictures. I keep thinking this can't possibly get any better and it just does. We knew going in that there are two fundamental geologic units. One is a thick sequence of layered rocks, fairly light in tone and then draped on top of that is a thin veneer or coating and that's the stuff we think contains the hematite. My fondest hope was that we'd land close enough to a crater that we would have a chance of traversing to it. Instead, we've scored a 300 million mile hole in one and we're inside a crater. It's not the big one Andrew showed you but we can get to that one :D. Pete and I talked about, gee, wouldn't it be nice to do a TCM and get to a place that would get us closer to a crater. I've learned a lesson to never ask for a final TCM. I don't know what the odds would be of us hitting a crater like this but it's just phenomenal. The crater that we are in is roughly 20 meters in diameter. You're seeing the rim all around us. We don't have the depth, probably a couple meters deep. When you look off in the distance you can see that wonderful rock outcrop. We've got those two geologic features within 10 meters :) It's right there in front of us, exposed. And then we have this fine-grained stuff which must be the hematite. In principal, we could spend the entire mission in this crater but there's nice stuff out there. This is the first high-res image from the Pancam showing the outcropping. This is just a taste. Sometime soon, on sol 2 at Meridiani we are going to take a 180° color, full resolution panorama that will expose this whole outcrop. The crater has actually exposed a stratigraphic cross section. This DIMES image, we are not in the big crater, it's probably 150 meters in diameter. It is surely within, I think, our reach :D. This is wonderful stuff for driving on. I envision we'll drive off lander, look at soil and investigate the hematite mystery, then drive to the outcrop and learn, understand it, then we drive out of the crater, look around, and head for the big one :D. I'll turn it over to Doug. He is an expert on minerology of Martian soils.

Doug Ming: Science team is absolutely thrilled to be here. If it got any better I couldn't stand it. Reason we're here is that MGS TES suggested that there was crystalline hematite, an iron oxide material. You'll notice it's quite a bit darker and very red. It only takes a few percent hematite to turn it red. What are the hypotheses? There are 7 or 8 or 10 of them Briefly touch on three. Water is a key objective and a couple include water. One leading candidate hypothesis is that the hematite formed in a lake or lacustrine environ. Over a period of time, metamorphic processes transform into what we see. Second is hydrothermal alteration of basaltic glass. Mauna Kea is analog on Earth. Water interacting with basaltic glass, begins to hydrate and one byproduct is nanophase iron oxides like hematite. Third potential way is the oxidation of a mineral called magnetite in basalts in lavas. So, there are a variety of ways that this hematite can form, aqueous, weathering, or oxidation. The payload we have has the unique capability to identify this. If we find goetheite, that'd be a slam dunk for lacustrine hypothesis. Mossbauer can tell us if we have that. The whole payload, Mini-TESS, APXS, Pancam, and MI will all work together. If it's oxidation of magnetite we may find magnetite and our payload, particularly the Mossbauer, will be able to identify that.

Q. Which of these three theories is conducive to life?

Steve: any of the liquid water hypothesis. Lakes, or hotsprings would point in that direction. Which of those two? Depends probably more on how long that environment was there. We have well defined, testable hypotheses and the tools to test those.

Q. Steve, could you elaborate more on why so excited about bedrock.

Steve: thing about bedrock is that you know where it came from. In Gusev, we knew going in that it was a pretty impacted, churned up, plus we've got a big valley that carried a lot of stuff. Really mixed up in Gusev. Result is that we see rocks but we don't know where they came from. That crater? Deris flow? Lava? We just don't know. Tough puzzle. The beauty of bedrock is that you know where it came from. We can say unambiguously that they are related, what their point of origin was. The other thing is that instead of being busted up, you've got discreet layers. Simple principle of stratigraphy that stuff on top is younger. Having access to bedrock is wonderful for unraveling the history of a place.

Q. That large crater in DIMES is very dark in the center with very bright rim. Why?

Steve: Layering that's been exposed by this crater. We've got this unit of darker hematite on top and a unit of thick below that. The little crater we're in exposes a meter or two of this layered material. That big crater probably excavated 30, 40 meters down. If we can look down into it or even go down into it is a much deeper cross section. You're seeing the exposure on the walls. Down on the floor, we don't know. No question but that going to it we will have the chance to see deeper down into Mars.

Q. How steep a terrain the rover can handle. Getting out of this one and into the next one.

Arthur: depends on the soil at this particular site. 15-20 degree capability but it depends on the soil.
Steve: based on topography we've seen so far, I don't think climbing out of this one will be insurmountable.

Q. When you say the flash hardware was working does that mean you're moving away from hardware problem hypothesis.

Pete: Software only problem theory is gaining strength. Hardware theory is losing strength. It was very interesting....software has a bunch of module developers and they were looking at some of the reset logs. Developers arguing about which module "not mine". Software only is gaining some currency.

Q. EDL, talk about luck, but you've built a pretty robust system. What's your take of expanding the envelope of other more extreme sites?

Pete: I would still not give him Melas if he asked. What has to happen is the project has to support an examination of exactly how robust this was. Way too early to decide. It performed very well. Wind profile at Gusev was challenging but DIMES tiers system delivered. We thought Meridiani would present less challenge and so far that looks correct. System performed very well.

Q. Have any of you slept?

Pete: we slept for three years. I got 4 hours.

Arthur: I got about an hour last night.

Steve: landings are special. Once you get into Marstime, it's fine. I got into the Gusev groove. I was getting 6,7, 8 hours sleep. What's hard is changing rovers. The jump to Opportunity was a 12 hour time zone change and that's hard. I've been sleeping in little 2 and 3 hours.

Doug: Like grad school. Key to get 3 or 4, minimally.

Q. In the second of your hydrothermal processes, could you spell it and tell me what role it plays.

Hematite. In these aqueous environments, one particular is called goethite.

Q. Based on DIMES 3, there are a number of smaller craters, any speculation on where we came down?

Steve: working on that now, a little hard to tell exactly. Remember the fantastic capability with the MOC camera on MGS, Mike Malin's camera. Knowing Mike as I do, he's probably planning that image now if he hasn't already.

Andrew: in the center of the DIMES image. We'll have more in a few days.

Q. First glance guess on that outcropping?

Steve: getting out ahead of ourselves here. It is clear from Navcam images that there are parts of the panorama that will show the layers. Right now the one image we've got we're looking down on the top of one of the layers.

Doug: color is unique. Too early too tell with particle sizes. Some could be nanophase or they could be more crystalline. It may be a few hundreds of microns in size.

Steve: the instruments that are really good at seeing hematite aren't even turned on yet.

Q. Does the basic spectra you can do with pancam trend toward hematite.

Steve: we haven't done that yet. All we have is three color pancam.

Q. Will we be able to ascertain toxicity? One day grow plants there?

Doug: When we get the APSX down we'll get a lot of good data on trace elements that will be key. Right now, we can probably grow plants ther but key questions about chlorates and salts that we may have toxicity problems. Get the instrument suite on the surface.

Q. Last night there was lot of talk about how this was unlike anything we've ever seen. Just that we're in a crater?

Steve: much more to it than that. We've landed in a geologic unit that is fundamentally different than anything we've seen. This soil, probably hematite, is different than anything we've seen. We knew going in that this stuff only occurred in a few places (from orbital assets.) Every place we've been so far is littered with boulders and loose debris. See any of that here? Here what we see is bedrock outcrop and this bazaar red gray soil, neither being remotely like Viking or Pathfinder of Gusev.

Q. We identify hematite with a streak test like an armature geologist.

Doug: probably difficult. We will definitely be churning up the place.

Q. We know bedrock is where it was born. One uncertainty at Gusev is origin of fine material. Do you have any initial hypothesis about fine material here?

Steve: if it's the hematite bearing stuff, Doug has already given you the hypotheses. You don't see this concentration anywhere on Mars so chances are it originated near here.

Q. DIMES images, is it safe to assume that the smeared out bright rims are similar bedrock outcroppings.

Steve: I think so. Certainly in the initial Pancam images the bedrock seems to be lighter in tone. It's a reasonable expectation that is indeed what it is.

Q. Could one of you review time sequence of standup, rolloff and mini-TES.

Arthur: we've just begun a set of critical standup. We have to be concerned about Spirit and any lessons there. Matt Wallace said you could estimate anywhere between a week and a half and two weeks. Won't stand up for a few sols.

Pete: Spirit egressed on sol 12. HGA and airbag work. Even though front egress path looks good, I think the time will be about the same as we look at Sprit problems. A few days of soil measurements before we do the drive to the outcrop. Plenty of time for Steve to take Pancam images to decide which rock he wants to RAT first.

Q: estimate of distance to big crater and outcropping details. Shapes of what you're seeing.

Andrew: Guessing, half a mile or less.
Steve: we've seen so little of it. Navcam images tell us it's there, broken up in segments. We just barely nicked it with the Pancam postcard. Only at the far right edge did we just barely nick the outcrop and you're not seeing a slice through it. As we work farther to the right we'll actually get steep faces where we'll see slices through the outcrop. When we get that, we'll start getting into morphology. We don't know the range with a lot of precision. Something like 10 meters away.

Q. Since they're twins will the Spirit problem be lurking for Opportunity?

Pete: Three theories, most probable is an inherent software problem with file system. If so, then systemic to the two. We'll either set rules to avoid it or we'll change it. Second most probable is that it's hardware triggered, then it's local to Opportunity. If it's third most probable and solar, we could be exposed to it again and we'd need a way to recover better. I think it's likely to be systemic to the two but likely to be easily avoided or patched. There was a heavy ion or neutron event that was detected by HEND on Odyssey but not detected at Earth. We're in different solar longitudes. Particles that hit Mars can easily not hit Earth.

Q. that outcropping is in the crater?

Steve: yeah. inner wall.

Natalie: Next brief at 9am tomorrow. Latest images from Opportunity and update on Spirit.

Q. Hematite is very unusual. At Gusev we have the valley. What's the broader geologic setting of Meridiani.

Steve: I think Ray did a pretty good job with the briefing he did shortly before we landed. Underlying ancient terrain very large area of this layered materials. Few morphologic clues how it got there. At Gusev, unambiguous evidence that stuff got washed in there by water. Here you have this broad layered base and draped over it is this fine-grained material, the hematite bearing stuff. How it got there is the interesting question. Geologic relationships need to be worked out.

*End of briefing*

And don't forget to check out Mars Exploration Rover Imagery at http://www.lyle.org/mars/ for the latest in processed images.

New raw Pancan images are also available.

Raw DIMES images are available but you'll need to stretch them vertically to get the real picture.

Looks like we got the third DIMES image.

Confirmed, that is the third DIMES image and it shows the shadow of the parachute which is kinda cool. So we have the first and third DIMES image. These images have a big crater (don't know how big, really) and a half dozen relatively much smaller craters and maybe a dozen visible even smaller craters.

We got at least one more DIMES image. It's closer than the last one. Looks like final image of three.

OK. Data again coming down from Mars Relay onboard Odyssey. Data downlink completed.

Oddyssey should be coming out of occultation any minute now...

They've been looking at a single DIMES image for quite a while, so I'm guessing that they haven't gotten the other two down yet. (DIMES takes three images and compares them during descent to guage the angle of entry and, if necessary, trigger the corrective rockets to straighten things out. The rockets were not fired with Opportunity; they were for Spirit.) DIMES images can be overlayed on MGS MOC images to help identify the landing location.

There's a polling of engineering subsystems going on now. Flight software unable to report in because of the distractions and noise of those goofy science team members :-) Sounds like everything is green from Fault. Power sounded nominal, too.

Images being cleaned up and displayed. DIMES (descent) images being shown.

Odyssey occultation, so they expect downlink completion at 20:21 (in another 30 minutes). I think they said we got 22.9 Megabits of data (is that what's onboard Odyssey or what we've already got downlinked to NASA/JPL?), about what we got last night.

Pancam images and health data coming in. DIMES too? Yep. DIMES too. Closeup from Pancam of that outcropping! Sweet!

It's being explained that the Mars Relay onboard Odyssey is the most reliable data path we have. There's apparently a lot of handshaking and confirmation between Odyssey and the planetary assets to ensure data integrity.

The Odyssey mission controller says he sees data and he's preparing to send it to NASA/JPL (maybe I misheard that).

NASA TV has live coverage that started about 20 minutes ago while we all wait to get the next batch of data from Opportunity via Odyssey.

Steve Squyres, Charles Elachi, and Pete Theisinger are all in the room so hopefully Steve will get on the microphone and talk about the incoming images.

It sounds like this won't be all of the data that Opportunity gathered but closer to the volume we got last night.

While we all wait on the morning coverage to begin, take a look at Clinton Ecker's Switch-Case for the best of the photographs released last night, and also check out Robby Stephenson's periapsis.org for some impressions from a local.

Also, don't miss Susan's 2020 Hindsight coverage of the 2am Press Briefing and Opportunity pictures.

If you know of other good sites doing Opportunity (or Spirit) coverage, please let me know in the comments or via email. No need to use the Mars Relay onboard Odyssey, as I forgot to pay the bill with my providers at the DSN ;-)

And, one more. As usual, /. has a great big thread discussing the Opportunity landing. Check out the Spaceflight Now feed which has several posts on Opportunity's landing.

Hrm, CNN can't even spell Steve Squyres' name right. I suppose I get some names wrong, but mostly that's because I'm not a professional reporter so I don't take the time to look it up. Also, I don't think I'd get Steve's name wrong. It's not like he's some unknown, behind the scenes, staffer or something. The piece has no byline but I'm guessing it was Miles O'Bryan who has been asking silly questions at all the press conferences :)

It's been an amazing day. I can't wait for tomorrow.

It's 7 am at Gusev and 7 PM at Meridiani. It's 2:47 am here in Redwood City and I'm going to sleep.

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.

More images at the MER homepage.

They're getting down to business now. Polling sub-stations.

Chris: It would appear we have another rover on Mars. (applause)

Photos are already popping up at the MER homepage.

Chris: That's all the data we're gonna get today. I hope people are happy with that (applause all over the room).

Steve:Slabby nature of this is fascinating. I'd say that outcrop is a fairly attractive first traverse target, don't ya think?

Steve: "This is the sweetest spot I've ever seen" The airbag marks have a clear imprint of the seams of the airbag. I got no words for this.

Steve: "Looks like nothing I've ever seen in my life so I'll attempt no science yet. Strange corregated terrain. Subtle, trafficable version... Holy smokes! I'm sorry. I'm jut blown away by this. That outcrop in the distance is just out of this world. I can't wait to get there. I got nothin' else to say, I just wanna look."

Chris Lewicky: "PI, what are we looking at?"

Looks very dark. Looks very smooth around the lander. Very different from Gusev. Super image of the ground! Wild texture. Smooth flowing surface with pockmarks.

Polar panorama nearly complete.

Wild rock formations! This has Steve Squyres almost in tears. Awesome!

More pieces being added to the mosaic. The image guy is really "working the crowd" :-)

Massive image dump. Beautiful! Polar panorama mosaic.

Clear egress aids in the front!

Small stuff in close but big topography on horizon. Egress aid tip in the air (unexpected). Interesting ground markings.

Rhazcam images coming in. Terrain looks quite barren.

Full navcam images coming in now. Thermal - nominal, about 4 degrees warmer consistent with sidepetal down.

ACS - 5.46 degrees pitch, nose up. Tilt highwater mark consistent with +Y down. Fault - has one expected red monitor. Power - 32.6 volts on bus so solar array looks good. We can wakeup on the sun. Mechanical - confirmed solar array deployment. Imaging - first image!

Chris Lewicky, flight director, running the show tonight, reports that the data is flowing

Expect thumbnails first and then full-frame images soon after.

Power, ACS, Fault, all at the top of the list for data analysis. Power situation is expected to be somewhat different than MER-A. ACS will be working on attitude if the data will support that work. Of course, Fault sub-system will be looking for any faults.

About 20 Megabits of data (more applause). Ramona wins the pool.

Applause as there is indication of data in the Odyssey buffer.

Odyssey team has just said that they'll be looking for data at 1:01.

Opportunity should have deflated her lander airbags, righted the lander by opening that side petal to flip the lander onto its base petal, and, flowerlike, opened up and allowed the rover to open her solar array and get to a power-positive state. The hazard cameras will then have taken a couple of picures. Then the navcam will have taken a couple of pictures before and after the mast assembly deployed. If all that went well, then Opportunity may have been able to send data up to the Odyssey orbiter which could relay that data to us starting sometime in the next few minutes or so.

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.

As I've tried to do for Spirit news, I'll be looking around the blogosphere to try to connect you all to the latest in Opportunity blogging.

At first glance I see Susan at the always informative 2020 Hindsight, Clint Ecker at Switch-Case (and in the adot's notblog comments too), Joost Schuur at Martian Soil, T.L. James at Louisiana Mars Society, and Daniel Morris at From Behind the Wall of Sleep, all blogging Opportunity today.

Keep up the great commentary folks and be sure to let me know of other good people out there blogging Mars and space news.

Press briefing at 10:30 PM (PST). Commentary at 12:45 am. A second briefing at 2 am. I'll have coverage if I can stay awake.

(9:38) Sub-station polling underway.
(9:34) Jason Willis: We're going to go ahead and begin post-landing sub-station polling.
(9:33) Rob: this signal was not rolling. The antenna is pointing toward Earth and it's bouncing off mars and we're getting a multi-path effect so I don't think we've been rolling that long and I'm definitely happy.
(9:30) Flight MGS MOC: the data looks clean. Welcome to Mars. We're gonna stand down at this point if you don't need us any more.
(9:29) Wayne: DTE signal has been lost. Expected. Every indication that the vehicle is alive down on the Martian surface.
(9:29) Rob: We're gonna start looking at MGS data.
(9:29) Rob: pretty clear we're on the petal low gain antenna which the signal is pretty weak on.
(9:27) Wayne: this data will be used to reconstruct EDL but since we have a live lander on the surface of Mars, this probably will not reveal anything dangerous.

We have data coming in via Mars Global Surveyor. We have about 512 seconds of data from MGS.

(9:26) Wayne: this is data that Opportunity transported to MGS during landing sequence that was relayed back to Earth.
(9:25) Flight MGS MOC has received data.
(9:24) Wayne: approximately 20 minutes after touchdown still seeing strong signal from craft.
(9:23) Rob: signal still moving up and down but I'm having a hard time believing we're still rolling. I think I win the bet about basepetal down :) (?)
(9:22) +Y petal down is reported.
(9:21) No fault tones! (applause)
(9:21) Wayne: Receiving simple tones indicating that the vehicle landed with force of between 2 and 3 Gs.
(9:20) Wayne: vehicle in motion for the last 5 minutes evidence by signal increasing and decreasing rate. Not inconceivable that it could roll for a very long time or it could be teetering on an edge.
(9:19) Got our first tone.
(9:18) Rob: signal still going up and down by 10db. Could be a very slow roll or tipping very slowly. A very slow frequency motion.
(9:16) Rob: I think we stopped rolling. Take that back, we're still rolling.
(9:14) Rob: Flight, we are *still* rolling on the surface of Mars!
(9:12) Rob: We're still rolling, very slowly.
Wayne: We still see evidence of rolling.
Rob Manning: We're rolling on Mars, slowly. You can see the signals rising and falling. (remember that they said they'd be monitoring both poles on the antenna, something they didn't do for Spirit? well, I think that gave them much better data on the rolling).

MGS MOC reports that MGS saw a minimum of 2.5 minutes of data after landing.

Rob: Seeing signal on RCP drop and rising on the LCP. May be pointed away from Earth again.

Flight MGS MOC did not see further evidence of UHF and are dropping locks now.

Stanford has not gotten any UHF signal.

We have great and holding signals on the ground.

The lander is alive on the surface of Mars.

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

(I may have some of the measurements of altitude and speed wrong. I was having a lot of trouble with the realplayer feed of NASA TV and I'm a horrible typist. It should be mostly good but don't go quoting it as gospel. My recording of the stream also failed so I can't easily correct it.)

Strong signal from right and left polarizations. bounce and roll for anther 8.5 minutes. Still got signal!
Seeing it on LCP. Much applause
Bouncing signal!!!!
We should be bouncing on the ground.
Radar has ground. retro-rockets fired.
175 mph. 8,000 feet in altitude. Airbags in 20 seconds
Heat shield dropped.
185 mph. 15 seconds from radar lock on ground.
18000 feet.
Parachute deploy detected (applause.)
Parachute should have deployed.
Altitude of 39000 feet. moving 1219 mph.
Accell 3 tones. Onboard computer determining deployment time. about 31 seconds from now. Vehicle wobbling increasing.
Parachute deploy in 30 seconds.
Parachute deploy logic becoming active. decelerating 2.5 Gs. Tones still coming in. 12.7 miles altitude.
16 miles alt. 4,468 mph.
Accell 6 tones. Decelerating between 6-7 Gs.
Accell 2 tones coming in. Decelerating at 5 Gs. Maximum deceleration at 6.5 Gs 7,900 mph.
(9:00) Wayne: vehicle slowing down. Altitude of 44 miles. 12,193 mph. 28.4 times the speed of sound. Over next minute should start to receive tones. Deceleration of 1 G.
(8:59) Wayne: Entry plus 30 seconds, altitude 60 miles.
(8:59) Atmospheric entry. Velocity will continue to increase for the next minute. Alt of 73 miles. 12,700 mph.
(8:58) Wayne: 30 seconds. 150 miles alt.
(8:58) Wayne: 13? miles altitude. 1 minute 12,170 mph
(8:57) Wayne: 90 seconds. 156 miles altitude
(8:57) Wayne: 2 minutes to go. 186 miles altitude, 11,976 mph.
(8:56) Wayne: At 258 miles altitude. 3 minutes to top of atmosphere (80 miles altitude)
(8:55) Wayne: 4 minutes.
(8:53) Wayne: 5:53 seconds from landing. All subsystems are go for EDL. Speed is 11,402 mph. Sit back and enjoy the landing. Now 4:36 seconds from entry. 1,250 miles from Meridiani.
(8:49-8:52) Jason Willis calls for pre-entry polling and gets good/nominal results from everyone.
(8:49) Wayne: Moments away from sub-station polling.
(8:48) Wayne: Accell 1 tone indicates vehicle not yet decelerating. As expected. 11 minutes until entry into Martian atmosphere
(8:47) Wayne: Telecom subsystem reported that we reacquired signal, are in lock and tracking.
(8:47) Wayne: Cruise stage pushed away with springs at 35 cm/sec. It will burn up as it follows Opportunity to entry. Current altitude of 1,264 miles, speed of 10,329 mph and a distance from Meridiani of 2,100 miles.
(8:45) "On behalf of the entire avionics team I'd like to thank you for flying with us and hope you had a pleasant journey" (applause)
(8:45) Wayne: Navigation reporting cruise separation jettison completed successfully.
(8:44) Wayne: Jettison. Calibration tone came in momentarily. Will lose comm momentarily during jettison.
(8:43) Wayne: 1 minute to cruise stage separation.
(8:42) Wayne: 2 minutes to cruise stage separation. 0.79° attitude error, a good number.
(8:41) Wayne: Bister family gave good luck peanuts which are being eaten now.
(8:41) Wayne: Thermal has reported that all freon has been vented into space.
(8:40) Wayne: We are 3 minutes from calibration tone. This one allows us to calibrate and verify tone system that will be used during descent.
(8:38) Wayne: Power anomaly you heard referred to was just a telemetry dropout. At this time the data indicates that the current draw from lander battery is as expected. 5 minutes from cruise stage jettison, altitude of 2183 miles and a speed of 9490 mph.
(8:36) Flight ACS is reporting HRS venting added to pointing error bring it to 1.8°.
(8:36) Power subsystem reports abnormal reading from lander battery was not confirmed with the next reading (some applause).
(8:31) Wayne: We are now half way through cleanup from HRS venting.
(8:30) Power subsystems reports abnormal readings from the lander battery.
(8:30) Wayne: Flight control engineers reported that the gas generators have turned on as expected and Power sub-system report nominal. Opportunity is at an altitude of 3,334 miles and a speed 8,817 mph. Jettison of cruise stage will happen in 13 minutes.
(8:24) Wayne: Jettison of cruise stage will happen in 19 minutes. Opportunity is 34 minutes from entry into Martian atmosphere.
(8:23) Jason Willis looking for confirmation of HRS vent completion.
(8:22) Wayne: HRS vent cleanup in progress. Should be completed in 19 minutes.
(8:19) Wayne: Venting freon into space should have occurred. Venting causes a slight wobble and telecom engineers will be looking for that signature. Spacecraft should be firing small control thrusters to stabilize that wobble.
(8:15-8:18) Jason Willis begins full sub-station polling and all substations reported in with nominal/good reports.
(8:15) Wayne: 45 minutes from entry, altitude of 5,522 miles, speed of 8,094 mph. Sub-system polling about to begin.
(8:13) Wayne: Gas generator heaters should be active.
(8:12) Wayne: That pointing error has been reduced to 0.37°, so even better.
(8:11) Wayne: Nav reports a 0.8° pointing error after the turn which is good news because it can be up to 10° and the craft still enter the atmosphere safely.
(8:10) Wayne: laughter you're hearing is reaction from flight crew looking at before and after pictures of their expressions when Spirit landed.
(8:02) Wayne: In approximately 10 minutes, we'll have the activation of gas generator heaters which bring the gas generators up to temp.
(8:00) Wayne: Opportunity is exactly 1 hour from hitting the top of Martian atmosphere.
(7:57) Jason Willis requests and receives general status from flight subsystems.
(7:56) Wayne: In 10 minutes, flight director Jason Willis will be polling subsystems.
(7:55) Wayne: We are 1 hour and 5 minutes from atmospheric entry,. We're currently at an elevation of 8,267 miles, and moving at 7,758 mph .
(7:54) Wayne: Turn to entry completed 30 seconds ago.
(7:45) Wayne: The turn to entry has nearly complete.

(man, I sure wish they had two channels, one for actual mission status and the other for this general purpose information that's filling so much of the time here)

Live coverage from JPL with Gay Yee Hill. I'll keep non-critical commentary in this thread and start tracking actual status in a new post.

Gay: After seven months of travel, Opportunity has traveled 280 million miles, and is about to join her twin on the surface. We are moments away from the turn to entry when the craft orients its heatshield down to enter the atmosphere.

Wayne Lee: We are 35 seconds into the turn to entry maneuver. We are 1 hour 23 minutes 45 seconds from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere. Altitude of 10,800 miles and a speed of 7,683 mph. Engineers looking at the signal strength as the antenna turns with the craft will confirm the process.

Farouz Naderi: Feeling better in the last 24 hours. Spirit is listening and is communicating to us well. (recap of the news of the last few days. scroll down and read from my earlier posts if you're interested in this.)

Wayne: Telecom subsystem data indicates that turn to entry is nearly complete.

Gay: You've heard that "Mars is hard." No guarantees. Things went well with Spirit but this is a different rover going to a different place. EDL, six minutes of terror. With me is project manager Pete Theisinger.

Pete: We never know. The fact that Spirit was successful means that the design is good but this is a different rover. From a workmanship standpoint, everything's got to work. Still 6 minutes of terror.

Gay: So many things that must go right.

Pete: (talks us through the animation). It could be 15-18 hours before we get a signal if the UHF isn't functioning.

Gay: Special announcement. Dr. Charles Alachi met with parents of a killed soldier in Iraq whose parents both work at JPL. Flag given to parents hanging in the JPL mission control.

Rob: Weather can play a roll. Atmosphere can become less dense at altitudes that count the most becaues of dust storms. We will open the parachute 2 seconds earlier. (Rob talks us through the reconstruction animation of Spirit EDL) With Pathfinder we didn't have as heavy a rover and we didn't have the atmospheric data from Odyssey and MGS so we didn't have the stabilizing rockets in the backshell.

Gay: We are about 33 minutes from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere. If you talked to memebers of this team about site selection, they would tell you we are following the water. Gusev may have been an ancient lake. Meridiani has the lure of hematite, a mineral signaling water. We have Dr. Joy Crisp to talk to us about selection of these spots.

Joy: Sites had to meet our safety criteria first. Elevation, fairly smooth, not a lot of slopes. Not too many large rocks. We used orbita remote sensing to find those safe sites. Once we had that we looked for the best science sites to meet our objectives of finding sites that had past water. Gray hematite is an iron oxide mineral that often forms on Earth in presence of liquid water so when we spotted this mineral from MGS TES we got very excited. Odyssey also gave us some daytime THEMIS data. Meridiani meets our safety criteri and has this hematite. This particular mineral often precipitates out of warm waters. That's intriguing to us.

Chris Jones: You remember back three weeks ago with Spirit we were keeping expectations low, thought there were 50/50 changes there were parts of EDL where we wouldn't hear anything. Today, the telecom performance is anticipated to be less than it was for Spirit. We may miss some of the tones.

Al Gore in attendance. Arnold Swarzeneger there too. Sean O'Keefe there. Steve Squyres.

• 8 minutes to turn to entry.
• Pre-entry turn polling. All subsystems report green for EDL. EDA is green. On 14, carriers locked and telemetry being acquired. Still waiting on ?. Odyssey and MGS are green. MGS MOC is green.
• 15 minutes from start of turn to entry.
• Switch to cruise stage MGA to LGA is complete.
• 5 minute warning to all sub-stations for pre-entry turn assesment polling that will happen at 7:20.
• Flight ACS sees the IMU reinforcement command.
• 45 seconds to LGA switch.

We're a half hour away from the beginning of the live coverage of the Opportunity entry, descent, and landing (EDL for short). If you were watching during the Spirit EDL, then you'll have some idea what to expect but you may also have elevated expectations due to Spirit's uncharacteristically flawless Martian arrival. The project team has been cautioning everyone very consistently the last couple of days not to expect everything to go so well. They still haven't figured out how some of it went so much better than they had planned or expected and they're warning that communication with the Opportunity lander may be far less consistent than it was for Spirit.

Live NASA TV coverage has begun.

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.

If you're interested in the state of the Spirit rover, see my most recent posting on that. Here, now, is a "rough transcript" of the "Mars-side Chat" featuring Dr. Ed Weiller, associate administrator for space science, Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mr. Orlando Figueroa, director of NASA's Mars exploration program, and Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars exploration program at JPL.

Dr. Ed Weiller: No format to this press conference, your chance to ask any questions. I appreciate that you know by now that landing and operating on Mars is really tough. We warned you. You and us got used to success after success. We've had the early ups and the down and we're on the up again. There will be more downs. We've got the best team on Earth operating the Spirit lander. I came here yesterday at 3 o'clock expecting a funeral and things are looking a lot better. There's a lesson in that. The third thing I'd like to say is that the people at JPL and Lock-Martin deserve a lot of credit. We've been relying on MGS and Odyssey. MGS is well beyond its end of mission and Odyssey is coming to the end and we've relied heavily on them. Any questions you have...

Q. How many website hits. Last count was 2.5 billion

Ed: 4 billion. Since we landed, we've already exceeded total number of hits from 2003. The majority of those hits are from youngsters. That's with our vision.

Dr. Charles Elachi: That has exceeded the total hits on all government websites (in 2003?) including IRS. 29 million unique users.

Q. Thoughts on Moon and Mars and beyond the solar system.

Charles: People already working on this. This is a generation, we've got a younger generation of scientists and engineers that will be carrying this beyond. The next generation is already here.

Orlando Figueroa: Average age of people working on this program is remarkable and energizing to see. There is a next generation that is coming and there is the older generation (gestures to those on stage) but there is also a present generation of explorers that is keeping the vision alive.

Firouz Naderi: We have gotten a lot of email from 5 and 6 year olds that have suggested ways to fix the rover. One child asked for a full blueprint of the rover and promised he would fix it.

Charles: one other kid volunteered to go up to Mar and fix it.

Ed: There is a valuable life lesson here. If you try something difficult you try and you persist and failure is OK but you keep trying and trying and trying. It would have been easy to throw our hands up in the air when the media declared us dead a couple of days ago, some in the media, but they kept trying and got the first step to the solution.

Q. Could any of you comment on whether there are particular lessons about [....] diagnose and solve problems we're having now?

Charles: On just about every mission we've had similar problems. You cannot predict all the problems. [connection lost...] You prepare and you have a first-rate team. You cannot predict the millions of scenarios. If you have a first-rate team and have the people who built the hardware there when you run into a problem, having those people there is important.

Ed: In Mars 98 we had two failures noted in the report. The team that built the craft left when it was done. Prime recommendations for that report specifically said keep the people who built the spacecraft on the team.

Orlando: Leadership is important, too. There is no room to panic. They kicked us (management) out of the room when we got too loud.

Firouz: We have a lot of flexibility in the product. People have been asking for human medical analysis. We are going to go to RAM which might not be as efficient, my left arm doesn't take the spoon to my mouth as efficiently as my right arm does. I'm confident that if it comes that we cannot use Flash memory, we will be able to do just fine, maybe a little less efficient, but we'll do just fine and I'm not saying we won't be able to revive flash memory.

Q. What's the mood in Washington about impact on the economy. The Apollo mission innovation benefitted the economy of Southern California. What might happen later this decade.

Ed: President's new initiative will probably be in the O'Keefe talk in a couple more hours. President made it clear that we're going to increase robotic and human exploration. That's going to require new technologies and new investments so perhaps the people in IT or in the space world will be happy with that initiative.

Firouz: Space program starts something, private sector picks it up and then we pump the private sector gains back into the space program. A symbiosis there.

Q. Will there be a private sector fast-track plan?

Orlando: Part of the Presidents agenda is more aggressive competitions.

Charles: Even with these rovers, there were hundreds of small companies involved, even internal to NASA, there is a tremendous number of small and large business involved. Odyssey and MGS done by Lockheed Martin. These initiatives will revive not only industry but also in education. Lot of kids going into engineering.

Ed: A lot of people believe that when they see some of our missions that these things are built within NASA. It's hardly the case. Even in-house programs like MER use small companies all over the country. Some are totally outside like MGS with Lockheed Martin. We're not carrying money to Mars. Every dollar that went into these rovers went into salaries in California and Colorado and into companies here in the USA.

Firouz: The company that built the MER arm talking on the radio referred to it as "our rover". Contributors think of it as their own.

Q. Some talk about how much they accomplished in a short development cycle. We've known about the close approach to Mars, why was cycle so compressed? Funding issues? Also how do you select the partners? How does the money flow?

Ed: Why was the schedule compressed? We had two failures in Mars 98. We had a program in place and those failures showed us how crazy that program was, including sample returns and other budget-busting plans. We had to scrap that program as unrealistic. It was rebuilt from the ground up. One aspect was these two Mars rovers. Pathfinder's airbag success led us to believe that JPL could do this.
In terms of how Cornell got involved, all scientific instrument programs are selected through a competitive process. NASA headquarters is responsible for that so we issue an "announcement of opportunity" open to all institutions. They send in proposals. NASA headquarters does a review and selection. That's how we selected payload for this and other missions. In the old days NASA used to give it all to the NASA centers. We've done a 180 on that. It also happened that Steve Squyres [who resides at Cornell] was the Principal Investigator on the team.

Charles: We had 3 years from when it was selected to launch it. That was very tough. It was challenging and that's why you see Ed and Orlando and Administrator O'Keefe giving extra praise.

Orlando: Also, the concept of a "program view" is important. There was a dead heat between another orbiter and going to the surface. When you looked at the data coming from MGS and the still being developed Odyssey we realized that the advantage of newer technologies in a new orbiter wasn't as good as in a lander.

Firouz: Late April of 2000 we were sitting here looking at short lists for 2003 and MER was not on that short list. MER proposal persisted and got into the choice of 2 (MER and orbiter) and we went to Ed and he heard the choices of the "safer" orbiter and MER and he ended up with a tie-breaker vote and that's how MER came from the back of the pack.

Q. How much extra did the second rover cost.

Orlando: 820 million total, either 50%/50% or 60%/%40.

Q. You talked about lessons learned from 98 failures. Didn't Mars Exploration office fold into a larger entity?

Ed: Tom Young, in his report on Mars 98 failures, had lots of recommendations and we committed to follow every one. One recommendation was to take the program back into NASA headquarters. We have a much tighter command chain, now. One problem with Mars 98 was no communication from lower levels in JPL to higher levels even with JPL and worse up to NASA headquarters. This has been dramatically improved. People were afraid to ask dumb questions. I ask dumb questions all the time, to try to set an example. Freedom of communications can make a world of difference. Communication is critical. People think of the technology but something simple like good communications is important. I think we've achieved that.

Charles: Young report also said it's not easy to do deep space missions so we engaged more heavily the technical expertise. Made absolutely sure that they're getting support, advise, peer review. Going to Mars is not a routine thing. 15 years from now it may become routine.

Ed: It ain't gonna be routine ;-)

Charles: after 400 million miles we got down within 100 meters. That takes a lot.

Q. Two dumb questions :-) Could you talk more about cost v. performance with two rovers. Why not a bunch of little tiny ones. Second part is "follow the water" choice. What are you not doing by chasing the water.

Ed: If my neighbor across the fence asks why are we doing this. Simple answer is "we are going to Mars to search for life" The bottom line is that to search for life you've got to do geology, minerology, climatology, atmosphere. We're going there to answer a basic human question, "are we alone?" We're going there, even sending humans to find out are we alone. On earth, wherever you find water, you find evidence of life.

Charles: To find life you need to understand a lot. A single little machine is not going to find life. This is a long term program to find life. You need a broader understanding.

Orlando: A lot of very small ones versus a bigger one, when we launched pathfinder and sojourner, it's mobility was limited and a lot of brains were sitting on the lander. With MER we've got a larger rover with brains on the rover and a bigger set of science instruments. Next generation will open new doors with nuclear power and more mobility, capacity.

Firouz: If you only have one kind of screwdriver in your toolbox you're not a serious handyman. We don't have one size fits all. People ask if we're only going to use airbags now. No. We'll use them when they make sense but keep expanding the tool set we have.

Ed: small things will have a place in the future. You've heard us talking about understanding our atmosphere. Right now we have a luxury of satellites telling us about our weather. I have to believe we'll be landing lots of little weather boxes in the future. There will be a place for small things.

Q. Nano sensors?

Ed: Scout program. Mars surprises us every time we go there so we created scout program and we just selected a scout program, Phoenix lander for north poll scheduled to land in 2008. We expected and got proposals for "motherships" that would go and drop lots of smaller things.

Orlando: Program investing in technologies to enable that.

Firouz: we have range of crafts from little tiny crab-like crafts all the way up to rovers that would roll over and squish MER.

Q. You mentioned yesterday's mood. What's your mood today and expectations.

Ed. There was nothing but bad news yesterday. I tend to expect the worst. Anything above the worst makes me feel great and I could tell this morning when I walked in that something good had happened. Tom Gavin was smiling and he never smiles. I'm back at reality and we have a long road ahead of us. They made a prediction in what was causing the systematics of the problem, sent some tests and it worked.

Charles: mood has come up and down but one thing that has stayed steady is that the guys, and girls have stayed focused, disciplined and calm. I give a lot of credit to the team and leadership.

Orlando: The one thing that happened immediately within seconds of the problem being identified the news made it right up through the chain. Then the team had some time to feel sad and that was important. First day and a half were grueling but the team switched almost immediately to another mode and jumped on it. I said "they're gonna figure this out". During development we often questioned whether we were gonna make it and we did. We have a resilient team.

Ed: Speculation based on human nature, there are a few engineers that I rely on one who is very conservative and negative, that he was very positive and that we can go a lot longer than three months, given that I'm pretty confident that we'll have a successful mission.

Charles; example of Galileo. Even with all th problem we had a great mission. We'll get through this.

Ed. We attended many funerals of Galileo and just recently we celebrated its total success.

Q. Operationally what will you do differently with Opportunity?

Firouz: two teams, two different sides of the planet. At this point we have no evidence that what is ailing Spirit will be a problem with Opportunity. If it is hardware, the occurrence of the problem could be much more random. If it was software, even at that, you and I can buy the same laptop and it's not necessarily that what happens with the software on mine will happen on yours.

Charles: but we'll be looking.

Firouz: Spirit is in a safe state. We're focused on getting Opportunity on the surface safely then some focus back on Spirit.

Q. Demonstrate the value of all of this by talking about what people use in everyday life that come from these missions. I think of the internet. What do you see as benefits in the future to general public to keep up interest.

Orlando: You've seen the access we've provided at all the websites that are disseminating all this data. The other is that there have been several focused events, Marsapallooza, you may have heard, to get schools and children involved in the process.

Q. How do you see a shift of gears with the science community to start asking questions about human operational activities on Mars.

Ed: near term space science missions will continue and continue to be science driven. I see more robotic missions not fewer. I see a combination of science goals with other goals that tie in to human exploration. We might start measuring radiation and how to convert Martian materials into human-usable stuff. We know how to go to the Moon and we know how to go to Mars and we'll be a platform for the human exploration program.

Q. Will you start inserting human exploration projects into 2011 or 2009 missions?

Ed: maybe 2009 with the nuclear lander. Possibility that there may be Mars missions inserted too.

Charles: Complementary efforts. Accuracy of landing, pinpoint landing is one example. Engineering objectives can be developed and tested in science missions.

Ed: Right, we might test some of that in the 2008 Moon mission. We might test precise landing missions to get the right rock back from the Aikin basin on the Moon.

Q. Some scientists fear human exploration of Mars because it's potential to contaminate the planet.

Ed: That's been worried about for a long time. John Rummel, planetary protection officer at NASA has the job of ensuring that we don't carry contamination with it. He can report around me to the administrator if he sees something he doesn't like.

Orlando: John and I have become close personal friends and MER was an issue we had to address. MRO issues too. MSL has many issues too. You're carrying nuclear payload, you're potentially melting ice and creating environments and he won't let us get in trouble.

Briefing note: at 4pm we'll have a short brief with NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and at 7:30 we'll begin live coverage of the Opportunity landing.

After listening to today's press briefing, I feel a lot better about Spirit's chances of returning to active duty. Pete Theisinger, Project Manager for the MER project, was careful not to raise expectations too high and suggested that it could be two to three weeks before Spirit is driving again but it sounds like they've started to get a handle on what's wrong.

Based on the information available from the last few press briefings, and my limited understanding of some of the technical details, here's where I think we stand:

Spirit has three kinds of memory. The first, double EPROM, is used to store the system "flight" software. It's non-volatile, meaning that when the rover is powered down, that memory can hold its data. The second kind of memory Spirit has is 256 Megabytes of RAM, not unlike what you'd find in a PC. This RAM is volatile and any data stored in it will be lost when the system powers down. Sprit's third memory type is its flash memory, and I think there is 128 MB of this (though my feed was breaking up during that part of the briefing). Flash, like you'd find in a digital camera, can hold its data even when the system is powered down.

There exists some kind of problem either accessing or utilizing parts of this flash memory. The flash, I believe, is in two banks or modules. It supports both operational software, and storage of collected data like photographs or telemetry. When the rover wakes up each morning, it builds a file system in that flash memory and when it shuts down each night, it performas a clean-up on that file system. Spirit was experiencing some problem in that process which was causing failures and triggering the rover to reboot itself. Because of this problem, the rover was unable to "go to sleep", to shut itself down for the night and also unable to perform other scheduled and commanded tasks. A problem utilizing that flash memory to calculate the HGA position is probably what caused the rover to drop into x-band fault mode, it's low-bandwidth communication "safe mode".

This morning, the MER team commanded Spirit to switch to something called "Cripple Mode" and then to reboot. Cripple Mode bypasses the flash memory. The change was successful and the rover is no longer freaking out in a reboot loop, and is able to respond to shutdown and other commands. The vehicle is now in a stable power and thermal state; it is commandable; and it appears that the fault protection has worked as planned.

The next step on the path to Spirit's returning to operation will be the establishment of high-rate data connections so that the mission team can slurp down the contents of that flash memory and other fault and telemetry data and start to analyze what's there. This will be done with UHF communication to Odyssey to Earth.

The team still leans toward a hardware fault hypothesis because they've been unable to reproduce the problem in the testbed where they have a high-fidelity "copy" of the rover and rover software. When they load in to the testbed all of the status information they have from Spirit and run through Spirit's motions, they are unable to trigger the problem. On the other hand, they've loaded their flight software in each of the two flash modules and tested with similar results. That might suggest it is a software bug rather than a hardware bug.

I think that if they do find out that it's a problem in the flash harware, the chips or their gates, and they have to abandon some or all of the flash memory, the mission should still be able to continue and gather great science. Losing the flash would mean that they couldn't store science or engineering data overnight, though, so they'd have to be careful to gather only as much data as they could safely return before the rover goes to sleep. This might limit the total volume of science that could be done but these guys are really sharp and this rover is pretty amazing so I wouldn't be surprised if they develop better compression techniques, get additional time from the orbital assets, and use other techniques to continue to deliver science data at a good rate.

I hope that this summary was helpful (and somewhat accurate). If you've got more information or corrections, I'm happy to hear about it in the comments or e-mail. I'm off to watch the 2PM Mars chat with Dr. Ed Weiler.

(In all its un-proofed glory. Enjoy)

Natalie: latest information on Spirit and Opportunity

Pete Theisinger:
Good morning. We made good progress overnight and the rover's been upgraded from critical to serious. We have a working hypothesis that involved the flash vehicle and the process used to access that memory. Processor has 3 kinds, RAM, used in realtime mode and that's volatile. Flash memory, can be read to and written from easily and has non-volatile characteristics. Double eprom more difficult to write to and read from stores part of the flight software image. Software has to communicate with flash memory which is used to store science and engineering telemetry. Sofware has to communicate with that memory, locating files, opening files, reading and writing. We are capable of operating in cripple mode by not using flash memory. In this mode, the filesyetem uses RAM rather than flash. Let me talk about the chronology. When we last talked we were attempting to shut down vehicle and had inability to shut it down. That was confirmed when later we had a UHF Odyssey session of 73 MB of data, mostly fill or garbage, but also got some fault data, some current and 14 hours old. Thought we might go into low power overnight. This morning at 9:30 no communications window indicating that the vehicle had gone into low-power that would cause vehicle to come up at 11: and talk to us. Just before 11: we said go into cripple mode. Then said "and reset". We commanded a 1 hour communication session. So the craft came up in cripple mode and we had a 1 hour communications session at 128bps. Progressive sets of resets did not reoccur. Something involved in flight software that talks to the flash memory causing this difficulty. When craft first wakes up it needs to communicate with flash to establish a file structure. If it's unable to do that it will not complete those tasks appropriately and reset itself and not shut down. After communications session we commanded shutdown to recharge batteries and shutdown was successful. We sent two post shutdown beeps and did not get response confirming that the vehicle was sleeping. We also yesterday terminated tonight's UHF passes and reset uploss timer. Uploss timer is fault code that goes into play when the vehicle thinks it has a communications problem. We have a vehicle that is stable now in power and thermal. Have a working hypothesis that we have confirmed. Fault protection worked as designed. Took us a while to figure out what was going on but it worked as it was supposed to do. We have a go forward plan. The cripple mode needs to be re-established each day. We need to establish a high-rate link to get much more data back, particularly if we want to get the flash data back to determine what has happened. likely to use afternoon Odyssey pass to do that. Then establish the contents of flash to determine what happened. Then move forward with diagnoisis and recovery of the vehicle. Remember that this was all kicked off by seq 2502 using elevation motor in the mast failing to complete. We don't know the detials of why that happened and we need to determine that. Mission consequences are uncertain at the present time. We feel we have more capability left in the vehicle than worst case. Still need a couple of weeks to establish what's happening and rebuild our confidence in what's working on the vehicle. I'm guessing three weeks before we get back to driving. Team will go into double-shift operations a few days after Opportunity landing. This is very good news. We've got reliable communications. We have controllability, can establish a good power and thermal state, and we have a working hypothesis that we can work around a significant measure if it turns out our hypothesis is correct. Jim to talk about Opportunity. I'm sure my credibility was destroyed a couple weeks ago when I said how hard it was to land on Mars and then everything went so sell. It is in fact hard to land on Mars and you should not expect the events to go as well as it did last time. Might not get tones on the bridal, pictures back as soon.

Jim Erickson:
Tonight we're going to be sending Opportunity to send it sister rover on Mars. Short status: overall we're in great shape. Last night did lander battery de-passivation, last engineering activity. That went fine. Everything is in great shape. Attitude is good. Solar panels pointing to sun, medium gain antenna pointing to earth. Everything we can think of is going well. As with SPirit was at this point, we're running EDL software onboard. Fully prepared to do turn to entry. It's prepared when it sees the atmosphere and begin the complex set of activities that will put it on the surface of Mars safely. Flight team tonight if all goes well will be merely watching. Hope to have a quite night, exciting at the end. Last Friday we performed TCMB4, last maneuver, only 120 grams of propellant, very small. Spirit performed flawlessly on EDL. Opportunity has some big shoes to fill. Very likely we'll have more difficulty staying in lock all the way down to the ground, and telling you the exact status throughout the night. Waiting longer for confirmation tones doesn't mean anything's wrong. Lower signal because Mars is moving away from us. It's been a long 7 months. Here's Nagin to tell us about the team that got us from Earth to Mars.

Nagin Cox:
Group of 60 people called "cruise operations team" have had 7 months to get to know these vehicles as they fly to Mars. Many experts from all over the project. Many involved in building the vehicles. We've had a set of expected events and unexpected. On the expected side, we've built, planned, executed activities to do spacecraft maneuvers, checkout activities to evaluate components and instruments, later in cruise we had activities to support EDL and surface operations. On the unexpected side, we had a very extensive solar storm where we had to respond to the effects of radiation on the spacecraft. We've been doing all these activities in parallel. One team doing it all for Spirit and Opportunity. Late in cruise we began operational readiness tests, dress rehearsals for the surface. Cruise team will be joining surface operation team. Never lost sight of main goal delivering two vehicles safely to surface of Mars. Today is the last day of this effort. We have been flying these vehicles from the cruise mission building and we'll be moving to a different building and the people will be moving to join the surface teams. This has been a remarkable ride. It has been an honor to accompany Spirit and Opportunity to Mars. We've gotten to know the vehicles and we've gotten to know the people. We're looking forward to joining the surface team and Opportunity joining Spirit on the surface of Mars.

Louis D'Amario:
Navigation status for Opportunity is excellent. We're in really good shape. In comparison to Spirit, Opportunity traveled slightly less distance to Mars, 460 million km, or 280 million miles compared to 300 million miles for Spirit. Opportunity is 103K km or 64K miles from Mars, traveling at 3Km/sec or 6700 mph. Atmospheric entry is 9 hours away at 9:06PM Earthtime. Spacecraft time is 9:00 PM. The one-way light time is about 11 minutes, compared to 9.5 minutes for Spirit. Last trajectory correction maneuver was 8 days ago, very small, only about 1/10m/sec or 1/4 mph velocity change to correct an error on surface of about 380 km. Also adjusted arrival time by about 36 seconds. This is the same map I showed at the Spirit pre-EDL. It shows various features and also the location of Gusev and also Meridiani Planum. Objective of navigation time is to put Opportunity on target for landing in Meridiani Planum, to land on a specific location, the landing ellipse, that has dimensions of 74 km by 5 km. That's about 46 miles by 4 miles. It's only about 1/1000th of 1% of the surface of Mars. To accomplish that we have scheduled 5 trajectory correction maneuvers, TCMs for short, plus one contingency TCM in case there was some serious problems uncovered late. For Opportunity, we skipped the 3rd TCMs that was about two months ago because errors were small enough that we could delay until TCM4 last Friday. Subsequent to that we canceled TCM 5 that was scheduled for Thursday. This morning we canceled final contingency TCM 6. We managed to target Opportunity to the desired atmospheric entry point that will bring us to the target landing point using only 3 TCMs in that 280 million mile trip to Mars. You'll remember I made an analogy to golf. With Spirit we only used four shots, got a birdie, with Opportunity we got an eagle, did even better. This is a large view of Meridiani, not the full area that contains the hematite material, but the area around the target landing point, that cross hairs right in the center of the visual. That ellipse is the current prediction of our landing dispersions, the elliptical shaped area in which we believe there's a 99% chance we'll land. Close-up you can see target at cross hairs, ellipse is displaced a little bit down track from target. That distance is about 11km. At this point in Spirit, we were about 3.5 km up track, or to the left and ended up landing 10km down track. For Spirit, the 9 hr predicted movement was about 13 km. So on this visual, we're not gonna land at the center of the ellipse. If we get a movement of 10 or 15 km that would not be at all unexpected. The dispersions ellipse is about, half is about 32 km so 15km movement is well within expected. It looks like from a navigation point of view we're two for two, hit the bullseye again, and, needless to say, makes the navigation team very pleased. It's been challenging but pleasing. In a review meeting we had recently someone made the analogy that navigators are the truck drivers. We deliver the product. We've delivered Opportunity to Mars successfully and now it's up to EDL to get us safely to the ground.

Rob Manning:
Apparently, my team is the team that drops the truck ;-) This truck is on its way to Meridiani. Thanks for getting us here. My job is actually very easy at this point because we're almost done. We're doing last calculations to make sure that EDL software parameters are correct and they will do exactly what we want them to do when we land. Very likely we'll know in a couple of hours that we're not going to change anything. What we did change though, we learned a lot, as you heard from Wayne Lee yesterday, that Spirit was a wonderful landing and we learned a lot about how the EDL system performed. This is that clip from yesterday, an animation constructed from actual data returned from Spirit during landing as well as data returned afterwards. Headed to ground at 150 mph and we got a good wind gust. Rockets fired to bring us to a stop some 28 feet above the ground. It was a very good landing. It was within our expectation for Gusev. Because it's a crater we expected a lot of winds so we put those attitude control rockets countering that angle, allowing the airbags to have a very happy easy landing. What have we learned? We have the data and everything worked the way we expected. We're getting weather reports every other day from Meridiani, via MGS TES instrument from Goddard. We get a processed weather report with atmospheric density information. This is the big difference between Meridiani and Gusev. For us, EDL team, air is the big thing. We use air to slow us down. We have two parts, the hypersonic phase, we expect this to be almost identical as with Spirit, entry angle almost exactly the same as we saw with Spirit. What is different, is because Meridiani is higher up and has had a recent dust storm in middle of December the atmospheric condition changed. With weather reports we can estimate atmosphere and run thousands of simulations which told us we had a little less timeline margin so we elevated the altitude and time at which the parachute would open so we have more time for all those activities between parachute opening and getting to the surface. There isn't a lot of air in Mars so this is a very exciting but terrifying ride. What happens when we get to the ground. What are the airbags gonna see when we land. There is a difference. Gusev had lots of slopes and rocks. Meridiani has rocks and slopes but less of them. Doesn't mean we won't land in an unsafe area. However, EDL is a controlled crash and it's as scary as it's ever been so even though our computer models say it might be easier, this is a hard thing to do, it's not something you do everyday, it's another experiment, and hopefully we'll get it right today. What to expect? We're landing a little bit earlier, about an hour earlier about 1:30 or so in the Mars afternoon about 9 PM our time. Given that we're landing earlier, that changes the time line a little bit. If you remember at Gusev we had little time between landing and when we had the Odyssey pass. We have more time between when we land and Odyssey passes. The time to take this vehicle in this configuration to the point where it's opened and configured is longer so we've got a little bit better chance of getting our Odyssey pass done, but if we land other than base petal down, it could take much longer, and the Odyssey pass could not be visible. It's a roll of a 4-sided die :). We expect some differences. We're further away from Mars so signal's reduced somewhat. Angles are different too so we could lose signal sooner and it could stay absent all the way to entry. We have a medium chance of getting those tones. We may have gotten lucky with Spirit orientation and swinging. We still don't know how we got those tones so clearly, why it worked so well. Also, remember after we landed there was this painful 15 minutes of silence. It turns out we were communicating with antennae on top of the vehicle. We rolled in a spot where we were sitting so that the bottom antenna was pointing toward Earth. The top antennae was pointing away. We found out we were only getting one polarization signal. This time we'll process and display both polarizations while we're rolling around on the surface which might slightly increase our chances of seeing that signal during the potential 15 minutes we're bouncing around. Might lower my blood pressure some ;-) Also would be crucial if there is an anomaly. DSN is doing it's finest at Goldstone and Canberra to be listening with all its antennae.

Pete:
If I could break in with a couple of things. You need to understand what Spirit has proven and what it has not proven. The design is identical, but they are separate vehicles. It has proven the design but there is equipment that has not exercized since launch. Though Spirit has established that the UHF can work, does not mean it will work on Opportunity. Absence of signal for long periods of time, as long as 22 hours, does not mean that the mission has not been a success. This is a different physical vehicle even if the Spirit experience gives us a lot of confidence that the design works.

Q. Yesterday you were sure it was a problem that would not cross over to Opportunity. Are you as confident today?

Pete: I feel as uncertain as I did yesterday. If it is in the software then in fact that could be a bug or a set of rules we don't understand we need to operate under to avoid the occurence. If it is not in software only but has been triggered in hardware or interaction then it is probably a singular event and not a problem for Opportunity.

Q. Is this comparable to a brain transplant and what happened to the science data that was there.

Pete: The science data is still in flash and may or may not be recoverable. Software people are off looking at that. We would like for reasons not related to science data, because return of vehicle functionality is more important than science data, to not destroy the contents of Flash because that would help us understand how we got here. We could reformat the flash if we wanted to, but we'd like not to do that.

Q. Moving to the actual landing can you give us picture of which signal from which antenna and will it come via the Odyssey pass and what's the timing so we know what to look for.

Rob: We use an antenna on cruise stage and entry to talk directly to earth. MGS cannot see that. It's not until we repell down the backshell, fall through the air with the backshell sliding back tgat we transmit back up to MGS. Then there's another antennae that transmits, x-band that transmits to Earth. Those two continue transmitting all the way through bouncing, and in the case of x-band, all the way through rolling to a stop. On spirit landing we got a good signal from both of those except rolling. MGS actually got that signal and we recovered that half an hour after we got to Mars. Tonight, about 30-45 minutes after we land, we expect a big chunk of data to come back via MGS assuming the radio works. We don't know if it works. That would give us info about how EDL worked, but doesn't tell you about the spacecraft surviving. Doesn't tell you about orientation. Once we roll to a stop, one of the back or front antennas will send out tones describing orientation and state of vehicle in very, very rough terms about 15-17 minutes after landing. After that, the radios are all turned off and we don't hear from it again for quite a while while airbags are retracting, petals are opening up, solar arrays open, and vehicle putting itself into power safe mode. Once that's done, if it's not past 4PM local solar time then rover will communications with Odyssey. If that's not done in time then we won't get Odyssey data. We would get Odyssey data about 4.5 hours after landing if that worked.

Q. Quick turnaround on lessons learned from Spirit. Degree of difficulty about finding out about bugs in software and what you do to get these resolved tonight and maybe later in the mission.

Pete: you find bugs in software by using it. Then you testbed to see what got you in trouble. That's what the software development program does from the very beginning. We'll take whatever we learn from Spirit diagnostics and apply it to Opportunity. That's surface software. There is no real urgency to do that as long as we maintian utilization of flash under measured control. If this is a bug with the flash, we operated for 18 days on Spirit successfully, at least at low data volumes, so we don't' anticipate a problem for early surface on Opportunity. Certainly doesn't impact EDL. Nor would we contemplate any changes to EDL software, much to late for that. We do have time post landing to find out where we are with spirit to determine if we've got a lessons learned case. If we do we'll establish operating rules that might limit how you use it until we could work out a software fix that we could upload. We have capability to patch. No sense of urgency for landing or early surface events from Opportunity. If that turns out to be the flaw. Once again, though, we don't know what the flaw is.

Q. To what extent will early operations be affected by what you've learned from Spirit. Would you consider delaying mast deployment.

Pete: No. Mast deploy is done by this actuator down here and will automatically happen and that's done tonight if the software sequence gets that far without problems. I think that how Spirit and Opportunity will interact will depend on how things go. Given the state of facts today, we'll try to continue both impact to egress on Opportunity and some kind of diagnostic schedule on Spirit. Nothing compells us to stop the Opportunity process. We'll play this out one day at a time.

Q. Pete, could you tell us possibilities on not recovering flash memory? impact of that on science?

Pete: Speculation so treat it that way. The chances that we lose all of it is remote. Contains part of flight software image. There's two flash memories. We were going from one to the other in the resets. Since we had the flaw, it's probably where the two memories come together or it's in the flight software. There is at least a segment of that flash working. If we had to operate without that we'd be limited on science to downloading all the data we took that day because it would be lost overnight. Chance the way scientists gather data. Might change the pace we'd gather data. We'd adjust, compression ratios, science gathering. We'd have a very productive mission even without the ability to save overnight. We could still do night science even as long as we could dump to Odyssey and MGS. We're a long way from understanding the problem well enough to know.

Q. Yesterday you were leaning to hardware. Still the case?

Pete: Yes. We don't know. There was some triggering event in the sequence. The sequence was not a wakeup or shutdown sequence. Was it something in parallel with the sequence or was it the sequence. The reason I still think it's likely to be hardware is that we've been unable to reproduce in testbed by simply running the sequences. It's not like you can just run A, B, C and D and reproduce it. Something else is going on. I don't know the extent to which we've reproduced all the data products. There may be something there. The thing that argues against hardware is that when we load software out of both flash images, the response is the same.

Q. Just before planetfall the lander will make three images of what it sees beneath it, to determine horizontal velocity will those be transmitted to earth in realtime.

Rob: Not realtime. If we get those at all, it will be in the first odyssey pass or later in the evening. We were surprised that Spirit got those to us. It was a good pass. Might even come later in the week.

(Schedule: 2PM E Wieller Mars chat. Then Dr Elachin, Orlando Figueroa, and Farouz Naderi. 4PM Sean O'Keefe. Commentary at 7:30 and post landing news conference at approximately 10:30PM)

Q. Does the fault tree analysis point to any specific hardware. Looking at computer components as a hardware issue?

Pete: Fault tree exam just begun. Until last night the range was too broad to do that kind of analysis. There's probably chips and gates involved in addressing lines and places where those come together for both memories maybe. Will not be looking at processor itself. The processor is running fine. That we could boot into cripple mode exonerates the processor and supporting chips. I'ts a relatively restricted set of memory and IO that would be involved here.

Q. 22 hours for first signal? When is no signal a bad sign?

Pete: If we do not have a signal by late tomorrow evening Pacific time we have a presumption of being in serious trouble.

Q. Spirit was in a safe mode related to HGA. We know HGA had a hardware glitch early on. Possibly related?

Pete: Probability of that has been lessened. Last hypothesis I've heard, X-band fault because a position comparison which involves the flash to determine between where the HGA is thought to be and where it is, if those disagree, you can end up in x-band fault. Right now, you cannot exonnerate it but it seems more likely that the flash problem or ability to write to flash issue could have caused the computer to reach an erroneous conclusion. We don't have a root cause yet. There's a series of events here and we see the tail end of the series of events, effects on flash, fatals, couldn't get shutdown, all those are connected to the flash and the software that writes to the flash. We still have to move to the software that relies on that and the set of events upstream of that. It may be that it was only the flash use or some other precipitating event. We can't yet exonerate the events of the morning of sol18.

Q. how much memory

Pete: 128 MB of RAM, 128 MB of RAM.

12:00 PM (PST): Press Briefing
2:00 PM: Mars program overview.
7:30 PM: Live coverage of the Opportunity entry, descent, and landing.
9:05 PM: Opportunity lands on the Martian surface.

The EDL should be very similar to Spirit's, which I blogged about three weeks ago. If you want a preview of what's to come this evening (hopefully), scroll down to the first post of January 3rd and start reading up.

I'll post notes from the press briefing as soon as it's concluded.

Steve points out in the comments the latest press release from the MER team:

NASA's Spirit rover did not go to sleep today even after ground controllers sent commands twice for it to do so.

Shortly before noon, controllers were surprised to receive a relay of data from Spirit via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Spirit sent 73 megabits at a rate of 128 kilobits per second. The transmission included power subsystem engineering data, no science data, and several frames of "fill data." Fill data are sets of intentionally random numbers that do not provide information.

Spirit had not communicated successfully through Odyssey since the rover's communications difficulties began on Wednesday.

???!!! Something's working :D ?!?!

And if you haven't already seen it, this MOC image (from MGS) is really amazing. They've got a technique I pointed out some days ago that allows them to get about 50cm/px resolution and the lighting was just right to get this awesome photograph of the lander and other Spirit hardware on Mars. Awesome.

This is my attempt to summarize the state of things with Spirit:

On Wednesday, Spirit was to begin an overnight mini-TES exposure. At night, the temperatures are much colder and so motor that moves mini-TES requires more voltage. The engineering team sent up a series of commands that would have the motor increase voltage, move, report home, increase voltage, move, report home, etc. The final command(s?) did not complete.

Now, Sprit is encountering several problems:

Spirit is in x-band fault mode and able to receive commands from Earth and to respond but the bandwidth for this communication is very low.

First, HGA communication isn't happening. The High Gain Antenna, you'll remember, expereinced some odd voltage spikes from one of it's motors in the first days on the surface. For unknown reasons, Spirit is unable to use the HGA. The HGA failure could be a trigger for the x-band fault mode.

Spirit's software is not responding consistently. The engineers have gotten inconsistent results in two communications but it has not prevented them from commanding the rover to send back telemetry on it's various health sub-systems including power, thermal, and communications.

The rover is not shutting itself down at night. If the engineering team cannot shut the rover down at night the batteries will drain and it will be in what's called "low-power" situation. The rover is able to wake up and recharge batteries with its solar array even if the batteries are at zero so this low-power situation, if it happens, is not life-threatening to Spirit.

The craft is in a processor reset loop. It has performed an estimated 60 reset attempts since Wendesday. The cause for this is still unknown but a non-software fault is probably the cause. It is believed that the thing that is causing the reset is not always the same.

(more when I get home from work tonight.)

The Spirit briefing is about to begin. I'll post notes as soon as it's concluded (If I can keep up enough to take a second to post, and there's anything really good or really bad to report, I'll get something up sooner).

Really rough preliminary note - excuse the spelling and grammar :-) You can read the "official" press release here.

Pete Theisinger: We have been able to command SPirit and have gotten limited response. Flight software not behaving normally. When I left you yesterday I said we had recieved a response from the craft and that was correct. We attempted to command the craft to send us telemetry. That command did not work because it was too late in the day. This morning we sent an early beep and did not get a response. When we were about to send a second, it talked to us. We got 20 minutes of transmission with a single frame of engineering data. We received another 15 minutes of data. Spacecraft attempted a short comm at end of day. It's in a processor reset loop. Processor wakes up, loads the software and waits for 15 minutes twice and resets. The indications we have are that the things that causes the reset is not always the same. We know that the sequence that began wed mroning to calibrate Mini-TES motor, that didn't finish. Craft is in an x-band fault condition could be failure to move high-gain antenna. 1 oclock wed craft did not believe itself to be in a fault condition. Team is taking data it has collected and moving forward and analyzing what they no to prepare a plan of action. We believe that we can sustain the state of the craft from a health point of view for a long time. No indication of a power or thermal point of view. Indication that we're not going to sleep at night. An anomaly team has been formed separate from Opportunity team. They will be working on schedule from 500 mars time to 1500 mars time. They'll be coming in tonight at midnight. First, examination of data and go forward plan for the day, then on consoles for the day, the post planning. I expect this to go on for several days, talking to thecraft, gathering data, making theories, testing theories. Many days perhaps a couple of weeks before we restore spirit. Opportunity coming up. We've made appropriate personell adjustments. It is likely that we may not continue the opportunity impact to egress at the same pace as we made with Spirit. That's a decision the project will make in consultation with management.

Wayne Lee: Landing Opportunity on Saturday night. This is going to be extremely challenging. Highest altitude landing NASA has ever attempted. Working around the clock reconstructing what happened with Sprit EDL to figure out if there is anything different this time around. Reason for that is that what happened 3 weeks ago was the first time this actually happened with EDL. All systems were analyzed and behaved exactly as expected. Only one area it didn't, in the descent rate limiter. As you know, a safe landing depends on interaction with atmosphere. Surprises in Martian atmosphere, two gusts of wind. One at 40,000 feet at mach6. Clear air turbulence caused the capsule to wobble more than expected. Also had a big gust of wind at the bottom and had we not countered that we could have been driven into the ground at 50 mph. Also atmosphere thinner than we had hoped. Global dust storms. Bottom line is what are we going to do different. Almost nothing. One change. Deploy parachute 4500 feet higher than Spirit. Reasons are three-fold. Higher altitude landing. Atmosphere variability. We meant to guard against that variability so system will have more time to fire retro rockets. Third reason the decent rate limiter. Confident but respectful that this is a risky endeavor.

Miguel San Martin: I'm going to tell you the story about the second gust of wind. The MER EDL is based on Mars Pathfinder design. That design had a sensitivity to horizontal wind. If you encounter a gust, the system starts to oscillate. If we fired rockets while at an angle, we could add horizontal velocity. That combined with the normal velocity from the wind, might add up and airbags don't like large horizontal velocity. So we added a system that consists of a set of sensors and steering rockets in the back shell. We assumed the worst about wind and implemented this system. I'm going to show Spirit landing data. The answer was that we did get a gust of wind, up to 50 mph in the last 1,000 meters, the system did activate and compensated successfully. In this image we show path of spacecraft superimposed on DIME image. The blue arrow is the velocity of the system due to wind pushing the system to the east. The purple arrow is the velocity we would have had if we hadn't fired the rockets. The yellow arrow pointing down is the velocity that we actually got. If you look at the size of the large arrow, we went from a predicted 52 mph to 25 mph. We are very pleased with that. In the next image we can see the reconstructed trajectory. Next is an animation using the telemetry from the craft.

Adam Steltzner: Another animation, high resolution video. Almost at the surface of Mars at realtime, real speeds. You can see the rover pushed to an angle and then corrected by the rockets and coming to a stop 23 feet from the surface of Mars. We're trying to learn everything we can from Spirit. One difference was the performance of what's known as the descent rate limiter. We had anticipated a deployment time of about 6 seconds and telemetry shows 11 seconds. Forced us to examine telemetry and that subsystem and we've concluded that the most probable cause is an increased breaking friction in the breaking device attributed to the 7 month journey to Mars and the loss of volatiles inside the breakpad material making it perform better than we had anticipated. Improved breaking slowed the separation. We've folded that in to our understanding of the Opportunity EDL process and we expect Opportunity to display a similar behavior. That, atmospheric data and altitude all folded in to the decision to release the parachute earlier. We feel comfortable with our understanding of that. We've done this reconstruction effort in an attempt to understand exactly how the craft performed and Dr. Malin has the photos that let us know how we performed.

Mike Malin: All the data that these guys are looking at were relayed through MGS. MGS obtained lock before landing and retained lock throughout the rollout period so we had telemetry coming in. Also, as principal engineer for MOC, I've been working on getting a picture of the landing site at high resolution. This is the DIMES view. Next slide shows the changes. See bright dot in lower portion of image and two dots in the upper left and a dark streak. Lower dot is the lander, upper two dots are the backshell and the parachute and the dark streak is the heatshield impact and slide down crater wall. We got all the bounces too. Then there's a rollout streak. Tim Parker was within 5 meters when he told you the location of the site. We have a positive location to within half a meter. We can see orientation.

Pete: I've been in this business for a long time and this is amazing stuff.
Mike: We'll get the rover in future pictures.

Q. Pete, we're all interested in what data you got.

Pete: Helps us a great deal. We get a set of error messages for software, we get engineering on subsystems, gives us pointers on what information to ask for tomorrow. It tells us that the software is in x-band fault mode. We surmise it got there because of HGA pointing. It gives us a little bit of a tell tale for what's going on with the processor now. Flight software not operating normally. We do not have assurance that the next time we go ask it that we'll get either one to the two different behaviors we've gotten. How come it's behaving that way. We've got quite a bit of information, obviously not as much as we'd like.

Q. Pete, translate that to a ground effort to duplicate what you've seen. If spirit was in the hospital what's its condition.

Pete: We are still critical. We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality because we don't know what's broken. I think it's difficult at this stage to assume we did not have some type of hardware event so we don't know to what extent we can work around that. We have been able to establish that we can command it, that the power system is OK and the that thermal system is OK and that's good. I don't expect us to get a big sea change in knowledge or theory in the next several days. Until we get a root cause with hardware it's very hard to duplicate this on Earth. There's two kinds of things that can get you in trouble. a hardware fault that impresses itself on software. second is software with a lot of modules talking to each other. We need a starting place to be able to set up the testbed.

Q. If it's mechanical... Can you say "what have we got that's good" and get at that through software.

Pete: I don't know. We do know we were doing a motor operation that did not run to completion. We don't know exactly what is good. We can get at engineering info that tells us that we're safe and stable but we haven't established that it's "good". We need to get software to get behaved so we can get more direct access to the functionality of the system.

Q. Pete, you mentioned earlier that Spirit wasn't shutting down at night. Depleting batteries?

Pete: Yes. But not a problem that will end the life of the rover because we can wake up on the solar arrays only. We'd like not to get into a low-power situation. We attempted at the end of the day to shut down the vehicle to conserve battery and keep thermal under control. It's not a duration threat. Batteries can go to zero and be recharged.

Q. how many lines of code in software. Is it rebooting and how many times trying.

Pete: I don't know. It has attempted to reset since Wed over 60 times.

Q. Is there a lot of science data on the rover?

Pete: I don't have a good answer to that question. We've gotten a lot of stuff back. There were some science products on the rover but I don't know how much.

Q. what motor.

Pete: motor inside for mini-TES. At cold temp (night) you need to increase voltage. We were going through a set of increasing current and moving motor. A sequence of events that the last command didn't complete.

Q. For pete, you said you did get engineering data back? Any reason engineering and not science data

Pete: good data. We do not expect to get MGS or Odyssey passes trying to shut down. Data tomorrow will be around 10 or 11 Mars solar or 4:30 in the morning here. Engineering data because we got it broke and Steve looses out here.

Q. Play the parent. How concerned are you.

Pete: I don't view the situation that way. We have a serious problem. That it's stable will give us time to diagnose that problem. It's giving limited but good information. Engineers have data to chew on and they're off chewing. I expect to get functionality out of this rover. Chances that it will return to perfect are low. Chances that it won't work at all are also low.

Q. If it's not going to sleep...

Pete: it will kill things that we don't want anyway. It takes one or both batteries offline and that may be something we'd like to undo. Better for us if it doesn't go low power but we can cope if it does.

Q. Can you explain what you feel about Opportunity.

Pete: the team always has to be mindful that this may be systemic but it looks like a singular occurrence to me. Unknown if this has anything to do with the HGA.

Q. Pete, there are OSes that allow you to go back to a date when everything was working correctly.

Pete: We can attempt to reboot out of a better image but we don't know what we've got here. If we've got a hardware issue then this really isn't a software fault. We are resetting the computer. This is just like pushing the reset button. This is very close to pulling the socket out of the wall.

Q. You suspect hardware, is that the same as mechanical?

Pete: something outside the software, not necessarily mechanical thing.

Q. Predictions that it would ever be perfect or not working at all. What about the chances of obtaining science data.

Pete: science team working hard but until we know the state of the vehicle, forecasting isn't very fruitful. We have not shot the last arrow in our quiver. I'm cautioning patience. We need time.

Q. Given the clarity of these images do you intend to go hunting for other crafts.

Mike: I've had discussions with the Beagle people. Very surprised how bright this is. Not covered with dust. Good illuminations. We are going to try to take some images of the Beagle site. We did try for Polar Lander and the lighting conditions were much more poor. We are using a new 50cm technique. It would take about 60 years to cover the Polar Lander ellipse. We have imaged Pathfinder and VL1 and those pictures are on our site but they don't look anywhere as good as this but you can see the airbags on Pathfinder.

Q. are you focusing on the motor's electronics box or the entire rover.

Pete: symptoms look like it was triggered outside of the software domain. The fact that motor operation didn't complete leads you to look there first but we're not limited to that.

Q. Can you take a picture of the craft from it's cameras.

Pete: we don't' think it would be visible from external. Inside the system.

Q. Could one of you describe the differences in altitude of the two sites. Can you show us again where that motor is?

Wayne: Meridiani 1.3 KM below the reference surface. 4000 feet below. Gusev was 1.6km so 1000 feet lower than where we're going on Saturday
Pete: (points out the area on the model rover)

Q. How has what's happened with Spirit heightened anxiety.

Pete: I haven't asked the team that question. Personally it does not change my anxiety at all. We want very much to have two successful missions here. We're committed to do the best we can. If we get a root cause that leads us to believe it is systemic, that might change our sequence on Opportunity.

Q. How are resources being diverted.

Pete: a couple of people are moving. Anomalies to engineers have a gravitational force. We're making sure that the people are where they need to be.

(Schedule for tomorrow will begin at noon PST. At 2PM Mars program overview. At 7:30 PST live coverage for 9:05 PST landing.)

Q. Could you put the trouble you're having with Spirit in context with Bush's call for NASA to put humans on Mars.

Pete: No. I'm happy to talk about robots on deep space missions because I've been doing that all my life and that's my area that's my area of expertise but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

*End of briefing*

Today we'll be treated to first an Odyssey briefing and then a Spirit briefing. A couple of e-mails and comments at the blog have pointed to articles online that are suggesting contact with Spirit has been improved some and the engineers are optimistic. I'll get the notes up as soon as the briefings are concluded.

I'll post the first brief here and create a new post for the Spirit briefing.

9 am Odyssey brief (first draft, recorded briefing successfully so I may add to it this evening if I have the time):

Natalie Godwin: (media relations) 2 communication passes with Spirit and we have received data. Team still analyzing that data. Latest information on Spirit at 10am. Tomorrow night, however, Sprit's twin, Odyssey, lands on Mars. Here to talk about that.

Jim Garvin: What a time in the history of Mars exploration. More vehicles exploring Mars now than ever. here at NASA we have a program guided by science. Joy and Ray to talk about science we aim to do. Advantage of having a program is different tools in different vantage points. Slide showing Odyssey, Mars Express, MERs, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix, and Mars Telesat orbiter and Mars Science Laboratory. (some brief description of the upcoming missions). Can we follow the record of the water to the record of the building blocks of life. Having 2 MERs doubles the science. Organized a process whereby hundreds of scientists had input to determine the best science we could do with Spirit and Opportunity. We ended up with two sites. You've heard about Gusev, let's hear about Meridiani.

Joy Crisp: Meridiani on the opposite side of the planet. We're going to be splitting the tactical operations team in half. They'll be working different halves of the day. (slide showing work shifts). These folks are working on Mars time so they'll come to work 39.5 minutes later each day. People won't just stick with one rover the whole time but also won't be shifting frequently because of the 12 hour jet lag. Meridiani safe and can meet science objectives. Meridiani has evidence for past liquid water in minerals, gray hematite, detected by TES on MGS. (shows a piece of gray hematite). Typically created in the presence of liquid water. Was that past environment favorable for life. Flyover animation of the Meridiani site made by THEMIS team (Odyssey). Some data came from MOC, MLA, and TES from MGS as well. Targeted to land somewhere inside the 45mi long oval in some of Mars's smoothest terrain. Colors are where TES has mapped gray hematite from orbit.

Ray Arvidson: I'm really excited for Saturday night. Within a sol or two we'll have some images from the surface in an area that scientists have been focused on for some years. Slide showing THEMIS data and colors represent concentration of hematite. 15-20% by weight in the red. When we're down on the surface and doing imaging in color, emission spectroscopy with mini-TES, into the soil with Mossbauer spectroscopy that gets you the iron, do chemistry with APXS and closeup and personal images with MI. Getting at, first of all, is it gray hematite. We're all pretty certain that hematite like this is on the surface. Then we want to find out what is the geologic origin of this material. What you're looking at is a map that covers a large area of real estate. That line that crosses across the bottom is a geologic cross section. That red area is determined to be gray hematite bearing material is on the top of a 2-300 meter sedimentary deposit. This slide, huge vertical exaggeration shows the hematite on the top of those layers. That green unit is eroded in places to show the crater underneath. Hematite sitting on massive deposit of sediments. Is this volcanic or a thick stratum produced in an ancient ocean. We don't know but we'll be on the surface Saturday night and within a few sols we'll be getting data that will tell us. Other minerals, landforms, microscopic imager will try to tell us through grain sizes, textures, crossbeds, things like that will start to tell us. Last slide is a view of the most likely landing site. Left is a MOC narrow angle image. You can see craters that have excavated through hematite deposits. We expect we'll see the material that carries the hematite and underlying materials. Combination of Pancam, mini-TES, MI, we'll get the kind of data we need to test the two hypothesis, marine or volcanic. Complimentary to Gusev. Gusev called to us because of its morphology. Meridiani called to us because of its minerology. Saturday night's going to be pretty exciting.

Natalie: please only questions about Opportunity.

Q. Joy, will instruments be able to determine whether it's marine or volcanic.

Joy: we have a pretty good set of instruments. Mossbauer can look at iron bearing minerals. We've got mini-TES, and we're in an area with a low amount of dust so it can see more of rock component but you can't know until you get there.

Ray: mission of exploration and discovery so can't predict but I can't imagine a better payload.

Q. How much added pressure because of problems with Spirit. Is this mission more critical if Spirit continues to have problems.

Jim: we're here addressing science of Odyssey.
Joy: pressure can't go up. For every mission, it's as high as it could be.
Jim: 3 and half years ago decision was made to send 2. We're aware of stress, risk, challenges.

Q. More description of how you tell the difference between marine and volcanic.

Ray: how we're going to use the payload and mobility. We'll survey the terrain with the Pancam octants, in color and infra-red, followed up with a full mini-TESS that will get at minerology and landforms. Then we'll figure out where we're going to egress. First thing then will be Pancam, mini-TES, APXS and Mossbauer to determine if we have this mineral. Verified hematite then what are the minerals associated with the hematite. Then MI is going to provide textural information, seeing things as small as 1/10mm across. Looking for evidence of sediments, crossbeds that may have come from waves and currents. Also looking at landforms, looking for vents. The hematite had to come from somewhere and we're gonna use the landforms, textures, crossbeds, layering, particle size and shape, chemistry and associated minerals. I can't give you a blow by blow description of the activities of any one sol because it's a mission of exploration.

Q. You would expect to find hematite in both situations?

Ray: we'd be blown away if we didn't find hematite because the measurements are so strong.

Q. Are you planning to tweak the software on Opportunity based on Spirit? For the embedded software on the rover?

Jim: We're using information we have from MGS, the engineering experience from Spirit EDL, we are integrated.
Joy: good question for next panel. They're going to be extra careful with second rover and learn from the first one. That is an option we have. We can go slower, we can patch software. No decisions have been made yet.

Q: given the recency of the discovery of hematite, how important was that.

Ray: outcrop is special, right on the equator. There's hematite distributed across the surface in low concentrations but this area is an enormous amount of hematite covering an area the size of Oklahoma. Why hematite and not other iron oxides. This was a major discovery telling us something about the evolution of the planet.
Jim: One of the beauties is that we have a program. MGS' discovery finds this, a rover can investigate and then we have Mars Reconnaissance.
Ray: it's not only the hematite, it's the hematite in combinations with the sedimentary deposit underneath it.

Q. Is it gonna look even alien to Mars?

Ray: some of the payload teams have a lottery. We kind of had a good feeling for what Gusev looked like. We expect this surface to look unlike Gusev, Pathfinder, Viking. Big plated structures, shiny outcroppings of hematite, we're really looking forward to Saturday night.

Q. Ray, could you explain implications of a volcanic origins of water? Hydrothermal vents?

Ray: Has water been on the surface for long periods in form of lakes, rivers, or has it mostly been under the surface. Water is corrosive especially when hot moving under the surface and can leave hematite. We're getting at was this standing water or heated ground water. Fundamental in terms of getting the real Mars to stand up for this particular area. Layered deposits could be wind-blown and hematite from sub-surface hot water. Equally likely that we're looking at sediments at the bottom of an ancient ocean. I do think we'll know in a few weeks.

Q. Ray, you said you've never seen anything like this on Earth. Where's largest formation on Earth.

Ray: Hematite occurrences on earth included direct emplacement from volcanism. You can get hematite in igneous materials. Much more limited. You can also get it formed in pre-Cambrian period in layered sedimentary rocks in shallow seas. Tens of square km of layered deposits. Also a ubiquitous weathering in soils if you don't get to wet. Can't be Earth-chauvinistic.

Q. Could you run through minimum science criteria to call this mission a success. Where is Spirit in that stage.

Joy: I don't have all those numbers but easy to remember are that we need one of these rovers to work. For one rover to work and operate for 90 sols. We needed to get full 360 stereo Pancam panorama and we did that for Spirit. Science team wanted to get mini-TES panorama but NASA didn't require that. We wanted to RAT but not requirement from NASA.
Jim: We required the missions to be able before egressing to collect contingency science. Spirit has done that. That was the science floor.
Joy: driving distance, 600 meters by both rovers. 8 locations visited by both rovers for success.

Q. Should Opportunity land perfectly might you unfold it, roll it out and get it going at a different rate than Spirit.

Jim: Lots of discussion going on right now. A lot of choices and decisions to be made. Team's looking at how to use Opportunity. Stay tuned.
Joy: they haven't changed anything yet. That is an option and it makes sense to learn from Spirit.
Jim: we separated landings to allow for this and we have a lot of flexibility in the systems.

Q. Anything from the Mars Express discovery of water vapor that changes science you're doing on Mars.

Jim: we've known about water since Mariner 9 and Viking. Looking at the nature of water and detecting it has been part of the Mars plan for a generation. New ways of looking at that is not unexpected. We're looking at the water at the rock and soil scale. Mars Express is wonderful results.

Ray: payload on Mars Express is a phenomenally good set of instruments and complimentary to what we're doing. The Sol 13 cooperative effort with Spirit and ME was a success. We have lots of data from that. There are also joint projects between ME and Odyssey and ME and MGS. Lots of contact between Europe and us.

Q. How the teams are being split? How many on the two teams? Elaborate on the challenges of operating two crafts on opposite sides of planet.

Joy: main challenge is 12 hours apart. We have approx 150 people. We'll have approx. 75 on each team. Up till now they've been on the same team getting educated. We'll have more room. Crossing between the two teams is a strategic teams linking up with the two tactical teams to coordinate plans, budgets, orbital assets. We also have leads in science and engineering crossing over. Crossover meetings. meetings at odd times because they're set on Mars local time.

Natalie: we'll replay images following brief. stay tuned for Spirit briefing at 10am.

Q. Will you see hematite as veins on surface? Will you see fissures and openings in the surface?

Ray: the answer is "yes." We don't know what we'll find but one can imagine a scenario where we're driving along and we see a discolored bed from where steam has come up. We'll be looking for fractured openings, vents, etc. On the other hand, if we find vast layered deposits and we go to a crater and see crossbeds and rounded and piled stones like you'd find in lakebeds on earth. We'll be using all the data that we get from all the instruments will go into testing the hypothesis. (ed. Ray just talks too fast for my typing, sorry for missing so much here). Mobility system so critical to the success of this mission.

*End of briefing*

I've got cramps in my fingers from keeping them crossed :-) so I'm glad to have run across Wil Wheaton's Spirit post where he suggests a less physically damaging approach.

So if anyone reading this could, you know, maybe look up toward Mars tonight, and send a little Mojo to Spirit, that'd be cool.

Somehow I missed Steve Squyres' post on the recent communications problem. I hope Steve's not bothered by my reposting it wholsale here but he doesn't have permalinks or even anchors for his posts so this seems like the best way to preserve it.

We've just hit the first significant bump in the road since Spirit landed. By now you've heard the news that we've been having communications problems with our rover. It's cause for concern, certainly, but it's not cause for alarm. I've been in this business for almost 25 years now, and I've been involved in over a dozen different planetary missions. I don't know of a single one that hasn't had a problem like this somewhere along the line, and I include in that list missions like Voyager and Magellan that were spectacular successes. This kind of thing is part of the business of operating complicated spacecraft far from Earth.

There are two reasons to be optimistic. One is that Spirit is very, very good at keeping itself safe. This vehicle knows how to protect itself when something goes wrong, and can do so for long periods of time. The other reason for optimism is that the MER engineering team is very, very good at figuring out what's going on when something goes wrong. Given enough time they're going to get it, and I expect Spirit to give them all the time they need. So I'm very optimistic that we'll get this straightened out, and get back to the business of exploring Gusev crater.

Thanks Steve, for the status update. You guys rock.

Tekumse, in the comments for the post below, pointed out that there's an update at the MER website confirming the beep this morning.

SPIRIT UPDATE: - Jan 22, 2004, 10:35 am PST
The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit radioed a beep Thursday morning confirming that it had received a transmission from Earth. Still, it has not returned any data since early Wednesday. Flight-team engineers for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project are working to diagnose the cause of communications difficulties.

The confirmation is good news. I've got my fingers crossed, and hope it's some minor software fault that can be corrected or routed around.

While you're at the MER site, do check out the nice interactive Flash animation (load it from the MER site to get the correctly sized window).

update: I've read through the comments at /. (so you don't have to) and the only informative posts were a post by mlyle which points out the varios subsystems assumed to be functioning, and post by goon which points to some good background information.

I need to come up with some snappier titles for these postings ;) The NASA/JPL press briefing, broadcast on NASA TV, will begin in about 15 minutes (9 am PST) and I'll post notes when it's completed. In the mean time, you can check out a couple of good Mars Exploration Rover-related program activity sites that I've recently found to be useful, Universe Today, and Spirit Imagery.

Not a morning of good news :(

updated with more info after I replayed the brief. (on replay I realized that I probably miss about 20% of the information. I suppose 80% is better than none :-) Pay particular attention to the last couple of paragraphs where Pete says we've probably got a signal that would indicate that important systems, like power, are at least somewhat functional. That, if confirmed, is very, very good news.

Pete Theisinger: At yesterday's press conference we reported what we thought was weather related communications problems at Canberra. We now know we have had a very serious anomaly on the vehicle. And we're very limited in our ability to learn what's going on because we're not receiving telemetry for the last 12 hours or so. Yesterday afternoon 1 o'clock on Mars we sent a sequence and we received a beep in response indicating that it received the command and that it was activating that sequence. We had an afternoon 2pm HGA pass that did not occur. Then, later we had no response via Odyssey in the 4PM or 4:30 pass. No indication from Odyssey that it received UHF from Spirit. At 1:30, 2 am we had MGS pass. It was anomalous. MGS believes it saw UHF transmission but there was no data in the packets and the period was very short, only got 2.5 minutes of anomalous data (of a 14 minute pass). 4 am Odyssey pass received no data and we didn't receive data from this morning's normal DTE comm. We also didn't receive the fault state communication at 11 am. That's where the spacecraft has entered fault mode and knows that and knows to communicate with us at a different time. We don't have any one scenario that could explain all of these anomalies. We've been working on fault scenarios, developing todo lists, we've run yesterdays sequences through the testbed with no anomalous results and that's our current state of knowledge. Where we are right now: The rover is getting towards the end of it's day. Team has been up for a very long time. We're going to send them home for some sleep. We're going to pick up activities in the early evening. We'll be looking for the MGS and Odyssey passes this evening. And we'll decided what our go forward plan is based on a plan developed later tonight. As you know, we do have another spacecraft coming in. 2 days out from Opportunity EDL. Not going to do TCM5. Navigation was good for that and this event definitely took that off the table. We are prepared to do a TCM6 on Saturday if it's called for but navigation should be good and we probably won't need to do that. We do not have any staffing conflicts. There are some person ell issues that may arise in the next 48 hours and part of the planning tonight will be to decide how to prioritized those. That's all I have of a general nature and I'll take questions.

Q. Have you lost contact with spirit? If so was the last you heard this beep you got yesterday morning?

Richard Cook: There were beeps that we heard yesterday afternoon on Mars, yesterday morning here. Then we got the MGS signal indicating that it heard through the UHF link in the middle of the night, Mars time, about 8:30 PM our time, that was a little bit not what we expected during that MGS pass. We saw a signal indicating that the rover's radio was on but there wasn't data present. The rover wasn't sending data, only sending zeros and ones, it was sending a random pattern of zeros and ones. We understand very well why that would occur. What it means is that the radio was on but the computer wasn't sending data over to it. Radio just sends out this pseudo-noise. We did at least see a signal.

Q. You have multiple tones and each tone tells you something specific. What did this one tell you.

Richard: The tones are just one kind, a 5 minute long carrier only session telling us "hey, I got the command. I heard you, and here's confirmation that I heard you." We got 2 of those yesterday afternoon. We're attempting to do some more of those today to see if we can get the vehicle to respond. We're not yet done with that. It's not Earthset at Mars landing site so we're trying to do that.

Q. What needs to be working in order for it to send those tones.

Richard: Quite a bit. The whole avionics, the computer has to work, ability to talk to radio, radio has to work, radio itself and the amplifier in the antenna and all the switches between those. A number of things in a chain has to work. We don't know what is the state of the software relative to sending out these beeps. One thing we learned from Pathfinder is that it we want the spacecraft to try to communicate with us whenever it can. To do that we've implemented in software some autonomous communications to us. If that got confused, we don't have any information about that.

Q. What do we know about what it was doing immediately prior to the loss of communication?

Richard: This started yesterday morning when we were attempting to begin the sol 18 activities. We don't know exactly when but we did attempt to send up commands in the morning to tell it what to do that day. This was while we were doing a high-gain session and the link was a little bit poor at Canberra, we thought because of the rain or station pointing, concerns with SUN alignment. We saw indications that it didn't get all of the instructions and we're pretty confident that it didn't begin the days activities and that's when we started to ask for it to do these beeps to confirm that yes was there and it was receiving us.

Q. Could it have happened the previous night?

Richard: I don't think so because we'd gotten morning data saying everything went fine over night and that it had come up in the morning like it normally does.

Q. In that Australian uplink, did it try to take some of those commands and implement them and created an issue because it didn't get the full commands?

Pete: Our belief that the architecture does not allow that to happen. The command link has a set of error correction codes on it and when it sees single bit errors it can repair those and when it sees multiple bits it rejects those code blocks. The architecture should not build a command set if it does not have all the files there and correct so it should have simply rejected those files.

Q. Can you discount an external event like thermal cycling broke something.

Pete: If you believe that between the HGA session in the morning and when we received the beeps at 1 in the afternoon, that something happened after that beep, the spacecraft was quite quiescent in a warm part of the day with not a log going on. Yes something could break and that's a concern that we have but there was not any obvious correlative event.

Richard: Also true of the MGS link as well. What things that would have to work well. There's a much larger set of things that would allow you to wake up at night and do a UHF session. The fact that the power system and battery have to be working. We think the hardware is working like it's intended.

Q. PL release last night cited similarity to Pathfinder. I'd assume a totally different set of software.

Richard: Operating a lander on Mars is difficult because it's not like a craft in space where you have sort of guaranteed access to it. A lander i snot always visible to you, not always fully powered. We're frequently having to tell it what to do and not sure it's listening to us. That coordination is a place where with pathfinder we had a number of occasions when we sent commands when it was asleep or not pointing at the Earth, etc. That's one of the reasons we have these new mechanisms to guarantee, as much as we can, assured communications.

Q. Location and position of Spirit at the last comm. Standing poised in front of Adirondack? What was the next thing it was supposed to do?

Richard. Same position, in the process of trying to take imaging and Mini-TESS, not RATting yet. Those wouldn't have occurred till later in the afternoon.

Q. What the spacecraft is supposed to do when it's in an anomalous position. Is there a whole sequence, equivalent of hitting the reset button?

Richard: It's very much scenario dependent. There's all these scenarios that we've played out. A number of software capabilities where the vehicle intends to protect itself against a problem, for example if the batteries were in a low-power state, the vehicle software recognizes that and modifies it's behavior accordingly for a few days to accommodate that. We've spend the last hours mapping those out and trying to determine what we'd see. It's not clear that there's one cause that would explain the observables we've seen. That's what's perplexing. The last time we did a full scenario discussion was last night. We've got a lot more information through MGS data plus what happened on Odyssey overnight pass plus what happened today, and now so later this evening we're going to go through and map out what are all the scenarios and what correlates with the observables we've seen and what actions we'll take.

Q. DO you know yet if you'll be doing any testbed analysis.

Richard: We did that yesterday, ran through sol 18 plan. We didn't see anything there that would indicate the problem we've seen. Ther's discussion about doing a little bit more but we don't have information that would allow us to do anything there.

Q. Team is bifurcating with Opportunity and so on. What would be the normal procedure without an anomaly and how it might it be different now.

Pete: We were going to stand down on spirit for 3 days. There would be key meeters of the team moving to Opportunity. We have EDL running on Opportunity. No CM 5, expect no TCM6. We have the next real heavy activity will occur on Friday night about 22 hours, battery de-passivation sequence and we'll get into EDL approach events on Saturday. Heavily scripted. Not a lot of interaction with the ground, requires some selection, decisions. Personnel in common working this problem currently and will have to begin to turn to the Opportunity EDL. If we get into impact to egress there may be other conflicts as well. We don't really have a strong plan yet because we'd like to know more about the range of Spirit possibilities is. We are taking a couple of more beeping opportunities today. We've not confronted those yet because we want to give another day of thinking.

Q. How much of an urgency is there on Spirit?

Pete: If this problem is a software or memory corruption issue and it's not a serious power fault then Spirit can go for a very long time and we can pick up the pieces. If there is a serious power fault, it has life-limiting characteristics and that might be more difficult to recover from. The MGS pass last night is perplexing from all the angles. A lot's got to work so that it works but clearly not enough worked. We would like to have more data from the vehicle, even if it wasn't necessarily good data..

Q. How many working scenarios are there.

Pete: all the different fault scenarios, temp, low-power, software processor recent, interaction with comm. window manager, once you get into software could have a bug or corruption issue and a lot of scenarios.

Q. Are there other external event scenarios, like weather, dust devils, lightning.

Pete: We can't conceive of a local environmental problem that would cause this. We designed for a very extreme environment. The only thing that comes close to that would be some kind of SEU cosmic ray latch-up in the memory somehow.

Q. What had to be working to get the MGS signal. The directional HGA?

Pete: the UHF antenna only, that little pencil shaped antenna, not directional or steerable in that sense.

*Schedule for tomorrow: 9 am scheduled Opportunity landing science brief. 10 am briefing will be update on Spirit Rover.

Pete: Don't take this farther than it deserves go to. If it thinks it's in a fault mode, it's command rate should be 7.8 bits per second. We sent a beep this morning about the time we came in to talk to you. We sent a command that says, "if you get this, send us a beep". I'm told that Jennifer came down here to say we think we got it so that would tell us that the Rover thinks it's in the fault side of the tree. Positive power, some elements of the software are working, x-band is working, sspa, all that stuff is working. That's more information, good news. Need to confirm that. Data from DSN sometimes needs double checking.

Q. When you last heard from spirit. I'm confused about time differences.

Pete: at 7:24 this morning it was 13:31 on Mars, 6 hours 10 minutes ahead. We last heard beep yesterday at about 13:30 Mars time, around 6:30 yesterday morning.
Richard: That was last direct. Then we heard then there was the MGS relay at about 8:30 PM PST about 02:30 am.
Pete: That's separate from this recent unconfirmed report.

*End of briefing*

I just finished taking another look at the 1700+ "raw" images over at the Mars Explorer Rover Gallery. These are the unprocessed images we've received from Spirit in the first 17 sols and there are some really interesting photos. The most interesting to me are a couple of more recent pictures that I hadn't seen in the press briefings or at Planetary Photojournal. It's also cool to see the raw images before they've been converted to their component colors and combined to form the true-color images that make the press releases.

Adirondack: this image looks like it might be the right camera view from the same moment as this Adirondak view taken from the left camera. I assume that the left camera was taking photos through the red (or infra-red) green and blue filters to produce the true-color image but I'm not sure which filter(s) this right camera image was taken through. Any imaging experts out there know how to tell?

Tracks: As the rover moves over different kinds of terrain, it's going to have various impacts on the rock and soil. You can see in the upper right of this image that the rover hit some "fluffy" material and sunk a bit deeper. It's probably one of those depressions that escaped the wrath of the dust devils and so held onto or even ammased more dust than the surrounding areas. This dust must be really fine stuff to be sticking together like that. Wild stuff.

Adirondack close-up: This close-up of Adirondack shows how polished the rock is. The broad flat surfaces will be an ideal first target for the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) which will grind a 5 cm in diameter circle down into the rock about half a centimeter.

These six pictures, taken by the front hazard cameras, 1l, 1r, 2l, 2r, 3l, 3r, when loaded in tabs and then tabbed through quickly can give you a cool, almost stereo view animation of Spririt approaching Adirondack.

I'll try to do a post about once a week that highlights some of the photos that aren't making the big websites if that's something you all are interested in. Let me know what you think in the comments or via email.

update: This slashdot strory points to a really amazing MER picture resource. A must bookmark for any MER fans out there. He takes the raw images and combines them to create color and stereo anaglyphs. Awesome! Kickass!

Leonard David, of Space.com, Space News, (he's one of the reporters that's at all the press briefings and he asks some of the best questions) reports on a communication problem today with Spirit:

PASADENA, Calif. � A communique released late afternoon Wednesday from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has indicated an unresolved issue with the status of the Spirit Mars rover.

According to a JPL statement, ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them.

However, ground controllers here did not receive expected scientific and engineering data from Spirit during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day.

Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission, stated a JPL press release.

The team is examining a number of different scenarios, some of which would be resolved when the rover wakes up after powering down at the end of the martian day (around midday Pacific time Wednesday).

This, after a problem sending commands up to Spirit this morning (attributed to rain over Canberra), seems a bit concerning and I sure hope it's nothing serious. I trust that Leonard is reporting things pretty straight here and it sounds like it came pretty directly from a statement or letter at JPL this afternoon. He's not alarmist and I probably shouldn't be either but the wild successes we've seen so far have be a bit nervous. I'm crossing my fingers and heading home. I'll let you all know if I find any more information on this.

update: The actual NASA/JPL press release can be found here.

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.

I'll get some notes up for the Tuesday press briefing this evening. In the mean time, enjoy this cool picture of the IDD reachin' for Adirondack.

Since I haven't posted notes yet, here's a cool inverview with the creator of that great MER animation. I wonder what it would have been like if he hadn't had "tone down" certain shots. Thanks for the heads-up, Steve.

And here it is:

I missed the first few minutes of the briefing and the notes are short on clean-up and editing. Have fun :-)

Johannes Brueckner:
I'm going to talk about the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, developed in Germany at the Max Planc Institute, a small hand-held instrument that measures x-ray radiation emitted by the Martian samples. With this data we can derive the elemental composition of the Martian soil and rocks. Image shows the instrument with the doors open and there is the x-ray detector. This first diagram shows an X-ray spectrum. The horizontal axis shows energy of the x-rays. Vertical shows amount of x-rays per energy interval. As a result you get the spectrum, the spec count and the peaks. The position of the peaks is indicative of the elements in the sample. The largest peak comes from Silicon, a major rock and soil forming element. Second largest peak is from Iron. Height of the peaks is also indicative of the amount of concentration of the element. This helps our colleagues to get good Mossbauer spectra. First I'd like to indicate that next to silicon peak is three small peaks, for sulfur, chlorine and argon. Very indicative of Mars. Argon is noble gas and part of the Martian atmosphere. Sulfur and Chlorine are salt forming elements. Not surprised to see this amount of salt-forming elements because we have measured this from Viking, Pathfinder sites and on all these sites there is a lot of Chlorine and Sulfur in the soil. This tells a story about something which is a component everywhere, globally distributed on Mars. Something which is new you can see on the right side of the Iron peak, the Nickel and Copper and Zinc. This instrument is so sensitive that we can now detect Nickel and Zinc on the Martian surface for the first time. The Copper comes from the instrument itself. This is a very high-resolution x-ray detector, possible because of very good detector development in Germany. This sensitivity will help us measure even minor changes in the chemistry on all future soils and rocks we hope to measure. Looking forward to more measurements on Gusev.

Steve Squyres:
Multiple working hypotheses - a bunch of different ideas and we're trying to figure out which one's right. We have multiple hypotheses. Preliminary observations have revealed interesting things about this soil and posed new questions. First, we do not know that this soil came from Gusev crater. The basic pattern of elements is very similar to what's been seen at the Pathfinder and Viking sites. Mars has global dust storms. This stuff could have come from somewhere else. It will be very interesting to dig some holes or go where mother nature dug some holes, craters. There are a couple of surprises that we've got so far. When we first looked we saw fine-grained soil with a reddish cast to it. As we take a close look with Pancam we can see a spot of fairly pure soil where we put down the Microscopic Imager (and the APXS, Mossbauer and mini-TES were used there too) When we looked at this a couple of days ago we saw these grains, very fine grains in an aggregate, stuck together. What's sticking them together? We got a surprising answer. I was suspecting electrostatic forces, static cling. I thought the first time we pushed on it that it would all collapse. The Mossbauer Spectrometer has a contact plate that we pressed into the soil. After we pulled the Mossbauer away, we took another image. The collapse didn't happen. Before and after pictures, there's hardly any change. Nothing collapsed. These grains held together. What's holding these together? We don't know but I think a clue may be in Johannes' data. There may be sulfates and chlorides, salts that are glomming these things together. They may have been transported there by water or by volcanic process. We may have chemical glue. I want to find out how strong those things are. We can push harder with the Mossbauer. We can use the wheels. It's a pretty heavy vehicle. It's gonna flatten these grains. One puzzle we've got is what's holding these things together. One other puzzle posed by these measurements is the Olivine. Olivine is a silicate with Iron and Magnesium. The kind you find in igneous rocks. It's not something you form as the result of chemical weathering. One possibility is that this is simply ground up, finely ground up lava. That would be a surprise to me. Some on my team are so surprised by the Olivine that they believe what we're seeing is actually underneath the fluffy soil to the solid rock underneath this stuff. We can test this. We can scrape, we can dig with the wheels. We're starting to put together a comprehensive picture of what this stuff is. We have pulled up against a rock called Adirondack and as we speak Johannes' instrument is taking data on Adirondack. Right now as we're speaking the science team is trying do decide if they want to use the RAT on Adirondack. We have the tools to learn.

Jennifer Trosper:
Right now, it's about 5 PM Mars time on Sol 17 at the spacecraft. This data we're talking about here is hot off the craft. Today's objectives were to unstow the arm this morning and check out the RAT contact sensors. We placed the RAT against the rock to test the sensors and then pulled it away and took some Microscopic Imager pictures. Then we put the APXS on for a couple of hours and next we'll do an overnight with the Mossbauer. As steve said, we're preparing to RAT this rock tomorrow. The spacecraft is extremely healthy. We had a 99 megabits Odyssey UHF pass last night. Incredible amount of data flowing. Thermal situation, we are a little bit cooler now that we're off the lander and can stay awake a little bit longer to accomplish a little bit more science. Power situation looks good. We charge the batteries fully each day. We're really mostly constrained by the amount of data we can collect. We're feeling very good about the status.

Q. What depth did these instruments sense? Possible that trenching won't get down to "the prize" because of the depths.

Johannes: APXS penetration depth is very, very shallow. 10 micrometers. Only see the upper most surface.
Gostar Klingelhofer: For the Mossbauer we can see down to half a millimeter for dense objects or up to millimeters, even a centimeter for the fluffy stuff.
Steve: We have an enormous capability to sample depths from 10 microns to about 50 meters, with the wheels, we can drive to a crater.

Q. You mentioned chloride salts. One possibility that they were brought by water. What does that say about life?

Steve: It's way to early to say about that. We don't even know if the stuff originated in Gusev. We know there's water here, frozen under the surface. There's compelling evidence from pictures taken from orbit that water flowed on Mars. It takes no great leap of imagination to think of water in small quantities percolating through the soil and dissolving salts and then precipitating those out. But there are other ways to make those as well. Volcanos. Go to a volcano some time and take a sniff :) Here's a key point. If you look at that spectrum that Johannes pointed out. It's very sensitive, fantastically sensitive instrument so we can go from rock to rock, soil patch to soil patch, scratch below the surface, etc. If there are even very subtle differences we'll see them. We've got the tools to do this.

Q. Any place on Earth where soil resembles this?

Steve: Am I allowed to turn to the audience for that one? Dick Morris from the science team, are there places you've been that look like this?

Dick: many places in Hawaii that look just like this.

Ben Clark: Back when we got the mineral results from Viking, we went around challenging people to come up with an Earth sample that matched that. That was 30 years ago and no one's done it.

Dick: Well, the answer to that is that Earth has a lot of rain that washes that stuff into the ocean.

Q. Steve, why would you not use the RAT?

Steve: That decision hangs on engineering and vehicle safety considerations. I think Adirondack is so well suited geometrically that I don't think there are any safety issues. The other question is will you learn something more by using the RAT. Adirondack is incredibly smooth, polished by mother nature's rock abrasion tool. The meeting's going on right now. I think the guys are probably gonna decide to RAT this thing because there's really no way to know what's underneath. If we do RAT it and find that nothing's different underneath, that would be great because then we know she's not hiding anything from us and we can take surface measurements as we move around.

Johannes: Pancam closeup suggests weathering. With the APXS we'll see first 10 micrometers. I'm confident we'll see a difference inside.

Q. How do you take the data and tease out what compounds are there.

Johannes: APXS is just elemental composition. Mossbauer can tell the rest.
Gostar: Mossbauer measurements can be compared with terrestrial minerals and we can dig out the different mineral compositions.

Q. Any idea when you might start trenching?

Steve: Trenching comes in different flavor. Some simple, some sophisticated. I expect the first simple trenching activity to scratch the surface is going to come pretty soon. Reason is not only addressing science mysteries but also important to address some key engineering questions. If we intend to head out across the countryside, knowing in a lot more detail how these wheels interact with the soil will be very important. I'll bet you by sol 30 we will have done something like that.

Q. Some of your colleagues are vacating the idea that you're sitting on a lake bed? Where are you on that?

Steve: I believe that it is unavoidable that somewhere underneath our wheels are lake sediments. How far down? I don't know. Couple possibilities. One is that this stuff has been churned up so completely by impacts that whatever was there in terms of sedimentary layering is long gone. Another possibility is that the windblown and volcanic materials have buried the lake sediments. That's why we want to go to that crater. A 200 meter crater is gonna dig down 20, 30, 40, 50 meters. As we get closer and start to see the ejecta we're going to be getting deeper and deeper into what's underneath. I don't think there's any question that Gusev was once a lake. I also said that Mars wasn't going to give up her secrets very easily. That's why we're going to need the full capabilities that this vehicle has to offer.

(Tomorrow's briefing at 10 am PST. Images on the website.)

End of briefing.

Mars Rover Blog is now offering an image RSS feed. Great stuff!

Everyone and his brother are pointing to the Reuters "Java runs Mars rover" article, which highlights Maestro, the Java-based application (available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Solaris) that is being used by the engineering and science teams to sandbox the rover drives. You can download a scaled down version of the software and get real datasets to play with. It's worth the downloads (get that first data set update) just to replay the EDL and browser through the 3-d space derived from those first Hazcam and Navam images. If you're like me, you'll blow hours playing with the thing :-)

There are also lots of links to the MER music video from Maas Digital. (For you serious fans, you can download via bittorrent, 310 MB of DVD-quality MPEG-2 video.) I've seen this animation at least 3 dozen times and it still amazes me. If you haven't listened to one of the various NASA/JPL commentators describing the sequence, you can read about what you're seeing at the video narrative pages at the Athena science payload website..

From New Scientist, via A Visible Hum, we learn that the science team is analyzing the Microscopi Imager data for what may turn out to be evidence of salt water on Mars. The images show hollow spheres or tubes similar to what's found in desert lakebeds here on Earth.

UtterlyBoring has some cute pictures from the surface of Mars :-)

Kano, over at ATSNN has a decent write-up on the "colorizing" of Mars.

Mars Daily has a story on the nuclear-powered "mini-van" [sized] rover that could be roaming the Martian surface if the upcoming 2009 Mars Scientific Laboratory comes to fruition.

The Parson's Pantry preserved the wonderful Google MER banner. Thanks Paul!

And last, but not least, Mars Rover Blog points to a Lego MER! (Nice touch with the trenching front wheel.) More at the AP story on MERs in toystores! Go Caltech! Also, a 1/10th scale model will be available for $150. If any of you would like to buy one of those for me, email me and I'll be happy to provide you with my shipping information :-) And even more info on Martian toys can be found at The Esotaric Science Resource Center

In a failed attempt to clean spam from the comments, we've lost all of the comments posted since late last year. Sorry.

I've often debated whether or not I should post some of my more in-depth responses to your questions in the comments section or as a primary blog post. I guess I have my answer now.

I should also take this moment to recommend that if you've got a blog, that you post any siginificant response commentary there and trackback rather than posting to the comments section.

With all this comment spam, comments may eventually go away. We'll see.

The MER Mission homepage reports:

"After a Sunday drive, the rover arrived at the rock Adirondack where it will pause to find out what the rock is made of. The rocks Sashimi and Sushi weren't chosen because they didn't have good surfaces for grinding."

Photographs are available at the MER homepage and in high-resolution TIFF format at Planetary Photojournal. You can also find a catalog of Spirit's 1500+ raw images at the MER Multimedia pages.

This is going to be an exciting week and I'll try to get back to covering the press briefings as the Adirondak abrasion and analysis come in and we start to count down the days and hours to Opportunity's EDL (Jan. 24 at 9:05 p.m., PST).

Today, Mars Express delivered some amazing photgraphic data from its HRSC. This image is constructed from 12 m/pixel, color, stereo imaging of Valles Marineris and it's just beautiful. Beagle was just one piece of the Mars Express mission so, while its apparent loss is sad, important science goals will still be accomplished. Express has a massive and very cool science payload and I expect we'll continue to get back great photos and other data for a long time to come.

update: JospehK, in the comments below, pointed to this news a few hours before I did. I should probably start checking here for my Mars news first :-)

I've been busy with work and family for the last few days and that combined with the mozillaZine downtime and I've neglected posting anything on the Spirit mission. If you haven't read it already and seen the pictures, head over to MER Mission pages and check out the first releases from the Microscopic Imager. We're in for some great science, folks. Stay tuned.

I just knew it. I blogged a few days ago about the George Bush goes to Mars garbage and warned that it was "a massive unfunded/underfunded mandate that doesn't make a whole lot of sense from either a science or an engineering standpoint."

Today I read over at The Story So Far that Bush's Moon-Mars scam is costing us the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA's been told, it seems, to scrap everything that doesn't get us to the Moon and Mars and that apparently includes the most important piece of hardware in the history of cosmology and astronomy, the HST.

Because of the mozillaZine downtime, I failed to note the release of Mozilla 1.6 yesterday. It's an awesome release with some great new features compared to 1.5. If your company requires NTLM authentication, this release should really make you happy. Also noteworthy are the fixes for the Mac bookmarks dataloss bug and the Mac paint problem on window resizing. You can read more of what's new by visiting the README and if you're interested in more detail, you can check out the rough changelog that covers the 1,000+ bugs fixed for the 1.6 release. This is a great release and I recommend it to everyone that's still using Mozilla 1.5 or older releases.
update: and Cameron reminds me in the comments that we've also got speed improvements too. Chris and I were talking on Friday and he mentioned between 5 and 10% performance improvements in page layout depending on platform. You can see some of the graphs here, here, here, here, and here. That's a pretty nice feature.

There have been a number of comments here at adot's notblog (and even more in email) suggesting, and even demanding, that I stop blogging about Mars and the Mars rovers. To the folks making demands, piss off. To those who have politely asked that I either blog more about Mozilla, less about Mars, or implement categories to keep the two separate, I appreciate the feedback and here's my plan:

I'm going to continue to post about whats on my mind and what I feel like writing about at that particular moment. This is my personal weblog and I don't feel any obligation to keep it focused on topics related to my "professional" (Mozilla) responsibilities.

Mars and space news is nothing new to this blog and it happens to be something I'm particularly excited about these last couple of weeks. If you're looking for Mozilla-only news, then mozillaZine.org is probably where you want to be. I don't forsee this blog ever becoming solely devoted to Mozilla. If anything, I expect to start blogging about even more topics.

That being said, I do realize that implementing categories and category-specific RSS feeds would go a long way toward alleviating the problem. At some point, I'll take a look at the MT documentation and see what's required to set that up. If it's quick and easy, I'll try to get posts categorized into "Mozilla", "Astronomy & Space", and "Personal" groups, or something like that.

It's also been suggested that I use the excerpt functionality to limit the size of the posts on the front page. I tried that in the early days of the blog and found it to be buggy. It caused parts of my posts to not show up and seemed to interact poorly with trackback auto-discovery. If I find myself with some free time, I'll play with it some more and consider bringing it back if there are no problems.

The wonderful folks at mozillaZine.org, who kindly host this weblog, have been experiencing some technical difficulties that caused about a day of downtime for this weblog. We came back up yesterday afternoon but comments and new posting was still down. Today, it looks like things are now back in full working order. If you see anything that's not working as expected, please let me know via comments or email.

If everything goes well, we'll be pushing Mozilla 1.6 bits real soon now. If you just can't wait and you want to get the "near final" bits, you can get a Windows build here, a Linux build here, and a Mac build here.

It's really late (early) and they just pushed the briefing out another 15 minutes so I'm likely to be even less coherent than I normally am. I'll post the notes when the briefing has concluded. Unless I'm sleeping :)

Head over to 2020 Hindsight for more coverage of the briefing. Susan got stuff I missed. Between the two of us, though, I think we got pretty much everything that was said. James also has some good coverage of the recent events.

Packed (seriously) auditorium. Full-room applause for the team.

Charles Elachi: Less than 24 hours ago Bush committed our nation to a sustained robotic exploration. We work fast :D We have six wheels in the dirt. Mars is our sandbox and we are ready to play and learn. Looking up at Mars last night, I'm awed that we have a rover on that planet. We went there not because we have to go there but because we wanted to go there. I want to congratulate this dream team, every one of them (room-wide applause).

Pete Theisinger: (sporting his "my other car... is on Mars!!" t-shirt. We've got six wheels on the dirt and it really doesn't get any better than this... but it will. An immense number of people to get us to this place. The test team, the launch crew in FL, the cruise teams that got us to the planet, the surface mission and rob's team, through the EDL phase to six wheels on the dirt, an incredible effort from "the best we have". I'd like to point out to you that we get to do this all again in nine days.

Jennifer Trosper: In keeping with tradition (popping champaign, room-wide applause) The last time we had champaign here was EDL. We were so greatly encouraged by the success of that day but we knew what we had ahead of us. It's been 12 sols and now we are the mission that we envisioned three years ago. A toast to all of the people who are on the team that contributed to getting us to 6 wheels on Mars. Your efforts are historical and thank you very much. (room-wide applause, and it really is packed there). Our to-do list for today was, get some images from Mars, meet the VP, drive a rover onto Mars. As a young girl growing up in Ohio, I wouldn't have imagined that would be my to-do list. Take a moment to thank some people, the guys that are responsible for the design of the hardware. Also, the team that had the responsibility for building the spacecraft. Matt Wallace led the ATLO team and you guys did a great job. Thank you. (room-wide applause). There's also a team that doesn't sit in the operations center, they're down in the testbed testing out everything we're going to do, shoveling dirt around, craning the rover, I'd like to thank John Worth and the testbed team for all that they've done to contribute. Is Pete Darris (berris? theris?) here? (applause) And then there's a team that had to fly the spacecraft, the cruise team, Mark Adler and Jim Erickson (not sure I got that right) thank you. (applause). And I can't skip over the EDL and Navigation teams for doing the impossible, thank you Rob. And there's another team, the flight software team, had an incredibly complicated job and the software has worked flawlessly and that is due to Glen Reeves and Jen Choedes (sp?) (applause). I wanna mention a couple of specific people because they've contributed so much. Heartbeat of the project, Richard Cook. (applause) For impact to egress specifically, Joel Krajewski, he was the lead engineer involved in the software design, verification program, the person that made this all happen. Joel, great job. (applause). And of course, a couple of other guys up here sitting to my left, Kevin Burke, and Chris Lewicky (applause).

Kevin Burke: I confess I'm going to have to do a little bit of the talking about others as well, but first lets show you what we thought was going to happen and what did happen. This is the testbed egress activity that we dry ran to make sure what we were going to do on Mars was correct. Good engineering and excellent implementation/testing. The next bit of footage is the animation that they put together of the move as one would see the entire egress activity (on Mars view) from the turn in place to the wheel straightening and the roll-off. The deck heights were well within our capability and the rover performed flawlessly. The next bit is not a cartoon. This is a very advanced piece of software to model and replay the true kinematics. This is exactly a replay of what we did on Mars. This is going to end up with 6 wheels on soil at about the exact predicted location. That's where we are, on the surface of Mars. A little bit about how we got to be here. For myself it's been a 3 year effort and at that time Chris Lewicki joined and I started hanging out with Mark. We've been trying to work this problem of egress and it doesn't sound like that big of a deal but very involved. Involved making sure the lander was designed right to do it's job to hold the rover, land on Mars, open up right. Working with the mobility team (missed the names, sorry) to make sure we didn't do something dumb. Involved some people who don't work at the lab. The airbag makers, also made the ramps. My design engineer. They were a huge part of getting us to where we are today. This is so interrelated and intertwined. How well we get off depends on the airbags, which way we land, which petal. It's a hard process. It was a lot of work and I'm really, really glad to be here and on the surface of Mars. We get through all the deployments and finally we gotta drive down the ramps; being the last person - piece of hardware between the lander and the surface of Mars is very, very stressful. I'm really glad. Looking forward to MER-B

Chris Lewicki: 'afternoon. I've had a great time over the last 12 days. I grew up in rural Wisconsin next to dairy farms. I wanted to do space things so I headed out of state and here I am. I was 15 minutes late to work. Spirit was a rover. Today, Spirit is a rover on Mars, in its native environment. (applause). It's great to have a room full of people that know exactly what they're doing. We really just started putting this rover together a year and a half ago. And today, it's where it was intended to be. I worked in the assembly process and was involved with everything that moves. We put 20 or 30 meters on either of them. They still have that new rover smell :) Got an extraordinary suite of instruments on to the surface. Now's the time where we kind of hand over the keys. It's great to drive this sportscar. In the end we're just valets bringing it around the front and handing the keys to the science teams. "12 days of egress" circulated today. I won't sing it. We had all these PORTisms, impossible physics.... In flight, things were just going so well, better than any testing. Amazing. Opportunity coming up in 9 days. Lookin' forward to doing it all again.

Joel Krajewski: About 3 years since we put together the beginning of a team. First hire was Chris Lewicki. Rob Manning declared "we have landed". For the last week and a half I didn't believe that, we've been approximately 40 centimeters from the surface of Mars. Tonight we have landed. For two years my job was running from building to building to understand the cross team designs and many parts of that design come together in IDE. First time we have a rover that shuts itself down and wakes itself back up to talk to us. Mechanical design phase of this mission is awe inspiring. The most complex deployment and sequences on another planet. If there's anything that this team has it is passion and it is daring. Six minutes of EDL terror and 12 days of IDE hard labor. We cut the umbilical and the baby is free. Thanks to Joe, Kevin, Chris, Daniel (missed a bunch of names here). There is no way we could have done it and we did do it. If I were to ask the question "is there life on Mars" I'd answer that yes there is and we put it there. We put it there today and I want to thank this whole team for helping us do that. (applause).

Q. Could you give us specifics now about when the signal was sent up, now long that took, signal back, in Earth time.

Joel: 1am sent signal up. 10 minutes one-way light time. 10 minutes later we got a beep back. Egress took a few minutes. We executed a sunfind and imaging. Got signal back at approx. 1:50 am.

Q. With the experience you gained here would you do anything differently with Opportunity?

Kevin: I got vetoed on pulling those airbags in more. I wanted to make that forward egress workable. It's not clear why we had bags in areas we didn't expect to see them. For MER-B we're going to initially retract the basepetal airbag a bit further.
Jennifer: with the HGA we're going to slew at the slower speed.
Kevin: How we land is not known. We landed on the basepetal and tried to maximize for low deck heights. If we land sidepetal down we do something different. But if we do land basepetal down again we'll pull that airbag a bit further. Meridiani's a whole new ballgame.
Chris: we don't have to change a lot because Joel put together an extremely modular and flexible plan.

Q. We were told it was 12:21 that the signal was sent. Speed it was moving. Direction?

Chris: egress drive was about a 78 second event to drive. 3.8 or 4 cm/sec.
Kevin: We ended up rotating 115° to the right. Heading on Mars 282°. The forward path was blocked by some still inflated airbags. We probably could have navigated that course but we chose to navigate the lander deck rather than the airbags.
Chris: great photos on the web.

Q. 80 cm from the lander? where next?

Jennifer: yes. We'll open, place the MI on soil, stow it and drive. We're getting into our daily planning now. Drive in about 3 or 4 days.

Q. Can you talk about the unlatching of the arm. When, what, which instrument?

Jennifer: The first day, sol 13 that'll start 8:40 PST tomorrow night (7am Mars local). Deploy the arm, leave it hovering over the soil. We'll image RAT. We'll take some MI images. Then on sol 14, late Friday evening here, we would deploy arm on soil and use the Mossbauer. Then late in the day swap to APSX for overnight integration. Then the next day, stow the arm and drive wherever the science team wants us to drive.

Q. How risky was egress, what could have gone wrong?

Kevin: we dry ran this a bunch of times. We ran with a flight-like vehicle and a simulated vehicle to ensure everything was gravy. Started thinking about that deployment diving board back there. Chris worried too. So I said great! that makes me feel good. I grabbed pictures and it looked good but I got the cold feet. Went to Jennifer and said yeah, well, there's this little thing.... Grabbed Mr. Voorhees. Everyone wanted to go to the testbed. We had an hour before command. We went to the testbed and convinced ourselves that it couldn't' happen and even if it could, what would happen. We put the vehicle on there and got it caught and it drove just fine. But what if it really got caught. We wedged it in there. When we pressed the go, it tore that piece off the lander. That was the last thing that possibly could have made us feel uncomfortable and we retired that risk in a destructive and comforting manner. Sent the command and next thing you know, my favorite picture we've taken on Mars. (showing the stereo anaglyph, red+blue 3-D)
Chris: We've done this over 500 times.

Q. The mini-TESS look up happens sol 13?

Jennifer: Yes.

Q. Pete, could you show us your t-shirt.

Pete: present from Dave Lavery. In two weeks I'll get the back stencil that says "my third car is too".

Q. One thing we see is the tracks. It seems interesting, cakey and interesting.

Steve (I think, off-camera): Cakey it is.

(Will not hold our usual 9am PST briefing (applause). We will have some mission team members available to speak to media around 11am PST. We'll be back Friday morning at 10am PST.)

I'm going to bed. I'm sure this is filled with typos and I missed a lot of peoples' names who were being thanked but I'm too tired to try to clean it up any. G'night.

Six wheels on Mars.

"The most significant three meter drive in recorded history ;-)"

The Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, has rolled onto the surface of the red planet.

Thumbnail hazcam images with the lander in the background :D Hugs all around.

Full hazcam images in. Track marks on mars.

Navcam mosaic! Awesome front view from hazcam showing that pyramid rock right in front of the rover.

Polar (hazcam?) thumbnail mosaic panorama!

Press conference at 2:54 am PST.

Be sure to check out Susan Kitchens' 2020 Hindsight coverage of the event. Once again, she's right on top of the action and her notes are darned good.

And James' log too!

The egress commentary / briefing on NASA TV is about to start (12:45 am PST).

It's 11:34 am in Gusev. About 30 minutes ago the team gave the rover the command to roll off. We'll get a comm. pass (Odyssey?) in the next hour.

Morning wake-up call was Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild".

Rob Manning, EDL mission chief, explains the origin of the wake-up call tradition. Picked up from the shuttle missions.

Rob: We have testbed rovers here on Earth and we used this test environment test the sequences. We had some concern about where the wheels are and a possibility of getting a wheel hung on a cantilevered piece of aluminum called the "diving board" - a track used in driving the rear wheels out. Detailed testing in the testbed gives them confidence that the wheels won't get hung on the diving board.

There's some discussion from one of the designers of the MER wheel. He explained the wheel cleat design from spring 2001 that looked really scary (long metal spikes) and the concerns about taking that across the "first 10 feet" where snags were possible. He then explained the spiral design in the wheel. (passing a couple of wheels around the room). They needed a large open volume and an energy-absorbing spring-like design. There were over 30 iterations. The spiral flexor was the best design for a "long path in a tight package". He then explained the strange "pocket" in the bottom of the wheel. The mass of the vehicle is concentrated in the middle with six satellite masses in the wheels. It all needed to be restrained. By holding onto the bottom of the wheel they avoided any large stick-up objects that could catch the rover in its egress. Explaining the "orange stuff", they came up with an opencell foam that fills the gaps, bonded into the pockets between the flexors of the spiral hub for the wheel. Why are they black? The outside of the wheel needed to be anodized. Created ceramic anodized later to prevent sticking or jagged edged carving that could happen to the wheel moving on the lander. Aluminum 7075T73 (?).

Rob explained that this is a traditional "lunch time lecture series". This discussion, lecture fills the rover "siesta" downtime (conserving power and keeping heat down).

Kevin Burk explains the video of the egress testbed maneuvers of turn in place 1-3 and the final wheel pointing. He continues showing the vehicle rolling down the egress aid and explains that the little bump was nothing to worry about. Lookin' forward to seeing that rear hazcam view of the lander.

Rob explain that this is all actually completed. The command went up an hour ago. The rover's on the ground and doing a navcam sunfind to re-point the HGA to Earth. We're waiting to hear back the results.

Steve Squyres at the podium mentioned something about putting 5 km on the rover (with a big smile, so I'm not sure what he was talking about). "We want the first-time activities to be as clean and free of risk as possible." We want to characterize the geologic diversity. We want to find the unusual stuff but first we have to find the typical stuff and get a really good characterization of that stuff. Steve mentioned the Mars Express flyover and the unique opportunity there. We're going to have a (sols 22, 23, 24) 3-day "stand down", a scripted set of events covering a few sols to ease the burden on the team during the first days of Opportunity on the surface. The first thing we're gonna do exercise the IDD and look with the APSX, Mossbauer, MI and that's gonna be really cool. We want to do rock first, followed by soil. Get the vehicle some place where at the end of sol 21 we have the IDD deployed and the Mossbauer on soil. Mossbauer is highly temperature dependent. Trying to count for as long as possible. Typical lasts for 6-8 hours and temperature changes significantly smearing out measurements. By parking for a multi-sol period we can measure in chunks when temperature is the same. We'd like to be on a fine-grained soil patch for the "stand down" few sol period. Rocks, sushi, sashimi, and pyramid (which needs a new name) and these are readily accessible. Bulk of science team wants to go to the pyramid shaped rock. Longer term plan and Chris Voorhees' 5 km theory - really trying to go after the stratigraphy. First get to this wonderful big crater. Then we head for the hills. Closer we get the higher resolution will be. Another is that there are a variety of materials that may have been shed from the hills. And the image all of us want is the view from up on those hills looking back down on the plane where we came from. The crater rim is 3,4,5 meters high, gently sloping. Distinguish between soil and wind-blown dust. Soil is ground up and mixed material from this location.

10 minutes from confirmation signal.

Rob explains that we'll get a carrier, we'll lock up on that and then the sub-carrier then it locks on the data and then information starts straming in.

We have carrier lock! (applause).
Engineering data streaming in.
End of drive, three meter traverse. Copy that. (applause).

If you're enjoying any of the Mars Explorer Rover coverage here at adot's notblog, be sure to check out some of these other great sites:

Spirit's Mars Rover Blog, Joost Schuur's Martian Soil, Robby Stephenson's periapsis.org, James Roberts' Mars Rover Mission Blog, Louisiana Mars Society's MarsBlog, Steve Squyres' Mission to Mars, Susan A. Kitchens' 2020 Hindsight, The One True b!X's Mars or Bust, Fred's The Eternal Golden Braid, and Daniel Morris' From Behind the Wall of Sleep.

I'm sure I've left off a few really good ones. If any of you have further recommendations, please let me know in comments or email.

A few folks have asked me in email what I think about George Bush's proposal for manned Moon and Mars missions. I don't really have time to post in any depth but my basic impression is that it's a scam. To those not paying very close attention, or those in a very narrow range of NASA activities (mostly aerospace and engineering), the plan may look pretty good. It sounds to me like a massive unfunded/underfunded mandate that doesn't make a whole lot of sense from either a science or an engineering standpoint. A 1% NASA budget increase over 5 years doesn't even put good plans in place, much less a functional mission. A new vehicle to replace the aging Shuttle program sounds good, but unless that effort too comes with a significant budget increase, it won't go very far.

And in case anyone was wondering, Bush's father had a similar plan and estimates back then were that it would cost around $500 billion to implement. Adding $1 billion to NASA's budget over the next 5 years doesn't even pretend to come close. Also, it's hard to take this initiative seriously when it comes with significantly fewer dollars than the president's $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages.' And cnn.com notes that the first year after Kennedy announced the Apollo program, NASA's budget was doubled, and then doubled again the year after that. This is a political scam. Don't believe the hype.

Well, not quite midnight, but starting around 12:45 am and going to about 2 am, NASA/JPL will be holding a briefing to cover the egress of the Spirit rover. If I'm still awake, I'll post some notes.

update:James Roberts says the briefing is at 1:00 am PST and that the egress begins at 1:40 am PST.

(Just a reminder, this is not an actual transcript; I'm not a fast enough typist for that. I hope it's useful but please don't use it to pull quotes because it's just not quite accurate enough for that.)

Natalie Godwin (press person): Tonight we expect spirit to roll on to the surface.

Jennifer Trosper: Today was sol 11. As you know for the past couple of days we've been turning the rover on the lander. We play wakeup songs at about 8:45 local solar time each day. Yesterday we plated "turn turn turn" and today "you spin me round" and "round and round". All activities completed perfectly. We planned to end up at 115° and that's exactly where we ended up. All of the subsystems are performing nominally. Some time last week we talked about transmitting through the Pancam mast and we tested that last night and the good news is that it didn't occlude as much as we expected. All of the mini-TES and Pancam mission success panorama data is down so nothing left to do on the lander.

Kevin Burke: How we prepared for this little endeavor - you're looking at our highest fidelity test rover. This is one of our last dry runs, starting at the 45° turn in place position moving to the 95° position - the most hazardous turn we have on the lander. That happened today and at the end of it we had a go/no-go decision to complete to 115°. When it completes the final move, you can see we're turning the wheels forward and getting ready to roll onto the ramp. Next slide is our 95° point in the testrun. The front wheel perched on the +x petal. That's where we are on Mars (which matches up about perfectly with the testbed location). This animation rolls through a series of lander Hazcam images showing where we were through the 95° point. We are very excited to be where we are. We've completed the exploration of our lander and we're about to explore the surface of Mars. In this last photograph, that is the sun setting on Mars, taken at approx. 4PM Marstime. We're headed in the North, Northwest direction and we're exactly where we want to be.

Justin Maki: I'm the MER imaging scientist. These pictures are the result of many years of work. Every time we get a picture back, it's the result of hundreds of peoples' work. As of 4 am this morning, we've downlinked 3900 images. We've acquired 4400 images. We've landed more cameras on Mars than all previous surface landers combined. We have 9 cameras and we're looking forward to 9 more (Opportunity). 6 of the cameras are engineering cameras used to navigate the rover and choose targets. Of the 3900 images about 500 have been engineering camera photographs. This image shows views from the Navcam which is the highest resolution image from the surface of Mars, beating Pathfinder and Viking by about 30% and only outdone by the Pancam. Next image shows an overhead view taken from the Navcam assembled from 20(?) images. Polar panorama is the result of a lot of work and careful calibration of the cameras and software. This image is from sol 10. Next image shows the turn. This is a panorama we built from the non-pointable hazcams. They're fisheye lenses with 120° field of view. This is what you'd see if you were under the deck looking at the lander. This is a new product, the Hazcam 360° mosaic. All imaging systems functioning - we're very happy with the performance. We post everything on the internet as soon as we have it. Join us on the internet.

Albert Haldemann: I want to thank the impact through egress team. I want to tell you today that we're doing something else historic tonight. We're also going to look up while someone else is looking down. We have been planning this for about a year. Credit to the multi-mission operations (something) team, Candi Hansen. We have MGS and Odyssey. The collaborative and coordinated science is offering us unique opportunities. Letter went out to Mars scientists looking for suggestions. Science team put together coordinated activities. We have a good Odyssey (nadir) overflight tonight while the lander is rolling off. We'll have that kind of opportunity for Odyssey every thirty days. The next day the Mars Express Orbiter will be flying over our landing site and that's an elliptical orbit that's at its closest. We'll collect the data, archive it and then evaluate it over the months to come. It won't necessarily be something from which you pull results right away.

Ray Arvidson: This Friday, sol 13, localtime at Gusev 14:00 Mars Express will fly over at altitude of about 300 km straight up. Three instruments on Mars Express including the German high-res stereo camera will produce high-res color images of the site at 10m/pixel. French imager called Omega produces .38 micrometers to 5.1 micrometers data. Third instrument, Italian, called Planetary (missed part of the name) Spectrometer. We'll be looking up with Pancam, tracking the sun that will tell us about the opacity of the atmosphere and particle size distribution as well as using mini-TES to get lower part of the atmosphere and boundary layer characteristics. We'll also be looking at the surface to get photometric and radiometric information that has the surface in it. The attempt is to use observations from above and below to do the best possible job to infer the dynamics of the atmosphere and then *removing* the atmosphere to see things we can't see now. In a couple months there will be a whole set of papers published discussing the atmosphere and geologic construction at the site.

Michael Smith: I'm going to talk to you about mini-TES observations. First plot shows what the sky looks like in infrared as a function of wavelength. This is one of three observations mini-TES made of the sky. Spike on the right is CO₂ gas. The smaller peak to the left of that is caused by dust, and those little bumps on the left are water vapor in the atmosphere. There happen to not be any water ice clouds during this measurement. We use the shape to derive atmospheric temperatures as well as abundance of those materials in the atmosphere. Next plot shows results for atmospheric temperature as a function of height. We're sensitive from about 10 m above the surface to kilometers above the surface. The temp changes quite rapidly near the surface. The atmosphere is a dynamic place, it's always changing as a function of time of day and season. Our best weather forecast now, here at the end of summer, is that temperatures will cool, dust will settle out some, and we'll start to see water ice clouds.

Q. For Kevin, what tonight will be like. You've had new looks at exit ramp. What do you expect to happen? How much of a jump onto the surface. For Jennifer, is it turning into zombieville over there? You guys OK?

Kevin: One of the things we're doing right now is getting Navigation camera images which are stereo so we're getting ranging to get final assessment of our height. It was about 40cm before the turn which means a 10-12 cm drop to the surface. We've tested as high as 57 cm so we're confident and we're going to have a go for egress after final assessment. We'll poll subsystems and then we will be driving 3 m forwards onto the surface of Mars and leaving the lander for good. We do plan to take a couple of parting shots. We should be on the surface with knowledge sometime around 1-2 am PST. I'm looking forward to seeing that rearward image of our lander.

Jennifer: The team has worked extremely hard with long hours and on Mars time which are longer days (36 minutes longer). Very soon, we're going to deploy the robotic arm. First day we'll hover over soil and take microscopic images then the next day put the arm on the surface. We'll be giving our egress team a few days off and bring in a fresh team with the arm and mobility guys. Tonight's the night that's gonna happen. For Impact to Egress phase, we ran pre-determined tasks as we had time. The new process is a daily planning and implementation process, a big undertaking with flexible planning. Science team is going to have a good time.

Q. Can you compare mini-TES results looking up with MGS looking down.

Michael: Very complimentary. With mini-TES very good measures of temperatures low down. With MGS you don't see very far down into the atmosphere. Results so far are very consistent. No big surprises yet.

Q. Role that Mars Express is going to play? What day is that going to happen? During the egress time will there be an overpass from Odyssey or MGS?

Ray: Friday, Jan 16th, sol 13, 2PM localtime in Gusev.
Jennifer: We're going to have a noon local solar time egress and a 4 PM Odyssey pass. We will have DTE comm. before the Odyssey pass.

Q. Could you get more specific about the kinds of things that you can see from Mars Express. Will you be able to see things about that 200 m crater that's a prime target?

Ray: Omega will have either 16 or 32 pixels across strip from north to south for hundreds of km. Within any one of those pixels you can pull out a spectrum from .38 to 5.1 micrometers and we can see a lot into rock forming minerals. By looking up while we're looking down, we can do the best possible job of taking the orbital data and removing the atmosphere. If we have measurements from top and bottom we can get atmosphere-free spectra. Iron oxides, sulfates, nitrates even, will show up in these data. Important to getting at "where's the water".

Q: Strategy for Microscopic Imager?

Ray: The strategy we've been planning for years. This is going to be one of the most exciting set of data from the surface. This instrument has pixels of about 30 micrometers. We'll move the arm to get stereo so we can do micro-topography. I expect we'll use the sequence we've planned over the past few years.

Q. For Ray, can you tell me more about collaboration with Mars Express folks.

Ray: Express went into orbit around Christmas. Timing of overpass wasn't known until a couple weeks ago. By coincidence this beautiful pass right in the afternoon, right overhead, at their lowest elevation so we blocked out time on our assets to match up with their assets. We've been planning collaboration for a lot longer. Some of the US investigators are participants on ME and vice versa. I think the first discussion took place in a cafe in Paris.

Natalie: We'll have live commentary of egress starting at approx. 12:45 am PST and 2am PST for egress. Dick Cheney address to JPL at 2:45 PM this afternoon. QA session with Dr. Alachi following Cheney address. Visit the website.

Q. General public and children have questions. From the public, what's the quality of the image like compared to normal photographic equipment. From the children, how do you get the pictures that look like they're taken from above.

Justin: Each of our cameras is a 1 megapixel camera. The neat thing is that we mount them on actuated devices so we can take many, many pictures and stitch them together so you can get (from Pancam) a 90 megapixel photograph. Overhead views, we use a set of mathematical equations to project each pixel onto a model of the ground and render that as an image. We can do this because we know exactly where the camera is and where it's pointed. We can do even more exciting stuff as we move around. Tell students to study math and science so they can do this kind of stuff :)

Q. What kind of data will you be imaging first on the ground. When would you get first picture of wheels in dirt.

Jennifer: We will be sending egress command at noon local solar time (after midnight PST) and we'll get data back at 1 am PST. After we drive we need to find the sun again. (I lost signal here, sorry.) Then we have some cleanup for parameters that are different between egress and the rest of the mission. We'll get a picture tonight or tomorrow morning.

The Tuesday morning press briefing is about to begin. I'll post notes as soon as it's completed. I may be cut a bit short today because it's BugDay, our weekly "getting involved with Mozilla" event.

(notes are really rough because my connection was pretty bad and I don't have time to clean up because of BugDay)

Chris Lewicki(sp?):
Cutting the umbilical. Severed the 135th and 136th pyro devices to free the rover from the lander. The next step was the first drive of the rover. A small one, but it tested out all of the actuators and mobility system and everything checked out. Then we did our last move which was a 45deg turn in place. We also downlinked 100% of our mission success panorama from Pancam and 100% of our mini-TES octants. (showing some testbed videos and images from the lander before and after these maneuvers) Engineers are extremely happy. Everything is tracking exactly where we want. we're 212deg in yaw.

Joe Guinn: some of the radio techniques to determine the location of the rover. The navigation team was able to guide Spirit to an entry more accurate than anywhere before. Once we were on the surface we used a technique to refine the location to within about 30m (about 100 feet). The accuracy is so good that the biggest uncertainty is in the maps. On the best maps we have available, features can be off by as much as 300-400 meters but given the fact that we've got radiometric solutions accurate to 30 meters, that's our biggest uncertainty. Optical techniques will help us squeeze out the uncertainties. This image shows a progression of the evolution of our understanding of Spirit's location. Large ellipse represents where we planned to land. We were able to take measurements during entry and landing the black ellipse (much smaller) and then there's the little dot inside that black eclipse (closer up image). The red and orange circles represent craters and the white dot represents where spirit is. In order to get an idea if this was really correct we wanted to match it up with an image of where Spirit was going. There was such an image from the DIMES images. Overlay of the Dimes images with the radio solution. In conclusion, we have a really good system for quickly determining the surface location.

Tim Parker: Wow! This is just a hoot :D In this graphic (slide of panorama). We've been pouring over the ground view and with the help of the nav team and the DIMES images. Azimuths to crater rim, then "east hill complex" summit heights and azimuths plotted on Pancam image. Azimuths to south mesas and south southwest hills. This method will disagree some with the radiometric data. This shouldn't be taken as an error in the placement of the rover but rather an error in the Mars control network. The next graphic will show the orbiter view comprised of MOC images mosaiced with two of the DIMES images. here I've plotted all those azimuths as yellow vectors and moved it around until I got a good match with the horizon features and this is what I got.

Steve Squyres: we know where we are now and we also know where we're going. (!!!). With that knowledge we can now intelligently plan a mission-long traverse. To understand why the team has come up with this plan I'm about to show you, it's important to remember why we're here. We will know what lies beneath the material we're on and what lies above it. Go some place where there's a big hole in the ground and then see what lies up higher - find a big hill. Map showing location and objectives. To the NE at a distance about 250 m is a crater 200m in diameter, an extremely attractive target, depth of 10s of meters, a rim 3,4,5 meters high. I don't know what we'll do when we get there but as we get closer we'll enter the ejecta blanket. We'll drive up maybe to the lip of the crater, depends on how trafficable. It will provide a window into the surface of Mars. After we've done that we'll have seen as deep into Mars as we will see in this mission. After that we'll head to those hills. I cannot tell you that we're gonna reach those hills. Vehicle was designed to go 600 meters. These hills are 5 times as far away. We're going to go *toward* those hills. This graphic is what I feel is one of the most evocative images we've taken (view of the eastern hills). This is the direction that we're going to go. As we progress, the detail of the images will get better and better. We will have a better and better chance of finding on the ground materials that originated on the hills. I don't know how close we can get. As we progress we'll investigate materials along the way.

Rob Manning: I can't top those pictures. This is a hoot. 64 pyrotechnic devices have been fired totally flawlessly. Status report of how EDL went: We are going to have better visuals by this time next week. Some facts: interesting development during parachute deployment. Opened perfectly except that the software opened it lower than we expected. Software did exactly right but about a mile lower than our target altitude. Makes things more exciting towards the ground ;-). About 7.5 kilometers height when it opened. speed about 920 mph, 412m/sec. We did have plenty of time. Our descent rate was about 152mph which was quite a bit slower than we had expected. We don't quite know why yet. Either more density or updrafts in atmosphere. The vehicle was actually going 30 mph faster than a skydiver (on earth). Robots have nerves of steel, or copper in this case ;-) We fired rockets at 342 feet, about 100 meters. A little bit lower than we anticipated but software did it perfectly. We ended up cutting the bridle a bit lower. Targeted 12 meters but we had a wind gust near the bottom turned us so we had a significant horizontal velocity when rockets fired. So we had an 8 meter height. Pretty close. Exciting. This wind gust, we did fire our rockets which corrected our attitude and we're very glad we did. Still had a little horizontal velocity left over from our entry angle. Still moving downward a little when the bridle cut. We were surprised but it was not unexpected. Since we had a vertical velocity, we bounced higher than we expected. We had quite a few bounces and we've concluded that we had 28 bounces and we believe we may have bounced uphill. Those scuff marks in sleepy hollow are bounces number 25, 26, 27, 28. Animations next week. Bounces took about 57 seconds. Faster than I would have guessed. Surprised the bouncing ended so quickly.

Q. What sort of changes (for opportunity) and how far did it bounce and how far are hills from crater.

Rob: For opportunity, we're doing a lot of minor changes. Airbag temperatures, other small corrections or changes to parameters not so much based on what we know about what we learned at Gusev but based on how we model Meridiani now that we have real data from Gusev.
Tim: 250m from the rim of the crater. A moderate distance for the crater. Hills nearest point is just under 3km away.

Q. Old saying, any one you can walk away from. Did you really escape disaster because of the cross-wind counter.

Rob: if we had not fired that rocket we would have hit the ground just within the boundary of what we designed for. Glad we didn't have to try it.

Q. Steve, can you run through key things science teams are looking at.

Steve: Atmosphere team looking at mini-TES data looking upward through Mars. We've got so many things that we'd like to show you guys. We have lovely temperature profiles. The geology group and long term planning group have been focused on strategy for first few rocks. Just images of wheel tacks in stereo will be very exciting. In the not too distant future, we're gonna do a little scratch and turn kind of thing with the wheels for science and engineering. Minerology and chemistry group awaiting APSX. Their focus is how to pick drive directions that will maximize our ability to learn about the minerals in the rocks with mini-TES. Need to fill the mini-TES field of view so looking for larger rocks to drive closer to.

Q. Looking at those hills, if you're standing on earth, you'll see a range of hills and it appears that one slopes down behind another. They look like hills on earth. Any possibility that you can work your way through one of those passes?

Steve: yeah, it's a beautiful piece of scenery. I'm not gonna tell you we can't. But again, those things are 5 times farther than Spirit was designed to go.

Q. For Chris, can you take us through what's ahead. A few more turns, some Pancam images? For Rob, lots of discussion for future landers. Stick with airbags?

Chris: Still on schedule for egress for sol 12. Two more turn in place maneuvers. Our first move tomorrow will be another 50 degrees. Last move will be a final 20deg move and turn our wheels straight. That'll all be tomorrow with confirmation from end of day Odyssey pass. Then the next day will be egress. There will be some more focused observations with Pancam and mini-TES before roll off. We already have some additional data from the blind spot and nothing hiding there.

Rob: I've been asked about these EDL systems before. There is no right way to land on Mars. We are still in the infant stage of these systems. It depends on so much. I personally believe that we're going to have a collection of different designs for EDL systems. There are many features of this system that need to be improved. We still can't get to many places on Mars. Places that are very scientifically interesting *and* safe are rare. We'd like to be able to deliver to more locations. We can't go to higher elevations yet. There's a big future out there.

Q. How long are the range of eastern hills, how high are the peeks and any theories about how they formed.

Tim: a few km in length. highest peaks about 100 m tall. three times the height of pathfinder twin peaks. three times as far away though. How they got there? That's difficult. Premature to draw conclusions. Some on science team are speculating about layering in the hills.
Steve: generally speaking, the origin breaks down into categories. One, they existed as before the crater. The other possibility is that material was stripped away to create them. We'll learn more as we go there.

Q. As you get closer to crater it gets more difficult to navigate.

Steve: we expect topography to get rougher and more blocky as we get closer to it. We have some hints from THEMIS on Odyssey. By looking at temps from orbit you can get a sense about how blocky. About 3/4ths of it is more blocky and rockier and one little part, like a door opening in has less of that and that's the part facing us. Good luck. We'll be careful. Darned careful. Whether or not it's important to get right to the rim or not. Hard question. I would expect that the floor will have a lot of drift material.
Tim: there is a suggestion that there are dark and light toned dune fields on the floor of the crater. The topography is rather subdued. They've either been partially buried or stripped away. We don't expect a meteor crater freshness. We're probably looking at a 5m high exterior rim. Who knows. The interior is not as deep as a fresh bowl shaped crater. Could be 10 or 15 m deep.
Steve: We can look at the stuff in the crater walls but we can also look at the stuff in the ejecta blanket.

Q. Biggest concerns as you get ready to get off the lander.

Chris: egress itself. we've tested a number of profiles and established how high a drop we can take. We want to have the best alignment. There are also various hazards along the lander deck.

Q. Tomorrow the president is making a big announcement about other missions, a proposed manned mission to orbit Mars. Thoughts on this?

Rob: it is very exciting. It's a huge road to get there, a long-term adventure. It's all integrated with exploration of Earth, and the science we get from these explorations. People need to have a place to head to focus minds and excitement and this can easily do that.

Q. What are we learning about Mars weather? Modeled for water vapor?

Rob: Mars, like earth has weather. Trick is to make sure you don't have to care about the weather. We had cold air prior to Christmas and then this very significant regional dust storm on the other side of the planet but to our surprise, the atmosphere can get warmer in the upper atmosphere because that higher-level dust can propagate over the entire globe. It's like a little thermal blanket that warms up that layer of the atmosphere. No need to model for

Q. How fast do you move off the lander? Steve, projected range of rover was 600 meters? Enough power as seasons change?

Chris: 3cm per second.
Steve: We have a set of expectations worked out ahead of the project. The number that was set as a target was 600 meters. Most of us are feeling pretty good about that number but 3km is a lot longer than that. It's late summer heading into fall.
Chris: As we get colder we'll use more energy but won't have to shut down to avoid overheating problem. Some predictions put us past the 90 sol mission mark.

The press briefing is about to start. On another "space" note, the ISS coverage on NASA TV just reported that they've found the source of the leak on the ISS. I'll post MER press briefing notes as soon as soon as it's concluded.

Joy Crisp: Before we show you the images, I'm going to talk some about the temperature. Why do we care about temperatures? For two reasons: one, certain parts can break if they go outside of their temperature ranges and two, certain parts need heating to work and that use up energy. We've provided Jim Murphy input parameters and his model predicted for us what the daily temperature change would be every 20th sol for the next 100 sols. After we landed we updated these inputs because the location wasn't like the average we had used before. We have a darker surface with more atmospheric dust than we thought. Graph shows the predicted change in temperature during the day, one meter above the surface of Mars. The rover has to survive large temperature swing each day from about -10°C or +15°F in the afternoon to -75°C or -100°F around 6 am Mars time. As we move from summer to autumn, by sol 100, the temperatures will drop down to a low of about -123°F. There are no temperature sensors on this rover that measure temperature directly but the engineering models are predicting quite well. As you know, our thermal situation requires a siesta each day to keep cool. Once it's off the lander, it won't require that.

Michael Malin: I have the privileged of being able to reveal to you a most remarkable image. There are 75 red, green, blue triplets, 1024x1024 each. 225 total images. 8 sections called octants acquired over sols 3, 4, and 5. Calibrated at Cornell then projected into map projection for assembly and then assembled. (video of image). (The version they're showing is half-resolution because their equipment wouldn't handle it with enough speed to finish by this morning's briefing. I wonder what that's gonna do to their website bandwidth). This is approximately true color.

John Grotzinger: I also have the pleasure of being able to talk to you about some of the images that Jim Bell and the Pancam team collected over the last two sols. A small-scale view of a piece of the Martian soil. First image is a very unusual situation, drag marks created by retracting airbags from the lander. This is unanticipated data. Pebbles which have been vertically depressed down into the soil. Pebbles have been dragged towards the lander leaving sort of a bow-wake around them. Then in the middle is the feature we call "Magic Carpet". Soil detached and was removed, then advanced forward and formed this curl-up feature. It doesn't exhibit the brittle deformation that we saw at Pathfinder, a more ductile, plastic deformation. In the next image, we're going to see a movie in which the Pancam was able to make a 3-D rendering with it's stereo cameras. The 2-D image is an approximately 750, 550, and 480 nanometer bands. This 3-D image is a false color image with exaggerated features. Here we zoom in to Magic Carpet itself. The large rock in background is about 20 cm across. Deepest drag mark is about 1 cm. Around that boulder you can see some coarser material. And here, this is a soft material that at the same time behaves cohesively that formed the magic carpet. The plowing is very spectacular, like a bow-wave of dirt.

Arthur Amador: I'll give a short status on the rover health from an engineering point of view, then I'll talk about today's and tomorrow's events. Today we had another good sol on Mars. We accomplished everything we had planned on sol 9. We acquired 250 megabits of science data, completing mission success panorama for mini-TES, taking some images of our egress and some additional mini-TES data from sleepy hollow. We ran simulations for our egress in the sandbox and everything went well. Good to go with our plan for egress. Attitude of the vehicle unchanged. 2 successful HGA passes validated our attitude. Tilt of about 1.6 deg. Communications systems, x-band and relay, continue to work well. Returned 220 megabits on 1 MGS, two LGA, 1 HGA and 2 Odyssey passes. Energy about 900 watt-hours. Thermally, our peak temperatures between 48 and 46° C yesterday - "a little bit toasty on the inside". Sol 10 science planned to get the last mission success octants. (missed something here as audio dropped out) Imaging of magnets. Egress on sol 12.

Kevin Burke: I'll tell you about our next three days: First, we'll be cutting the last cable that connects us to the lander. (shows test cable). Connected to the back of the rover and to the lander. It allows us to use the actuators on the lander (like the airbag actuators) that we no longer need. This cable cutter (shows demo) is a pyrotechnic device that will cut that cable. It's an "explosive guillotine". Once we're done with that, we're ready to initiate the egress activity. You've been waiting 9 days. It's been three years for me. After we cut the cable we're going to do a bump, a -25 cm drive. Then we'll tow in the wheels so we can initiate a turn in place. That will let us know that all our mobility actuators are functional, making a lot of the engineering team very happy. Up until that point there are still 4 actuators that we haven't tested. Once that is completed we initiate turn in place #1. Go to a 45° angle to assess that blind spot that the solar arrays cover. This is a safe move that allows us to turn back forward if we see something we don't like as well it allows us to assess the actuators. Those will begin this evening Earthtime. Next we'll begin the turn in place #2 from 25° to 95°. At the end of that maneuver we stop to make sure we're in the right spot and adjust if we need to. The last move will be the turn in place from 95° to 115°. The very next day we're going to be driving straight ahead at 115°, 3 meters, putting our rear wheels one meter away from the ramps on the Martian soil.

Q. What are the hypothesis on what the magic carpet material is? Could this characteristic gunk up the wheels while driving or trenching?

John: We haven't had a lot of time to study it yet. Solid aggregate behaves in a mostly very fluid way. I would expect that it wouldn't be sticky at all. The magic carpet is an anomaly that characterizes some cohesive behavior. It's probably very easily broken apart.

Arthur: we'll be testing a number of things, including looking at stickiness as one of the first things off the lander.

Q. A lot of people think you found mud. Can you discount that at this stage? Mike, you've been looking from orbit for a while, what are you struck by now that you're on the surface.

John: at low-res it looked like a fluid mud. In higher resolution images, it doesn't have the mechanical behavior of mud. This image has a max resolution of about 1 mm per pixel so it's quite detailed.

Mike: On the surface, it looks very very familiar. It looks very normal. We're all very excited.

Q. Mike, now that you're seeing it in such incredible detail are there particulars that leap out at you?

Mike: You betchya. We don't have enough time to go to all of the places that look exciting. We see indications of a lot of wind action. We see fractured rocks. We didn't see fractured rocks at any of the other landing sites. We see a crater with it's whole ejecta blanket waiting for us. Too many directions to go :) And the hills in the far field - we all want to get over there.

Q. While it's easy to accept that the magic carpet isn't mud, could it be a damp clay-like material stuck together by traces of liquid water. Natalie ? points out hat Gusev is in that equatorial region that has more near-surface water. Could it be slightly damp soil. Has it become urgent to take a close look at this as soon as possible.

Mike: It's unlikely there is enough water to have a physical effect. Very, very fine grained materials behave in strange ways. (A couple of Viking and Apollo mission examples of very fine materials doing strange things). As scientists, we can't assume anything. We have a whole group "soil and rock physical properties" group and a set of experiments where we'll learn this. And don't forget, we have a microscopic imager on this system and we're gonna look. I don't think there's any liquid. I know that Martian fine materials can behave like a liquid.

John: If there are clay minerals, and Mossbauer and APSX can tell us that, it could be that they have electrostatic charges. With the MI we can get right in there and see what's happening.

Q. What is the approximate location and dimensions for magic carpet? And do you think this stuff is everywhere?

John: about 2 meters away from the camera. Magic carpet is about 10 cm diameter and about 1 mm or two thick. Slightly longer than it is wide. We can't rule out that it's an artifact having to do with the airbag itself. The rover can test this out in the field.

Q. Could you give us a sense of the lay of the land, topography. Does that square with the idea that this is a lakebed.

Mike: Yes, topography is rolling in some directions and flat in others. Much is probably related to large numbers of craters on the surface. We're seeing overlapping ejecta blankets and directional ejecta. The relief on these things are very small, from a few cm to 2 m on the large relief. We're not looking at pristine original surface out there. You can see that from those big hills to the south and the east of us.

Q. For Kevin, in which direction will egress occur.

Kevin: The directions I deal with are 'where are we on the lander'. We're going to be egressing at 286°, a little bit west of Northwest.

Q. Talking about rocks that were split - indicate presence of water?

Mike: Yeah, possibly. We don't know when, but possibly. We have to pose questions in a way that we think we can test but we also come to this with our own personal bias. My experience in Antarctica, the fact that I've seen more fractured, cracked rocks here than we've seen everywhere else combined leads me to believe that water was involved. Other colleagues don't believe that and speculate that it could be explained by impact fractures. There are things we can look for when we get over there. Two possibilities, water and impact fracturing.

Q. Characteristics that will tell you?

Mike: Physical impact would be sharper. Weathering, (water fracture) would allow other degradation because it happens over time. The fact that we have the opportunity to look is remarkable.

Veronica: just a reminder: replay at conclusion. images on website. next brief tomorrow at 9am PST

Q. When do you expect to have that mini-TES pan data. Also, I'm seeing white rock in the images.

Mike: There is also some debate as to how many types of rocks there are. When I look at these images, I also see a light tone rock and a dark tone rock type. The gray stuff seems to be the dark rock with dust on it. However, people in the science team with spectrum data think that the light tone materials bear a striking similarity to the dark tone rocks. Not clear. Obvious visual impression is two types of rocks.

John: The last two octants being collected today and will be down tomorrow.

Q. Once the rover is on the surface, how long before you strike out in some distant direction.

John: The hope is that in a few sols the instruments will all test out and then we'll make a short drive, a few to 10 meters, with the goal being to analyze soil and one of the adjacent rocks. After that, difficult to predict except to move towards that crater that is about 200 m away then move toward the distant hills.

Q. What does the 360 tell you that the other pictures don't. How do you compensate for the dust?

Mike: Photoshop magic. We have a strict set of rules on what we can and cannot change so that the public can have confidence they're seeing what's actually there. Within those parameters I can try to balance the contrast and brightness. We take sort of an average sky color. It's really bright some parts of the day, really dark at others. Seeing the pan totally assembled gives you a much greater appreciation for the relative distribution of things. I find it easier to visualize where I am when I can look in one view at all those directions. We're also working on coming up with ways to better view this. In the old days, we put the panoramas inside of spheres and stuck our heads inside the spheres. I'm trying to find a way to do something like that with this pan. There aren't going to be a lot of times during this mission that we'll be able to take this kind of image in this detail.

Q. As you look at this panorama are you seeing any color change from top to bottom of rocks that would indicate evaporation over time.

Mike: We're seeing lateral and vertical bands. Could be chemical process but probably more likely that these are places where windblown materials have banked up against them. We're going to use the rock abrasion tool in dusting and grinding mode to distinguish between the possibilities.

The Sunday morning press briefing is underway. I'll post notes at the conclusion.

Arthur Amador:
I'll talk about the major activities we performed on the vehicle yesterday, then give a vehicle status, then talk about the remainder of the egress plan. John will talk about science plan for sol 9. The major objectives yesterday were accomplished. There were two engineering activities in addition to returning the science data from mini-TES and Pancam. First engineering task was to release the two middle wheel cables. These were released by cutting the cable with a pyrotechnic device. We are now fully stood up and all the wheels are deployed and released from the lander. The only thing that we remain connected to the lander by is the umbilical. We'll be releasing that on sol 10. These cable cuts that we used to release the wheels and the pyro event to release the arm are the second to the last of 106 pyro events. We're almost there. We have one cable left on sol 10 then we're completely free of the lander. The second activity was the release and stow of the robotic arm at front of rover. It was stowed and locked for launch in a horizontal stow. We released the pins through pyro events yesterday. Then we moved the arm slightly out and up onto a little hook we have to stow it. So it is now released and stowed in the drive position. That leaves us set to perform egress activities over the next couple of days. The vehicle status remains pretty darned perfect and everybody's extremely pleased with the health and status of the various sub-systems. Yesterday we performed a sunfind and we measured total tilt of lander to be 1.5°. Our communications performance continues to be excellent. We had over 170 megabits downlinked from the vehicle yesterday. We've downlinked all of the science up to that point. Mars Odyssey and MGS downlinks are performing excellent and the HGA continues to operate without any problems. Thermally, we're very close to our predicts which we've adjusted some to predict temperatures on the surface. Power-wise we're in very good shape - generating about 900 watt-hours per day and using about 700 or 750 of those watt-hours per day, so we continue to have a good energy margin. We continue to be on track for egress. This is a Navcam image and the yellow arrow is our current egress path that will take us off the lander to the north, Northwest. (lost connection for about a minute. sorry)... plan mechanically how we would do that turn and practice coming off the lander in that direction. We set the practice up to get the lander at that height and tilt and ran the practices of egressing that Northwest path (show of video from that test taken last night). They set up the mock-up lander and engineering model rover in the sandbox. They backed rover up approx 25 cm then turn to the right about 120 degrees to get off that Northwest petal. We're planning the egress in three parts. First we'll turn rover 45 ° and stop to take Hazcam images of the rover, the deck, and positions. We'll return those images to Earth and the impact/egress team to ensure they're as we predicted. Then we'll give a go for part two that will take us to 95 ° then do the same thing with the pictures and the evaluation. Then, part three will take us to 115° to 120°. We did several cases in testing, a 120° case, and a 115° case. We raised the deck and tested uncertainties in our number there, and we tilted the deck and tested uncertainties in those measures. Today we're developing the sequences that will actually tell the rover to make those turns and we'll test those sequences in the testbed, kind of a dress rehearsal, today. So, today, on sol 9, we'll finish testing and do a dress rehearsal, but nothing will happen with egress on the actual vehicle today. We'll just take science today. Tomorrow, on sol 10 we'll do cable cut #3, the umbilical. Then we'll do the first part of the turn. On sol 11, Tuesday night here, we'll do part two and part three leaving us in a position to egress on sol 12, Wednesday night, Jan. 14.

John Callas: Things continue to go very well. Because egress permitted us another day on lander and uplinks are going so well, we have an opportunity to do unplanned science. Up until now it's all been planned. We'll do more unplanned once we're on the ground and that's how we'll be operating from here on out. We have to do daily commands. In a 17 hour period, end to end, we will make the plan, send the commands, get data and start making the next day's plan. They've been doing analysis, but for the first time, our science team met last night to develop a detailed plan for the next day's operation. The plan is first, completing the remaining two mini-TES octants. Since we have stood up and the rover's now at a different height, we want to also include a Pancam coincident for those two octants. Because we have about 270 megabits of science data, we've developed a very detailed Pancam panorama that will be 3 tiers tall, 10 frames wide, 14 colors, and 120° of coverage in the egress direction. It will be in stereo, high-quality, not as strongly compressed as the other images we've taken. We also have 3 mini-TES stares. Stares are when mini-TES spends longer on a target and get higher signal to noise ratio. We also have a multi-hour APSX calibration planned as well. This is more than enough data to completely fill the relay opportunities that we have today. Once we egress, one of the first things we're gonna do is use the arm. We'll probably do a target of opportunity, in situ, analysis, first thing after we drive off. If there's a rock within the work volume, we'll probably look at using the robotic arm to look at it. Once we're on the surface, we commence operation where the science team will look at data, make plans and build commands each day. Scientists will have to make decisions very quickly and then make commands, get those commands tested and uplinked. We have a very difficult and complex process but we've trained for that and we have an infrastructure for that. We have some of the top scientists from around the world and we've done extensive training and testing here on Earth. We've given them the infrastructure, tools, software tools, to accomplish that. We've developed software tools to allow us to visualize very quickly. We have a very tight schedule because if we miss the uplink, we miss a sol and this mission works out to about 4 million dollars a day amortized, so missing a sol is a big deal.

Veronica: Just a reminder that all the images shown today are available on our website along with all previous images.

Q. When you exit and you get a bump is there any concern about recalibrating instruments and can you give me an idea of what are those targets for the mini-TES stares.

Arthur: Once we get on the surface we'll do a sunfind to get a measure of our attitude and that's part of the normal operational process that the rover goes through.

John: We aren't planning on any recalibration of science instruments. We have three targets for the mini-TES. One is in sleepy hollow. The two others are of interest to science team, they want to start to catalog the diversity of rocks in the vicinity of the lander but I don't know the exact targets right now.

Q. When the rover is off the lander and you'll look at soil and first rock of opportunity how long will rover stay there?

John: Two or three days at that location. Each IDD is a one sol event. Soil first day, rock second day. These will be first-time events so we want to get them right.

Q. Roll-off moved from Tuesday to Wednesday night and what caused that? And is there anything else that could cause further delays?

Arthur: We adjust the plan every day to manage our risks and our resources both on the spacecraft and here at JPL. I would expect that as we get over these steps and closer to the egress these uncertainties will decrease. We've got this three-part turn and we may discover something that causes us to do something different. We try to give you all the best estimate we can and today we estimate getting off around sol 12.

Q. Which direction are the two octants in relation to the egress path and other familiar features.

John: +y -x octant direction is roughly back in this direction in rover frame (points over right shoulder) and -y +x octant is this direction (pointing to egress direction and sleepy hollow).

Q. In the turn I noticed that one of the rovers solar panels is blocking a little bit of egress path could it be blocking a hazard from view.

Arthur: We'll be examining that very carefully as we make the turn.

Q. Time of day of egress.

Arthur: sol 12, execution realtime operation on Mars will be during late-night hours on Wednesday and early morning hours of Thursday here at JPL. Early Thursday morning JPL time.

Q. Is it accurate to say you've switched to more of tactical operation now and my second question is once you move off do you have that first science target beyond initial in mind yet.

John: Yes we have started a new phase. We've now implemented a new suite of science meetings. We want to start transitioning the team in that mode. As far as targets, I don't know that at this time.

Q. About these last two Octants, when you have the data come back are you going to have a complete panorama from sitting position and then two octants from standing? And can you speak to the possibilities of instruments being damaged when you freed robotic arm.

Arthur: We got a lot of telemetry from the release and stow and every thing looked good.
John: We had always planned to take these octants either pre or post standup. The important thing was to take the mini-TES and Pancam for each octant from the same position. We will co-register the 360 degree panorama and you'll have a slight shift. The new panorama we're taking is in the position when we'll be the highest we'll ever be. This is the best perspective so it really is a nice opportunity.

Q. How high off the deck is the rover and can you talk about power an thermal issues.

Arthur: The deck is 40-50 cm off the ground and the rover cameras are a meter and a half above the deck. Power and thermal, power sub-system team is very happy with performance. They're within a percent or two of where they expected to be over the last few sols. We look very good power-wise and expect to improve as the dust gets better. Thermally, the same thing. We've been running a little bit hot and we'll cool off some when we get on the surface. We're very happy with power and thermal. (follow up question on tau measurements?) Science team measures it one way and the power guys look at it as a qualifier on their power performance.

Q. This last cable cutting has to be a little bit nerve-racking? What has to happen physically with that connection? Numbers of cables?

Arthur: Right. It's cut close to the rover's web and it drops on the deck and is retracted to get it out of the way. We'll be very careful to avoid getting hung up on the retraction device on the deck. There are two pyros to cut the cables, redundancy. We expect a clean cut. Once we do that the lander will be powered down.

Q. Can we expect the mission success panorama tomorrow.

John: I don't have an estimate and there's some work labor to calibrate and coregister. I hope soon.

Q. Timeline for the week, do I have this right? Mon: turn in place, Wed: actual egress. What's Tuesday? Then if you do egress on Wed., then Thursday night would be first deploy of arm, and Fri would be examine the first rock within range?

Arthur: The turn in place is over the course of two sols, Monday night at JPL, sol 10, we'll cut the cable and do the first 45° and send back images and do analysis. Then on sol 11, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, do the second part. I think you got the IDD activities right after that.

Veronica: Next briefing will be Monday morning at 9am Pacific. All images available at the website.

I had planned to do a "week in review" post, a somewhat in-depth report on Spirit's first week on Mars. I'm not going to have time to turn out the article that I'd intended to but I'm not gonna let that stop me from posting the first segment. If you all are ineterested in this kind of "original" content, let me know and I'll try to do more of it. It's something more than the notes I've been posting but also something less than an "article".

Spirit's First Few Hours On Mars - What Is And What Came Before

On November 7th, 1996, a one ton satellite named Mars Global Surveyor began its ten month journey to the red planet. Apon arrival, it would settle into orbit at an altitude of about 235 miles and begin recording and beaming back to Earth some of the most detailed photographic, spectral, and elevation data ever collected of the Martian surface. In addition to the science payload, MGS carried an instrument called Mars Relay, a communications link between the Earth and future Mars surface landers.

Three and a half years after MGS's Martian arrival, the 2001 Mars Odyssey was launched. Odyssey, one half of the Mars Surveyor 2001 project (the lander/rover half of the project was canceled) carried alongside of its science package a second communications relay into orbit around the red planet.

On January 3rd, 2004, just one week ago today, both MGS and Odyssey phoned home with data from the most recent Martian arrival, Spirit, first of two Mars Explorer Rovers to arrive at the red planet. Spirit would be sending telemetry and other data through MGS's Mars Relay during entry, descent, and landing - the final phases of its 200 day voyage. It was scheduled to transmit about 250 kilobits worth of descent-specific data and when the EDL team at JPL announced that it had received more than the expected 250 kilobits of decent data from MGS, that was the first clear indication that Spirit was alive on the surface.

Soon, the data beamed from Spirit's UHF antenna to MGS and then to the deep-space communications facility (a DSN component) near Canberra, Australia, was coming in fast and furious. We learned within minutes that the lander had settled "base petal down" meaning that it wouldn't have to flip itself over to open up. Seconds later we learned that the airbag retraction was in process and that if all went well with that retraction, Spirit might be able to take advantage of an evening Odyssey flyover to relay photographs of the Martian surface that same night. Everything went well and we got back an amazing 24 megabits of data through Odyssey's relay. That data included first the engineering data reporting "all systems green", then thumbnail images, and then full-frame images.

Three hours after Spirit jettisoned her cruise stage, she was sitting on the Martian surface and the science and engineering teams (and the public, via NASA TV, CNN, the MER website, and other outlets) were pouring over dozens of images from the Descent Image Motion Estimation System, the MER's Hazard Avoidance Cameras, Navigation Cameras, and Panoramic Cameras, along with enough EDL telemetry and atmospheric data to keep them busy for days.

There are many lessons to be learned from Spirit's first days on Mars. One of them should be obvious the next time someone mentions to you "all of the failed Mars missions". Our Mars program is solid and the pieces are all working well together. Thanks to the hard work at NASA, the JPL and elsewhere over the last decade, we have satellites in orbit around another planet, ready and quite capable of adding amazing value to current and future missions.

From the very informative Susan's 2020 Hindsight:

• Spirit's Blog. Heh.
• Cornell Mars Rover News Cornell's contributions described in these news stories
• Steve Squyers Mars Mission News latest update Jan 5
• Student Astronaut Journals From Courney and Rafael, who spoke at Wild About Mars the day after landing. They make a report each "Sol" (Martian day)

Also, be sure to check out these Mars-releated blogs and posts:

Marcus P. Zillman - Happenings and Events
Chris Gulker's Picture Weblog
The One True b!X's MARS OR BUST
From Behind The Wall Of Sleep - Worlds Beyond
Marsblog - Louisiana Mars Society
Mars Rover Mission Blog - A Very Unofficial Blog Following the Twin NASA Exploration Rovers: Spirit and Opportunity
Alcaide's Caf�
DanielRoot.com - Mars Jiggyvision
kwc blog - Moons of Mars post
iCalShare - Spirit Calendar
Martian Soil - Daily news on the Planet Mars
Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron - dowloadable Martian sims objects

It's the weekend and this is my 10th (I think) press briefing post. It feels like I've got enough notes to put together something of a "week in review" post. Maybe sometime after today's briefing. We'll see.

Press briefing seems to be delayed. It's after 9 am and NASA TV is playing some robot games thing.

Hrm. Maybe it's not delayed and NASA TV just isn't covering it on the weekends. What a disappointment. Anyone know the story or when NASA TV might replay the briefing? The schedule isn't really explicit.

Ahh, a commenter says it's one hour later. Thanks so much for the info. I guess today I'll get to post after I've had some coffee. Nice :-)

Briefing replay happening now.

Saturday morning press briefing notes:

Jennifer Trosper: After 7 months of being folded up, today is the day that it's unfolded completely. About 3 years ago, Chris and his team were given a huge challenge, essentially putting a square peg into a round hole. Today we get to celebrate the success of Chris and his team who fit our rover into this lander.

Chris Voorhees: It's been a very exciting couple of days for the spacecraft team. Spirit has spent most of the last 7 months crunched up inside of a tetrahedron shaped lander. Over the last couple of days spirit has undergone a reverse origami, an unfolding. Started yesterday performing standup part one and standup part two. This is a sequence of images that shows the first parts of standup raising into position and the front rockers have folded themselves out into their deployed position. Part of that process includes a couple of latches on the side of the vehicle that support the vehicle. There was then a re-raise to make sure those latches were locked in. As part of this morning's process we re-did the re-raise procedure to verify again that they were indeed successfully engaged. We got telemetry that says they were engaged so today we move into part three where spirit really gets into her own. Now the rover lift mechanism that lifted Spirit into her standup position has retracted and the rover is supporting herself. Once that was verified on the ground we went into standup part four, the deployment of the rear wheels. Her rear wheels have been nested against the middle wheels and have been dying to get out. We do that with two pyros that release the wheel and the wheel then deploys itself by driving along a cogged surface. This only takes a few seconds and increases Spirits wheelbase so she is more stable on the surface. The last slide shows our verification that process completed successfully. (hascam images of wheel position change). This latch check ensures that the wheels are deployed all the way out. To continue a tradition I'll do "standup by the numbers". There were 12 pyrotechnic devices, 9 motorized mechanisms, 6 structural latches, 2 sets of stereo hazard avoidance cameras, and numerous other and the other sensors reporting back. The other number is the scores of engineers, analysts, technicians, machinists, that allowed Spirit to perform one of the most complex sequences of deployment on a robotic spacecraft ever. Being successful, we've left spirit in a very comfortable position. She's asleep comfortably supported on all 6 wheels.

Jennifer: As if what Chris just described wasn't enough, we've transferred over 200 megabits of science mission (10 times all of what Pathfinder sent). Now that we're fully sit up, we're getting ready to egress (graphic 5, overhead shot). Tomorrow we're going to release the middle wheels. The other thing that we'll do is move the instrument deployment arm from its launch locked position to its stowed position. After we do that we'll fire cable cutter number 3, the final cable holding the rover to the lander. We've been looking at the egress paths and testers doing simulations in the testbed. We discovered that there is a possibility that as the rover drives down the front ramp the back of the right solar panel could brush up against the airbag. We made decision today to egress out the back. What we'll be doing is to turn the rover 120° and drive down the egress aids on the back of the lander. Turn on Monday night and egress on Tuesday - a bit earlier than we thought. The lander is very flat and we had talked about hyper-extending the petals into the ground to make the lander more level. We now don't believe that this will be necessary. Deck height of 40cm is actually egressable. End of the aid is about 15cm from the ground and that's the drop-off as the rover moves onto the ground.

Joy Crisp: Going back to that "six minutes of terror" and understanding the atmospheric conditions is crucial. Before we landed Spirit, we set up predictions. We've been busy checking our prediction against what Spirit saw. Atmospheric reconstructions is now completed. It was done to determine if any adjustments were needed for Opportunity. The accelerometer and gyro readings derived the profile. The yellow line is temperature. Before spirits landing David Kass and Tim Schofield prepared a predicted temperature. It was derived from recent MGS TES data. Models of the Martian atmosphere have a lot of uncertainty. On earth we take thousands of like measurements per day. On Mars, this is only our fourth time to take such measurements. We were thrilled to see those lines (predictions and actual) match so closely. This is just one piece of the whole analysis of EDL. Pete Theisinger reported yesterday that we're not going to be changing the Opportunity entry angle.

Matt Golombek: Selection of these landing sites took place over 3 years. The two most important things in making the selection were, one, safety, safety, safety, and two, you want it to be scientifically interesting. In the evaluation we made use of, for the first time ever, data from two spacecraft in orbit around Mars, MGS and Odyssey, and they collected enormous amounts of data about these sites. They are the best imaged, the best studied sites anywhere on Mars. We looked at 3-meter MOC images, thermal, radar, albedo, etc. And from that data, we made three broad predictions. 1. The site would be safe - and it was. 2. The site would be trafficable and safe for driving rover - we'll find out soon. And 3. We said it would have substantially fewer rocks than the previous 3 landing sites (turned out to be 3% compared to 20% average at the others). What does remote sensing - thermal, inertial, albedo, topography - say about that area. It's smoother and flatter at 1km, 100m and 5m scales than two other sites we've landed at. In the location we came to rest, a low albedo region, we said it would be less dusty than where we've been before and that seems to have been the case. Pancam is healthy. This new image, panorama looking to south west, relatively smooth and flat surface, sparsely rocky, small circular depressions filled in with dust and light sediment, flat horizon, not much in the way of relief. It's the smoothest, flattest place we've landed on Mars with the possible except of Viking 2. Looking to southwest we see that hill in background, it's being used to try to infer where we landed in the ellipse. Pancam is acquiring images for mini-TES as well as the first spectral spot. 93% of mission success panorama has been acquired and we hope to release that pretty darn soon. (Slide tour of other landing sites) Pathfinder site: Substantially rockier plane. Brighter albedo from dust coating. Viking 1 site: Substantial rocks and dust and drift deposits, raises albedo and makes it a brighter looking place. rolling surface. Viking L2 site: Lots of rock, dust, high albedo, about as smooth and flat as spirit site at the 1km scale but Spirit site has fewer rocks. We predicted that Meridiani will look completely different from the 4 other sites, with substantially lower albedo, very little dust, a dark gray rolling plane.

Mark Lemmon: From the very first images we could tell there was a great deal of dust in the sky. Dust can be a nuisance for getting power but also can be studied from a science point of view. We're getting a good handle on the atmospheric data. In this image see the yellowish brown sky. Also notice in this image and in more distance peaks, dust substantially impacts the visibility of the features at the sight. More distant features are more obscured. Dust makes visibility something like a smoggy summer day in a big city but not the worst smog you've ever seen. We're trying to get a good handle on the dust properties. We're putting that atmospheric data together with information from other sources like the photos of the camera calibration target or dust falling on the magnets. We want to better understand how dust impacts exploration on other planets. We started with measurements from orbit using thermal imaging. We take pictures of the sun to see dimming by dust. It's .9 to 1 on the opacity scale which is a bit more than the estimates we're getting based on the thermal infrared instruments. Solar panels are OK. Also doing evaluations of the coloring of the sky. Imaging teams are making adjustments. Looking at the right in that image (calibration target) you can see a very bright shadow. See that the shadow is maybe 50% as bright as non-shadowed area. Much of the time we're imaging Mars, half of the light is coming from the colored sky and not directly from the sun. See also the mirrors showing Martian sky color. Pathfinder observed several dust devils (images). Gusev crater has perhaps 10 times the dust devil activity as the pathfinder site. We will be observing in the early afternoon hours when it is warm out and dust devil activity should be high. Not seeing many yet. We will get measurements of convection and our team will be describing what's happening at the lower levels of the Martian atmosphere.

Q. Drive off questions. Toward the northeast? What time Tuesday evening? Command path?

Jennifer: Northwest. We continue to command through x-band even though we could use UHF if we chose to. Egress command will be sent a little before midnight (late Tuesday evening).

Q. Rolloff questions: Elevation of lander is 40cm? How far is it gonna roll before all 6 wheels on soil and what is the angle of decline?

Jennifer: The height is about 40 cm on average. The highest point on the lander settled recently (the rear petal) from about 56 cm down to 47 cm. The whole lander has settled a bit since we started retracting airbags. Angle is 30-45° and as the rover weights it down it gets steeper. We'll drive till we get all 6 wheels on the ground, probably half a meter.

Q. Am I right that the lander becomes "just so much metal" when you cut the cable, and can you talk more about that Pancam image?

Jennifer: yes, lander becomes space debris.

Matt: we believe that is ridge/trough topography leading up to those far hills about 2.5 km away. It's reminiscent in some ways to what we saw at the Pathfinder site. At pathfinder we believe it was the result of fluvial activity. We're more reserved about making judgement about the Spirit site this soon. Other evidence of fluvial activity, rounding, concentrations of boulders at tops of ridges the so-called "boulder bars", but we wanna wait a bit before making that judgement.

Q. Question about reconstruction of atmospheric data, you tweaked on Spirit's parachute, is that part of the strategy for Opportunity. And can you talk more about dust on solar panels?

Joy: The team is thinking of increasing dynamic pressure of the parachute opening just like we did on Spirit. This would be a minor adjustments. Part of the picture is monitoring the decay of the dust storm.

Mark: What we know about dust falling on the solar panels is still just a model. Over the course of the mission we'll actually measure that with cameras looking at panels and calibration target.

Jennifer: We spend the first week of the mission working on our power model and with a tau of about .9 we get our predicts to match our actuals so there's a little bit less energy but not significant and as the tau clears up we'll get even more. We don't use all our batteries each day anyway so there's margin there.

Q. About that new panorama segment, there seems to be a craterlike depression that looks like it might have exposure on the far rim. Do you see that?

Matt: There is what appears, - there are literally dozens of these and my personal interpretation is that they are secondary craters, add a little bit of windblown dust and that could be what you are seeing - there is one in that scene that appears more rugged with a higher rim. It could be fresher, a more recent crater, or could be a primary crater. I have not noticed any outcrop in that rim. Precious little "outcrop" except for those far hills two and a half kilometers away.

Q. It looked like at the top of one of those hills there's a tilted bedding.

Matt: There's quite a bit of attention being paid to those far hills. A couple of reasons for that. We've narrowed down our location, those hills are the nearest "different" thing from where we are now. Could be older material that's not eroded and that's the closest "etched material" so there's a debate whether or not that's within rover range (optimistic laughter). One, we've got a stereo fix on those hills from previous orbital camera images. We have a wondrous 2-D model and we believe they're 100m above the plane (not the 50m that we previously thought). In terms of a long-range plan, many of us think that might be a good place to get the rover driving.

Q. If I spent 7 months cramped up like that I'd have cricks and creaks. Is that the case for the rover, maybe metal memory, or is it the case that what you have is what you have?

Chris: For the most part, what you have is what you have. The rover has a slight innate sag that you would see under Martian gravity. In some cases the sag was appropriate and useful to have. That sag has probably developed as we deployed the bogey wheels (last night). The only other thing is that all of the deployments went exceedingly well, drew currents that were lower than expected, which bodes well for the general health and hardware. Standup got us from a lander into a rover and it also works well as a healthcheck for the systems that will be getting us around.

Q. You mentioned an estimate of rock area is about 3%. Isn't that less than orbital predictions which pegged it at about 9% and what does that say about Meridiani? What about that white rock, doesn't look like dust but rather the intrinsic coloring of the rock?

Matt: Yeah, Viking data predicted 7% with a margin of error of 5% (ed. not sure if I got that right. Matt talks really fast) We think that there are areas that have a higher rock concentration, some of those "boulder bars", so I'd call that a match. And yeah, the science team is specifically looking at a family of lighter rocks. Some places you see darker material coming out from underneath that, other places you don't see that. Spectral properties are differ from the reddish ground and dark rocks. It could be a real target.

Q. Tuesday night, what day of the sol is that? Is the science data coming back the same day

Jennifer: That's sol 11. When we egress depends a little bit on testing over the next couple of days. We want to confirm we're moving exactly as we want to be. Will likely do more than one move, multiple decision cycles. A decision cycle is the sending of the command and the return of telemetry/imagery confirming the success of the command. We'll have 2, maybe 3 of those. We don't' expect a delay but it's possible.

Q. I'm delighted that you may egress earlier. Why?

Jennifer: We talked about hyperextension of the petal to level the egress path and we now think that's not necessary so that's one day we don't have to spend moving the lander around to adjust its position. We also didn't plan decision cycles around the UHF paths to the orbiting satellites. We planned on 2 decision cycles per day via DTE comm. Right now we're using the afternoon Odyssey pass to enable a 3rd decision cycle. We did that today and got an unbelievable amount of activity.

emcee note: as usual, we will replay all the images after the briefing, and we plan on a morning briefing Sunday at 9am.

Q. How does the weather compare to anything on Earth. When you talk about dusty is it anything like what we would consider dusty here.

Mark: First, "dust devils" is a somewhat misleading term. They're bigger than tornados are on Earth. They tower above our tornados. Some might be 100m across. In terms of the amount of dust in the atmosphere, it would look like a very dusty day here. Not like the middle of a Sahara desert dust storm but definitely dusty.

There have been some requests for a Mozilla-related post so here goes:

Today we took (hopefully) the last of the 1.6 changes so I'll be testing the builds over the weekend, working on release documentation, and looking forward to a Mozilla 1.6 early next week.

I've also been working with Simon to plan a BugDay for next week and we've tentatively shcheduled it for Tuesday. If you're new to Mozilla testing and Bugzilla, or would like to get more deeply involved, Bugdays are a good opportunity to learn and expand your involvement.

Firebird is coming along well, on it's own 0.8 branch (which is very close to the 1.6 branch) and I'm looking forward to a release soon. There are definitely some great improvements over 0.7 for anyone stuck on that old technology ;-)

The test case manager is kicking ass and as soon as Myk finishes up with a quick security audit and a couple of bug fixes, I'll be inviting folks to come work with me on running tests and recording results, and on writing and inputting new testcases. If you're interested in helping out with the new test case manager, please let me know in comments or an email.

Leaf's been in town this week and working out of the Mozilla Foundation offices. Today we finished up a three day long chess match on the big chessboard. Leaf stomped me. He heads back to Portland this evening which means I'm safe from his chess onslaught 'till next time.

Mozilla Rocks!

It's 9am so it's press briefing time. I'll get the notes posted as soon as the briefing is concluded.

I think I mentioned it before but in case I hadn't, David Price reminds us of a very good Mars blog, the Mars Rover Mission Blog which has good regular updates. Be sure to check it out.

Once again, while I am trying to capture as much of the precise language used as I can, these should not be thought of as direct quotes. I'm just not a fast enough typist for that. Also, I think I'm getting about 90% of what's said, so don't think of them as a complete record either. With that out of the way, on to the briefing.

emcee: Veronica McGregor (media relations)

Dr Albert Haldeman (deputy project scientist)
Dr. Phil Christensen (payload lead for mini-TES Ariz St. Univ.)
Dr. Steve Squyred (princ. investigator)
Pete Theisinger (proj. manager)
Matt Wallace (mission manager)

Albert: Spirit continues to perform very well. 72% of mission success panorama on the ground. Patience pays off. Patient but eager. I'mg going to show a graphic comparing performance (MB of images recorde per sol) on sol 6 with sojourner and pathfinder. That keeps it easy to be patient. I am eager to hear what Phil has to say.

Phil: I will second that, and appreciate your patience. We've been working long and hard to get mini-TES data processed. Gratitude to the group of engineers and scientists that got us here especially the mini-TES team. I'll begin by focus on a couple of octants we have acquired. This is the panoramic camera underlay that we've been looking at. There are rocks, and an area similar to sleepy hollow. This is the mini-TES temperature data. Mini-TES does two things, temperature and spectrum. I want to start with looking at temp. Each one of those spots represents a point where mini-TES looks. Each spot is 4 seconds. The next image shows that temp data laid on top of that Pancam data. We can see the rocks are cool, that's what we expect. Rocks can conduct heat inward. Fine-grained materials get very hot. You can see a couple of rocks nearby and indeed they are cool. As we sweep across this small grained material, I can tell you from the data that it's very fine grained. It's probably fluffy. To give you a sense of scale, rocks are approx 10° cooler than the average and the fine-grained material in the sleepy hollow-like depression is 5° warmer than average. You can see one rock that's very blue (cool). We'll be using this data to navigate the rover to desirable targets and maybe avoid the warmer areas. The "tails" behind rocks are cooler coarser-grained and may even be sand. Again, this is that image looking off to the left. Next slide shows a view of this hollow showing the marked difference in temperature. Next slide we took an area that was pretty average and I'm gonna show a set of mini-TES infrared spectra within that box. (slide with spectra graph). This is a measure of the amount of heat, of energy given off by the surface and the atmosphere in spectra. There are two curves here. The yellow one is the mini-TES data and the red one is from MGS/TES. First thing I was excited about was how well these things matched. Calibration success. We have a laboratory quality spectra on the surface of Mars, better quality than my lab here. It's working extremely well, high quality. Next slide shows CO₂ in the atmosphere. There's a deviation there on the right-hand side that I believe is water vapor. That's not a surprise, we expected water-vapor in the Martian atmosphere. The next slide shows a depression in the line that suggests a Silicate mineral. We'll explore it. The next slide shows a very sharp peak that shows water, a few percent, bound in the minerals. We've know from orbit but to be there on the ground with it under us is exciting. The last slide shows carbonates. We came looking for carbonates. I want to very carefully caution everyone that there are carbonates but in orbital data, we've found minor amounts of carbonates in a lot of dust in many different places on the surface of Mars. Now we can begin to chase this carbonate. Where does it occur, what soil does it occur in. One theory is that it's from an interaction with water vapor in the atmosphere. Another model is that it might be from the water we came to look for in Gusev. Incredibly exciting. In the first couple of days, in the first couple of spectra we have found a number of things that we're going to be tracking down over the next weeks and months. Rocks are different, they have different temperatures and different spectra. Rocks' spectra is very different from the soil. But we're dealing with small rocks here (holds up a softball sized rock) and the rocks don't fill mini-TES' field of view. When we get out near rocks that can fill our field of view, Mini-TES will have a field day. I had an idea a while ago that friends called crazy but I think it might be fun. We're planning an activity called "School House Rocks". We'll be calling on students to send us rocks from all over the world and we'll measure them and see if we can see if there are rocks in your back yard that are similar to rocks on Mars.

Steve: We had just a wonderful day yesterday. From a science perspective, maybe the best day since we landed. I can't top Phil and the min-TES data. That is just a fantastic instrument. I want to talk about these results and how they add to our understanding in these early days on Gusev crater. We are still in the "multiple working hypotheses" days. There are several interpretations of carbonates. One, the interaction with water in the atmosphere. The other possibility, and I am of like mind on these two and we have now way of knowing which one is right yet, is that it's telling us about properties of what's gone on in Gusev crater. In standing bodies of liquid water it is possible to precipitate carbonates. It is also a possibility that imagine you have Gusev, filled with water, precipitate carbonates, water goes away, not yet lithified (become rock) so it stays a loose material. You could have this mixture of sediments and potentially carbonates. We have other rocks transported to this location somehow, don't know how yet. So you gotta ask what are these carbonates telling us. The beauty is that we can find out. If it's from the atmosphere then it should be fine grained dust. If it's from Gusev then it should be coarser grained and possibly buried. We're going to be chasing this for weeks and months. We can go out and look at different patches of soil. It's going to be really interesting to dig a hole. Not only do we have multiple hypotheses but we have a payload that can get at the answer. We had a jubilant science team last night. First mini-TES, also some very good engineering news.

Pete: I haven't talked to you since landing night. It's been a week. A week ago today was the day before landing press briefing. If anyone had walked into the room and said that they'd give us a beautifully functional lander on the surface but it would take four days longer to stand it up, I'd have said "Sold!!" We have a beautiful lander. People are calling it a $400 million lander. It's not. It's priceless. We're not going to take any inappropriate risks. The team is performing flawlessly. We're proceeding in a measured, temperate way. Being pushed into inappropriate risks is something that we've learned about over the last few years (various reports). We're going to be brave but not stupid. This team has given an awful lot to be where we are today. Going far better than we have any right to expect.

Matt: It's a little hard to compete with that spectacular Mini-TES data. We started our sixth morning on Mars with our tradition of a wake-up song. Today it was Bob Marley's "Get Up Stand Up". As many of you know in order to fit within the constraints of our vehicle, we had to do a little magic to compress the rover. Part of the transformation to our mobile configuration occurred on the first day, the solar panels, the HGA, the mast. Yesterday was the next major step which involved getting the rover up off the deck and getting mobility components locked in. Footage from ATLO operations down the road at JPL (opportunity footage showing lift process). Lifting up about 15 cm. Front wheels rotating out and around into their mobile configuration. You're looking at the front of the rover here and the wheels continue down until the linkages lock into position. You'll see a little bump here in the opposite direction to check that the wheels are locked into position. Then we can lower the entire vehicle down and put weight on the system which locks more linkages into position. This is a very critical and complex operation done autonomously by the rover on the surface of Mars. We're very, very pleased to see the rover complete this part of the standup process. We completed our attempts at retraction of the basepetal airbag so we went ahead and lowered the front left panel to get us flat for the activity you just saw. These pictures were taken at the front of the rover. Wheels have rotated out of the way and you can see the quick lift and check of the linkage. That was rerecorded by the rover itself. (loop, almost animation, of several images). Before and after from the mast camera as well. Good verification between imagery and telemetry that the rover did everything we asked it to do. Tomorrow completion of standup activity. Retraction of the screw that lifted the rover up and deployment of the rear wheels. In addition to that, we're going to do a very short movement of the front left petal to characterize our ability to move that petal. Our baseline is to turn 120degrees to the right and traverse down in that direction. We've done this many, many times and we're very comfortable doing this. The current configuration that we have with the lander situated, it is as good as we could have hoped for. Egress planned for sol 13 or sol 14.

Q. Dramatic differences in color across those images taken with Mini-TES data. Can you say more about the kind of variations. About the carbonates, you see them at a couple percent from orbit, estimate from down here?

Phil: The temperatures do vary but composition of the soil doesn't seem to vary a lot. There aren't very many rocks in our view. There are about 20 that show spectral variability. The temperature variations may be due to the compactness. It doesn't take much carbonate to produce those absorptions. It's on the 2-5% order, certainly not on the order of say 20%. We'll be looking for concentrations of that material.

Q. So far the mini-TES data don't show any profound new data. CO₂ not in MGS data? Why not.

Phil: in the MGS data we went to great pains to remove the CO₂ because we're trying to use those data to unravel the surface. As far as the surprises, you're right, at this level, this tiny piece of what we've seen. We're still puzzling it together, the rock we see doesn't look like rocks we expected to see.
Steve: I'm surprised and intrigued by the higher carbonate values. I was surprised by how easy it was to pull out some of these mineral features. Compared to what we're getting from orbit, to pull this data out in 48 hours is amazing.
Phil: This bodes so well for this mission. To do minerology from 5 feet away is going to be amazing.

Q. Variety of the rocks?

Phil: they look like they might be different from imagery but can't say yet.

Q. Did the failure of the temp sensors for the mini-TES' calibration have any impact on this data.

Phil: Other than keeping me from sleeping ;-), no. We have many workarounds.

Q. Do you have further theories as to why the airbags wouldn't retract?

Matt: We know no more and have no real way of proving or disproving. May have broken some of the tendons. The other possibility is that those are just areas of the bag where we don't have tie points and we're retracting other parts of the bag. Telemetry suggests we are pulling something.

Q. In the carbonate image, there were two dips, one mirrored what you're seeing from orbit, the other is unique.

Phil: there are other minerals that have absorbtion features in there. We'll be looking at those. We're confident there's carbonate but there may be subtle differences.

Q. What do you expect to find where? I'm getting the idea that if this lake hypothesis is true and the lake material which is probably very old and still around at the surface then where you'd expect to see something significant is in coarse grained soil and I'm getting the idea that you didn't see carbonate in the rock or you would have mentioned it? So, where are you looking for what and when will you get excited and what will you be looking at when you get excited.

Steve: I'm excited now :D If we find the highest concentration of carbonate in the coarse grains, or subsurface, if we see that kind of thing then it would indicate that the carbonate originated in Gusev. If, on the other hand, we find it in the fine grained dust, it could have blown in from somewhere else. A few sols from now we're going to come to you with a pretty definite determination of where we landed. We're already sure there's gonna be a pretty hefty impact crater within 100 meters of where we are. I think once we crawl off of this lander and start looking at things with APSX, micro-imager, etc., things are gonna change some more. It'll be fascinating.
Phil: my nightmare was that we wouldn't see spectra. We have them and we're going to chase them.

Q. How does it add up that you hypothesized the lake bed might be buried and that carbonates are at the surface.

Steve: If the stuff was blown in by the wind, that's easy. If on the other hand it's stuff intrinsic to Gusev, you have to remember that this area has been pounded for millions of years. Impacts turning up what's underneath. One of the things that made Gusev a prime target was that this churning had the potential to turn things up.

Q. When is sol 13 or 14 in earth time.

Matt: January 15th-ish.
Pete: Thursday or Friday of next week.

Q. Your experience with the instrument gives you confidence. Anything you've learned that you might adjust the instrument for hematite?

Phil: I don't think we're going to have to do anything.

Q. Have you changed how you pick target points?

Steve: Given that we anticipate the egress direction is going to be that way and not dead ahead, we're looking at what kinds of materials and the next place to go. First place is to slap the arm down wherever we are. After that, the "something else" is more likely to be in the new direction.

Q. When we first aired your pictures, the first reaction was the familiarity of the landscape. Any of you had the same reaction?

Phil: I live in Arizona and share that feeling. Several surface missions now, I think we're beginning to develop a familiarity with Mars. The beauty is that it's not the same. It is a strange place and we're just scratching the surface.

Q. Each "dot" in the temperature image, is that an average for that dot? Can you "zoom" in?

Phil: each dot represents a spectrum and we can convert that to a temperature. The instrument can't zoom in. The zoom is the rover's wheels.

Q. Reactions to President's planning on announcing sending humans to Mars. Will Bush be visiting.

Pete: focused on our objectives. Let that play out. No one's talked to me about any high-level visitors.

Q. Where do you stand on EDL changes (for Opportunity)?

Pete: your contacts are excellent :) We've completed (Spirit) EDL reconstruction and we do have a position on whether or not we will have a correction maneuver (for Odyssey). I'll be sending that paper up today. We made a change to the parachute deployment based on dust storm data (for Spirit) based on data from orbital assets. Things are getting better at Meridiani.

Veronica: if anyone has further questions about Schoolhouse Rocks project, info at the website. Also weekend schedule is briefings at 9am Pacific time.

Q. What are the absolute temperatures.

Phil: warmest ground temp is about 5°C and coldest is about -15°C. Those were taken between noon and 2 PM. Atmospheric temperatures we're still working on.

Q. Is there anything you can learn, any science you can do from the lander over these next days, before you roll off, that you can use to determine the history of Gusev.

Phil: I've shown two of the 8 spectra. We still have a lot more to look at. We're just beginning the process. Whether or not we can puzzle out the story of the carbonates - I'm looking forward to doing that from the ground, but we're just getting started with the remote sensing.

Q. Can you tell us what carbonates are and their relationship to water. They represent water that was once there but isn't now?

Steve: Our second theory points to water long ago and not today. Carbonates are a family of minerals that can form under a variety of circumstances. All tend to be easily dissolved in water. For example, limestone is made of calcium carbonate. If you can dissolve it in water, you can precipitate it from water and form carbonate rock. There are a couple reasons carbonates have been of particular interest in the history of Mars. One is that they precipitate out of water. Two is that Mars may have had a denser atmosphere with carbon dioxide and carbonates could be where some of that carbon dioxide went.

Q. Are you moving rocks around in the "Mars yard" to simulate what you're seeing on the surface of Mars.

Matt: The orphan twin here is an engineering model and the answer is yes, that from almost day one we started to reconfigure that to help us validate the sequences and process of the last 6 days.

Some additional great space-blogging sites:

The Eternal Golden Braid
The SpaceWriter's Ramblings
Periapsis.org

The press briefing is about to start; notes when it's completed. (It's either starting late or my feed is broken.)

Press Briefing 9:05 am (These are really rough notes. Sorry. My connection was spotty and I haven't done any real editing to clean up the notes so what you're getting is direct reavideo to asa's brain to asa's fingers to the blog communication with no filters. Man, I wish I got NASA TV over cable so I could TiVo it.):

Albert Haldeman: We've landed safely and we're looking forward to a safe egress. To do that we have a concept called first time activities. One per sol. Incremental driving activities, the use of the IDD, doing science activities during the night time, use of the rock abrasion tool. We've practiced on earth but we want to understand the Martian environment. Crawl before we walk. Reaching our stride in maybe a month and a half. Asking science team to be patient with engineers and asking engineers to hurry up :)

Jim Bell: status on Pancam then show new postcard then talk about how we make these pictures. Pancam is very healthy and happily taking many pictures on Mars. Busiest day on Mars sol 5. We got 4 more octants. We've now acquired (on board) the full mission success panorama. The whole team is ecstatic. We've got 40% on ground and thumbnails for the rest so we know it's there. Over the next two or three days we'll trickle down the rest. Next I'd like to show you an image that is fresh pixels off the presses. Taken at the end of sol 5, late afternoon. (slide) looking North, to the minus x direction. Yesterday's view was to the south to the egress direction. This is also a possible egress direction. See a rise in the horizon. Horizon is pretty flat but the lander has lifted. Spectacular 8000x3000 view. Spectacular sand dune with an interesting dark top. We're panning across to that area known as sleepy hollow. Seeing it in 16 times better detail. ridge of rocks in the back. maybe a meter high. Those dark donut shapes in the middle might be the airbag marks as it bounced to it's landing. Color is approx what you'd see with your eyes. Dominated by iron. Hints on some compositional variations. We'll end (the pan) at that spectacular dune. We also took a look at some of the equipment (more panning around the lander). We pass by this piece of the airbag (the one we thought was a rock early on). We end on this little object, the Pancam calibration target, a very important object (shows one in the studio) about 8cm x 8cm. Essentially a photographer's color chart. It's got three grayscale rings and 4 color chips (green, yellow, red, blue). It's also a sundial. This was made very clear to us by Bill Nye who works with the mission team. Inscription: Mars 2004, two worlds, one sun. Made an educational tool/project with this.

Courtney Dressing (student astronaut): Students around the world can join the mission by looking at the images online (slide of sundial) The sundial can be used to tell the time. A group of people including Bill Nye created the sundial to demonstrate that we share the same sun. Explanation of ring near the bottom for late afternoon and early morning. Blue dot and Red dot represent orbit of earth and Mars. Students in the Red River goes to Mars project are working on the sundial. We've used software and information about the rovers's position, we overlayed the hour information. Useful way a calibration target could encourage public participation. Slide of the DVD please. (slide) Another public outreach effort. Lego man surrounded by a coded message (online you can attempt to decode message). The DVD was paid for planetary society members and Lego company. Additionally it includes magnets to collect dust.

Rafael Morozowski (student astronaut): Planetary society chose 16 students to work with JPL and the science team. We're using the Marsdial images and writing diaries at planetary.org website. (short video clip). This is Courtney and I in the control room watching rover health data. This is a picture of the sundial and a conversation we had with Jim Bell.

Matt Wallace: Thanks Rafael. Now that I know you're on Mars time I've got a few jobs for you (laughter). Primary objectives from yesterday, to re-establish our HGA link. We've had some very successful UHF connections. We had 2 successful HGA links at high data rates and when we combine that with our strong UHF orbiter links we get a lot down. The other thing we were attempting to do was to retract the airbags in. We were attempting yesterday what we call a lift and tuck maneuver. Lift the petal up about 20°. Before and after pictures from the previous two days doesn't show much difference. The front left hand side of the rover airbag was the one we were attempting to pull in. We were not successful. We're going to retract it another 6 revolutions and see if we can get the airbags down a little more. Independent of that we'll go ahead and drop that petal back down and move on with our standup. If it is successful we'll continue with our front egress. If not successful, we'll egress 20 degrees to the left or 60 degrees to the right. Both are very viable paths for us. We prefer to drive forward if we can but we've practiced and can use other directions. That's the primarily the plan for tomorrow, another 6 revolutions and a drop of that petal. We'll then begin the standup. First we use a lift on the underside of the lander to drive the lander up. Then unfold the front wheel arms and drop the lander down onto its legs. After that we do a short little lift and drop to verify those legs are engaged. Then we complete standup and egress activities. We also will sequence more of those beautiful Pancam images. We also have two of the mini-TES octets planned for tomorrow. Earliest egress looks like sol 12. If we have to maneuver the petals some more that could be delayed 2 or 3 days. "Brave but not stupid". We're gonna do what we need to do to safely get this vehicle off the lander and on to the surface.

Dr. Henry Stone: HGA anomaly rundown. The HGA is a gimbel actuated device that can be pointed to Earth, track Earth and talk directly to Earth. On sol 2 there were three activities. First deployment which did not involve elevation. The second activity was a swing around of both axes with a very large slew of the elevation actuators to turn the backside of the paddle to show that Columbia (plaque) view. Following that antenna was re-stowed and later we made a HGA pass. That HGA pass went off fine but we received engineering telemetry data that indicated large current spikes during the elevation. (slide) The blue jagged line on here shows the current spikes across a motion that lasted about 33 seconds. Normally we see .1 amps and spikes were up at .7 amps. The azimuth slew had a normal line (slide). The return motion did not show current spikes. That was particularly interesting to the anomaly team. We expected the flaw to show itself in both directions. We looked at the rate at which current spikes were occurring. Seemed to be occurring in alignment with the last stage of that gearing. We hypothesized that some debris had been lodged in the very fine teeth of that drive. He (ed. missed the name) put together some simulations to study what might cause this spiking of the current. We were unable to do that. He then came up with a technique for simulating some debris on the drive and got similar current spikes to what the telemetry was showing. We think that the second motion, reversing it, kicked that debris out of the gear tooth. We halted further use of the HGA until we could put together a diagnostic. Sent that up on sol 4 and executed it. Small, safe motions. We got all that data down, 7 slews. All came back with clean current measurements. We decided that it was appropriate to go ahead with use of that antenna on sol 5 with the caveats, use caution and reduced the rate at which we drive those actuators. Upped the priority for the data products monitoring those actuators. Also reset the position at which the HGA is stowed following the comm. passes. Done such that should there be a failure we'd be left in a situation where we could still perform one HGA pass in the afternoon. On sol 5 we performed 2 HGA passes and the actuator data came back clean. Increasingly confident that we've got this one addressed. Final thing we'll be doing is making some adjustments to how we look at these data products when they come from Opportunity.

Q. Can we get an update on mini-TES. More about the airbags, residual gas?, what's causing the headache.

Albert: Mini-TES is gathering data and we're working on it. Not ready yet.

Matt: We're not 100% certain. A couple of theories including that we snapped some of the tendons that go out to points on the airbags. It's conceivable that we snapped some tendons. It may be that the areas that are puffed up aren't tendon attachment points. Telemetry suggests we are pulling on something. There are other possibilities but those are some of them.

Q. When are we gonna see the mini-TES data. What's the delay? Also, can this rover chew gum and retract bags at the same time? Is it all sequential or can it be done in parallel.

Albert: The interpretation of those spectra is critical so the calibration has to be done right. When Phil Christenson releases it, it's good stuff. Plan to co-register mini-TES and Pancam when rover stands up.

Matt: Rover is definitely capable of multi-tasking well beyond what its handlers are capable of. We create localized activities but that's in the planning and the handling side. The airbag activity is a short activity, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. There's plenty of hours in the Martian day to do a lot of great science while working through eng. activities.

Q. What time will you know airbag success?

Matt: building and evaluating sequences now so I would say in 12-14 hours we'll have gotten through our first HGA pass and have some indication whether those airbags have retracted. We intend to move forward regardless because we have other options for egress.

Q. Colors look much richer in than they did yesterday.
(ed. sorry, lost my connection)

Jim: (ed. missed during lost connection).

Q. Then what we're seeing that's in that Pancam image doesn't correspond to what we'd see if we were standing there?

Jim: we have a pair of red filters that give us stereo. The red you're asking about is the infrared filter which is different from the red humans see. We can convert that red easily. We also have a red filter that matches human sight red but we prefer to use the infrared filter to get matchup with both cameras. Two cameras each have 8 filters. One filter on one eye is a dense welder-like filter to look at the sun. On the left camera is low frequency and the right camera is higher frequencies. Total of 11 unique wavelengths.

Q. What's the very soonest you'll start standing up the rover.

Matt: under nominal case we'll start tomorrow. First the lift and revolving out of the front wheels and dropping down. Then a day of evaluation followed by a day where we deploy the rear wheels and fire our pyro devices. Then there's some time to release, deploy and stow the front arm, deploy cable cutters, perform the 'bump'. The big question is whether we need to move the petals.

(note that all images are available at website and next briefing is tomorrow at 9am)

Q. Is there consideration of updating software for Opportunity airbag retraction.

Matt: there's an opportunity and a team in place looking at that. We're still in the middle of evaluating Spirit. I don't think we'll chance it but there's certainly a possibility and a plan if we decide to do it.

Q. How high is the deck?

Matt: The forward lander deck is approx. 40 centimeters and the airbag protrusion is 65-70 cm above that. Frankly I think we could egress over that. We'd skirt inside of the two bubbles and the airbag height is not so that it would cause problems for our solar panels but there's a little bit of non-determinism but we have other routs. Take the safest rout. We certainly could if that was our only option.

Q. Courtney and Rafael, what's your most exciting moment in mission control.

Rafael: landing. Courtney: I agree. Matt: good answer, I agree (laughter).

Q. Color differences in the rocks. how certain are you that it's compositional differences in the rock.

Jim: we're just starting to get data and from only 3 filters. What we need to do and what we'll start doing is trying to focus on the most interesting targets, spin those filter wheels and start to get a better picture. There are some hints in those three colors that there's some variety.

Q. How has this experience impacted the students lives?

Courtney: It's made me sure that I want to go into the space program. Consider working at JPL rather than becoming astronaut.
Rafael: It's been very exciting. Working with this mission changed what I thought about science.

Q. Pancam images, colors on the two screens were very different. Which one is more accurate? Any change in plan to go to sleepy hollow and what about the assessment that you are in a dry lake bed.

Jim: every monitor and screen is different. Mars is often depicted as a bright red planet. It's not really, it's a much more subtle brownish, reddish, ochre, salmon. Beware of garish colors. Sleepy hollow, there hasn't been any decision yet as where to go. Personally I'm still really enticed by that place. It looks like we may have been there already (bounced through in our airbags). Bright deposits on the floor of the depression. That area, perhaps more than any other close to us, might be the best place to start testing those hypothesis about water, a dry lake bed.
Albert: the rover drivers are warming up. They're using our data to prepare themselves for driving on the surface. They've been given like half a dozen potential targets.

Q. Scientists talk about looking at the whole panorama to pick a target and engineers want to egress out the front. if the most interesting isn't out the front why egress there.

Matt: we want to egress out the safest direction. there's no other answer to that. science team have been very supportive of this. we have to pick the safest.
Jim: we can drive around after we're off.

Q. Speculation about what the debris in the actuator might have been.

Henry: no. very small teeth, small debris, grain sized. (END)

You will (hopefully soon) find the press release images at the Mars Rover Gallery. You can find the full-sized images at Planetary Photojournal including the nice big new panorama in tiff format.

There's a great Java applet, called Powers of Ten, available at the FSU Molecular Expressions web site. If you liked The Atlas of the Universe, then you'll probably really like this FSU applet.

And I just got this in an email so I'm sharing with you all. Check out the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Artforms, presented by the the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter. I really like butterfly scales.

I'm still keeping my fingers crosse, but the best yet attempt to contact Beagle 2 was unsuccessful. You can read more at the beagle 2 website.

I agree completely with Steve Squyres sentiments from the first press briefing after the Spirit landing:

"One last thing. I got a congratulatory call from Beagle 2's Colin Pillinger. They're still holding out hope of contacting Beagle 2. I let him know that I haven't given up on it. I told him, 'A whole bunch of people on this side of the Atlantic are rooting for you.'"

Consider me one of those people. They haven't given up hope and neither have I.

The Wednesday morning press briefing is about to begin. I'll post notes when it's completed. Also, I found another good MER Status page.

Press briefing notes:

Dr. Firouz Naderi (manager of Mars Program Office at JPL and MER Program Manager):
Before we give status I wanted to take a moment to mention that in our personal lives, in moments of great joy, we often remember and long for lost members of our family and so it is at this moment of our triumph in our professional lives we remember those we lost in the space shuttle Columbia. A plaque designed with the MER rover. (slide). The plaque is mounted at the back of the high-gain antenna and in addition to the names of the 6 astronauts it has the NASA logo and the shuttle insignia. We know that the crew of the Columbia would be applauding our effort as a part of the NASA vision to extend life to there and to find life beyond. also I would like to remind you that NASA administrator named the landing site in honor of the Columbia crew. I wanted to also give you some statistics on public interest through the internet. Yesterday 1 billion and a quarter hits. representing more than 10 million unique users visiting NASA site.

Dr. Joy Crisp (Project Scientist for the MER Mission):
Atmospheric advisory science team working hard with EDL engineers to compare the predicted state of the atmosphere at Gusev with the actual measure as recorded during descent. This is only the fourth time we've measured that. This is of great interest the engineers and managers who are going to have to be working on Opportunity. Mars has dealt us a complicated hand. Large dust storms last month have modified the atmosphere in ways we don't yet understand. (slide). A "1" corresponds to a really yucky day here in Los Angeles (looks like Dec. 15 peaked at about 1.5) A large regional dust storm began in December and raised large amounts of dust at Meridiani and some of that dust was carried to Gusev. We're trying to understand how accurate our predictions were and what we learn from the spacecraft measures we'll apply to predictions for Opportunity.

Dr. Jim Bell (Pancam Payload Element Lead):
The Pancam continues to perform very well and we continue to collect some pretty spectacular images from the surface of Mars. We've collected the first stereo pair of images from Pancam. (slide showing the panorama octants division and planning). On sol 3 we obtained the two pieces towards the +x or positive south side of the rover. On sol 4, this past day, we took the two pieces behind us and tomorrow we'll start with 7. We'll continue to obtain these over the next couple of days. We did get octant 8 down on the Odyssey pass a few hours ago. Red/Blue stereo anaglyph much like the one we saw earlier with the Navcam but at 16 or 17 times the resolution. Looking at an area just to the left or east of that "postcard" we saw yesterday. Those hills are approx. 2 kilometers off in the distance. They are 50 to 100 meters high. Definitely a potential drive target. You can also see some rocks that are very precariously placed or perched. We'll be examining these kinds of images in great detail to determine where to drive our vehicle. There are some pretty nifty sized obstacles and some interesting scientific targets. By combining with other elements of the payload we'll be able to get a better idea of where we want to go (ed. I think that's what he said, though I lost my connection briefly).

Ray Arvidson (Deputy Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload):
We're ready to go. Pancam is clearly working. Microimager (Athena Microscopic Imager), APSX, M�ssbauer (Gamma-ray Spectrometer), all in good shape. We have mini-TES data but not really the kind of data you bring to a press briefing but collection is underway. This is not your typical lake bed, if it's a lake bed at all. You can see rocks that are probably coated with dust. Good thing we have an abrasion tool. We're debating intensely what it is we're looking at. We've filled in the lower right hand corner of that image and it has some interesting textures. (slides) I was a part of the imaging team for Viking and I'd put that in Chryse Planitia... It will remain to us to determine what is holding this material together. I suspect that there's a very think coating of dust. Kick that around and you expose this cloddy material below. This is a terrain that's both familiar and alien. We may be looking at an area that is a volcanic terrain with rocks kicked up by craters, primary and secondary. We really need to get off the lander with this wonderful integrated payload that we have. We're in the process of putting together hypothesis. We need our engineering buddies to get us off this lander and on to the surface.

Arthur Amador (Mission Manager for Sol 5):
Spirit continues to be in excellent health, all subsystems in good health. 45 megabits and 52 megabits of data from the two Odyssey passes. At 128 kbits per second we'll be getting a MGS pass tonight. Both Odyssey and MGS are now at 128 kilobits per second. Yesterday we let Spirit take a siesta in the afternoon to manage our thermal situation. Nap from 2:30 to 3:30 before the Odyssey pass so that when it transmitted to Odyssey it would be nice and cool. We recorded 48° at the time of the transmit and that's consistent with our models. Besides acquisition and return of mini-TES we performed an activity to diagnose the HGA slewing anomaly and performed an activity to retract the basepetal airbags to assist us in our straight off egress. We put together a team to diagnose the spikes in the driving of the HGA elevation. We sent the sequence of commands to test on sol 4 and "everything came back clean as a whistle" so we got good results in the currents and everything looks fine so we think that there was some sort of debris in the motor housing or some stickiness and that was taken care of in the last slewing on sol 2. We've got a preliminary "go" to use the HGA on sol 5. The other major activity was retracting the basepetal airbags (animation of a couple of slides of Pancam photos). We did see that we pulled the airbags a little bit. We got about 5 centimeter lowering of the airbag to the left of the front of the lander, the one we're concerned about. The airbag is still a little bit too high and we're afraid we might hit it with our rover solar panels during egress. Yesterday we pulled about 3 revolutions but we need to work on it some more before we come off. Those are the major activities from yesterday.

Art Thompson (Rover Tactical Activity Lead JPL):
Truly amazing to come to work every morning and see a new batch of pictures that are probably better than the day before. It's currently about 1 in the morning local time so the rover is asleep. We're working on the plan for sol 5. Vehicle will wake up at about 8:45 local solar time or 17:14 PST. One of the first things is to go for an airbag adjustment. We're going to try for a "lift and tuck" maneuver where we lift up the petal and pull in the airbag then set the petal back down. A little different than what we did yesterday where we did a straight pull. Hopefully switching over to HGA for last two data passes this afternoon. The baseline plan is to continue with airbag work but if we hit the lottery and everything goes well we could begin standup. Shutdown today at 14:50 for thermal reasons. DTE comm. at 9 am LST on low-gain. Shortly afterwards we hope to switch to HGA. At 11:15 and 13:00 two HGA sessions. If not able to go to HGA then we'll have 3 low gain sessions at 9am, 10:00am, and 12:30. Afternoon Odyssey session at 16:50. We're truly amazed at the quantity and quality of the data. We also have an overnight Odyssey and MGS data pass. We want nothing more than to get this rover off the lander. "We are chomping at the bit to get this puppy off the lander and get the scientists working". At this point we would expect to egress around sol 12 (next Wednesday).

Q. You said this is not a typical lake bed. could you elaborate?

Ray: This is rock strewn, a number of secondary craters so it's not a primary depositional surface of what you'd see in a lake bed. If a lake bed is there it's been chewed up. It's our job to use this integrated payload to find the evidence if in fact there is evidence of a lake bed there. Microscopic imager will be critical to pick apart the different grains and say something bout the origins.

Q. What kind of cement would be holding that together and can you say more about what you saw with Viking.

Ray: With Viking, we didn't use airbags. We used rockets. Lander feet disturbed the surface. When we saw the disturbance from Spirit we were reminded of Viking dig sites which were dark and crusty due to elevated values of sulfur and magnesium, kieserite, an epsom salt that forms in aqueous solutions. This (Spirit) site is complex. We're gonna get down there and look at it and the vehicle is a digger. We can get in 20 centimeters on a good day (spinning a wheel).

Q. What could form a landscape like that?

Ray: It looks like there was a lake at some point in Gusev. Is the landform we're seeing today a lake bed? I suspect not. The environment may have changed, lava overfilled the lake beds, cratering continued, secondary and primary craters stirring things laterally and in addition some deposition of windblown material. Looks like a desert, desert pavements. I've seen similar in Earth deserts. Sand and dust actually work underneath cobbles and lift them.

Q. It looked like you pulled the petal down more than you pulled the airbag in.

Art: The action was successful. You're seeing a secondary action of petal settling. We have lots of options. We're being very cautious.

Q. What are your strategic options.

Ray: thinking about the landforms and how they might form and how we get evidence of water. We're debating lots of hypothesis. We certainly want to characterize deposits in the immediate vicinity. That's never been done before with a payload like ours. If it's all homogeneous we need to do a good job getting material properties and then drive to interesting places. The closer we get to the hills in the distance, the bigger they get and the more pixels you get from Pancam and mini-TES to characterize them. We want to get off the lander and make more measurements then we'll convince the project manager to do a long drive (big smile and a look over at Arthur).

Q. In the stereo image there was a point that looked like a channel or a wash and a ridge a few inches high....Any idea what that is? Dust devil track?

Jim: I think you're looking at a wind tail perched on a little ridge.

Q. that funny stuff in the bottom right hand corner, is that Casenite (sp?)? Can you talk us through the lift and tuck.

Ray: I don't see those materials as anything special. We dropped, bounced and dragged so you're gonna create interesting surfaces, just a mechanical interaction between the craft and these clotty surface materials. Kinda like silty loam so there may have been some smoothing and dragging. Just not particularly exciting to me.

Art: we're putting together the lift and tuck sequence now. It's just one sequence that we'll send up. When that's complete well have comm. sessions with engineering data, hopefully imaging. Then we can do another maneuver in the afternoon if necessary. The amount of imaging that's coming down is important. A couple of days ago it was "gee, we gotta get off the lander and go over to sleepy hollow now!" now it's not nearly as interesting compared to all the new stuff in newer images.

Q. Is Wednesday really the earliest for egress and is that a delay from the nominal schedule? Could you characterize what your discussions are like.

Art: 3 days past when we had originally planned. In planning, we spread it out to about 9 days if everything went perfectly. We have experienced a couple of hickups with the HGA and the airbag so we're being careful. The current plan will take us to Wednesday. I wouldn't be surprised to see it be even a day or two later that.

Ray: We're getting data down from Pancam and mini-TES. Once we egress it's clear we want to stop and drop the instruments down to the surface and make measurements. Then there are rocks in the vicinity of the lander that we'll want to measure. Then in the longer term we'll be searching the mid and far distances from the Pancam image. Even longer term strategy would be to try to get to horizon features - which one and we have our favorites in the south east. Debate, like herding cats.

Q. Which is the wildest hypothesis.

Ray: Hypotheses range from the mundane, like mine from earlier, that there may be lake bed deposits that have been broken up, covered up, etc. to having the rocks and soil brought in by rivers, to having liquid CO₂ involved (laughter).
Jim: There were suggestions of glaciation, increased eolian environment. Even Ray's mundane hypothesis has some fantastic to it.
Ray: This is totally healthy science with multiple working hypothesis.

Q. How long, months days years before conclusion to characterization of this as a lakebed or not.

Ray: It could be next week or it could be longer, depends on the evidence.

Q. There's been a theory floating around that Gusev might be covered by debris from volcano 125 miles to the west. Could the rocks we're seeing, could this be basalt thrown from that volcano.

Ray: There is a large volcano to the (direction?) of Gusev. Having blocks thrown that big from that far is highly unlikely. Having volcanic ash deposited is highly likely.
Jim: we haven't seen any unambiguous evidence of one process or another. We're scouring the data set looking but we've only got one little wedge of the data so far.

Q. Explain what's interesting in the southeast. Sleepy hollow is to the north. Would that delay grander strategy of moving to the south if you have to go north first?

Jim: The way that art described it is humorous but quite fair. We're getting slow glimpses as we get more imagery. What's going to happen is that as we build up this data set these instant gratification biases will settle down and we'll figure out which way to go. We're going to keep our minds open, collect some measurements. and not get ahead of ourselves.

Q. In that airbag retraction it looked as though the airbag on the left might be catching on the corner of the petal. Is that motivating the lift and tuck.

Arthur: That is part of the concern, we don't want to pull it too hard or too much and grab that petal.
Art: We yesterday, our mechanical team came in with actual egress aids and mechanical and airbag material. There's a silver knob that protrudes at the end of the egress aid and we tried to get it to hook or catch and we were not able to do that. We even cut the material and still couldn't get it to catch. We do not wanna snag this but we don't believe we will. We'll lift it up approx. 20° and retract the airbag.

Q. Is there progress on linking hills (we see in the Pancam images) to an overhead view that would help us pinpoint our location.

Ray: We know where we are within half a kilometer or thereabouts. There are three teams working with MOC narrow angle, THEMIS and DIMES images and there's some debate still.

(note about all images being available on website and next press brief tomorrow at 9am)

Q. In pathfinder there was suggestion based on orientation of rocks that they were lined up by a flood. Anything like that here?

?: no. not yet.

Q. There seem to be a light coating on some of the rocks. Looks like a salt coating. Are there differences in the kinds of coatings.

Ray: There are thousands of rocks here, some coated with color similar to soil, some different. Also, depends on the angle of the sun. That bright rock...
Jim: What you were seeing was a black and white image with a red filter. Not necessarily white. When we put the color together you'll see it's not really white, white represents a strong red content.
Ray: We'll get the RAT on this.
Jim: Resolution is a big part of it. There are some very large clean rocks but there are lots of smaller, coated, rinded rocks.

Q. For Joy, about the dust issues. How best can we characterize landing sight 2.

Joy: Mars Observer Camera, wide angle images, will tell us if there is a new storm, where it is and if it's spreading. THEMIS on MGS is giving the kind of information critical to us, density of the atmosphere (ed. something else I missed). This dust storm is decaying but differently than at Gusev. Gusev had less dust, but higher up and a bigger effect on atmosphere than at landing site 2 which has more dust but down lower. We're watching the decay.
Jim: This is an incredible time because we have these other crafts in orbit giving us all this data.

Q. Charts show you still have an opacity greater than 1. Will this be a solar problem

Joy: may be similar to Gusev so it'll probably be fine.

Q. I grew up with dust storms that would completely cover cars in thick layer of dust. Is dust covering the spacecraft an issue?

Joy: Probably not a concern. There's a lot less atmosphere on Mars. At Gusev we didn't even get hit directly by the storm. The dust is high up in the atmosphere. At Meridiani (Planum) it should have decayed by the time we get there. I don't think we'll have a problem from this storm.

I've been looking at the "postcard" image on and off for almost a full day now and my eye keeps coming back to this strange serpentine line of small rocks.

I can think of three obvious explanations. First, it's an artifact of the panorama compositing and doesn't really exist. Second, it's not a photographic artifact, it's really there, but it's an optical illusion and seen from a different angle or at a different time of day the rocks wouldn't form any line or pattern. Third, this is a line of rocks that have been organized by wind or water. What do you think?

Also, a friendly NASA person is mirroring the big image here. Thanks Leebert.

And there's some nice photo massage here that's worth a look.

If you're looking for the big color images you can still get at them over at the Planetary Photojournal.

The nice ones are:

pia04995 (the big one)
pia05003 (upper right detail)
pia04996 (center detail)
pia04997 (center right detail)
pia04998 (lower right detail)

The big one is worth grabbing (get the tiff if you have an application that can handle that format).

The upper right detail shows an interesting few "depressions" that were mentioned in the first press conference as possible "secondary craters", craters that are caused by the ejecta from a larger impact. You can also see in this second image a mountain, mesa, or crater rim in the distance behind the primary horizon. It's speculated that these landmarks are 10 to 25 kilometers in the distance while the primary horizon may be as close as 5 kilometers.

The center detail highlights wind tails, the dark streaks that give us some indication of prevailing wind directions.

The center right detail is very cool. It shows both very rounded and very angular rocks. It's likely that these rocks were all from the same source and they've been polished and even somewhat sculpted by a "sandblasting" wind.

The lower right image is the most curious of all of the areas in this photo (I think). It shows an area of the surface where the craft, inside of it's inflated airbags probably sat for some time as the airbags deflated and were pulled into the lander. It sure looks like mud, but as Steve Squyres said, "right, it looks like mud, but it can't be mud." Whatever it is, it sure looks "cohesive" and mud-like. There are some indications that the science team will be pushing for more photos of this before the rover rolls off the lander where the rover "wings" might block a pancam closeup.

The Mars Listings at the Photojournal are all great so go poke around and if you don't get your fill there, then I can certainly turn you on to some really good MOC and THEMIS images taken from Martian orbit (this one is particularly cool.)

You can see a somewhat larger version (though far from the full resolution one) of today's "postcard" panorama if you have flash installed. Go here and pan around the image. (it's nicer in a larger window than the one they offered, so I linked directly to the flash rather than pointing to their link).

...and a correction. I think it must have been "100 million hits" on the website and not one billion. That's what I get for posting before I've had my coffee.
Update to the correction: Susan points out in the comments that I wasn't alone in reporting that number. Apparently AP/Andrew Bridges is reporting the same so maybe I didn't mis-hear or mis-type. A billion hits is a lot and if it is the case that they've had a billion hits, I suspect they're not talking about visitors or even visits, but rather, server hits which means every image, embedded object, html file, etc. It's still a very large number though. There are probably only about 620 million people worldwide with internet connectivity. A billion hits is a lot :0

...and Steve Squyres has a homepage (thanks to Marc Erickson for the tip.)

Martian Soil has some MER coverage so give them a look if you're hungry like me.

Jay Reding has some Martian thoughts too.

megnut too.

Chris Gonyea posts news of the Spirit landing site naming and memorial plaque in honor of the Colombia crew. Thanks for the heads-up Chris.

Susan Kitchens, over at 2020 Hindsight is doing some awesome MER blogging. Go there now for some great information. Of special note (thanks for the heads up Susan, and yes, that was most certainly a joke) are her JPL/MER leadership discussion transcripts/blogposts. I've watched many of those as well and done some blogging on the content but not nearly as completely as Susan. You can find those among her Jan 3 and Jan 4 posts at 2020 Hindsight.

If any of you have or know of other good Mars blogs (or not-Mars blogs that happen to be blogging about Mars recently) please let me know and do give Susan's blog a look. She's got some great stuff including a nice list of "professional" resources (minimal overlap with those I mentioned) and wonderful coverage of the highlights sequence that's played a couple of times on NASA TV. Also check out her Louis Friedman's space updates. Lots of great stuff. Just go there :-)

Press conference underway. Color pictures!! I'll post notes when it's done. Images are up at marsrover.jpl.nasa.gov. (You really must look at the high-resolution version. It's just awesome.)

update: hrm, NASA JPL seems to have run out of bandwidth and pulled all of their large images and video content. Maybe they should put it up on Geocities or something ;-)

Press conference notes:

Charles Elachi:
phone call with the president complimented the team. thanked them for daring to be great and called the landing of spirit as a proud and inspirational moment. told him how proud and privileged we are then had a little chat about quantum physics and string theory ;-)

Firouz Naderi: passed the 1 billion hits on the internet. in next few days the parents of this rover will help it to its feet and help it take its first step first on the lander then on the surface. this baby has skipped all the baby talk and gone right to full sentences.

Steven Squyres: our science payload has 6 pieces and each will have a day to shine. today it's pancam. Jim Bell is the Ansel Adams of the space age.

Jim Bell: I'm going to be sharing with you some initial results from pancam, the dual camera system on top of the mast. I hope you all will be as impressed as we are. Each camera has a filter wheel. All color images are from pancam. Introduce you all to spirits first color postcard. This is a view right through the front of the rover, a panoramic mosaic of 4 high by 3 wide. 12 million pixels. To really do it justice you have to start zooming in so we have a video that's gonna sort of fly us in. (wow) Wonderful mix of both smooth and angular rocks at the site. here you see one of the freshest rocks at the surface. here are some drag marks from the airbag retraction. "trenching" this surface is going to be a blast. You can see some dark deposits around some of these rocks. We think this might be some of those wind streaks from dust devils. Color and resolution are about what you'd see. These pictures are the highest resolution, highest details we've ever seen of Mars. We're looking at one little wedge in front of the rover. There's a wonderful distant mesa about 20 kilometers to the south on the horizon. You can get a sense of what 12 million pixels of resolution can do for you. All of those images were from compressed data. It's spectacular but not the best this camera can do. I want to acknowledge the wonderful professional work that's been done by hundreds at Cornell, JPL around the country, people helping with the filters, the electronics, etc. I think the best thing we can do to make the whole team proud is to keep taking these kinds of pictures and extracting the kind of detail we can from these kinds of images.

Jennifer Trospars:
Images leave me a little bit speechless. The full 360 pan is what we're working on now. On it's third day on Mars the rover woke up at 8:45 local solar time after a typical nights sleep, 15 hours ;-) After sleeping for 15 hours the first thing spirit did was make a long distance call and confirm what she's been doing. During the night she'd made a couple of uhf local calls. We cut the second cable and plan to do standup tomorrow. After about an hour the rover called us again. On that pass we did notice that our geologist was a little bit warmer than what we expected them to be so we needed to make some changes to the plans for the day to keep the temperature good. Temp was at the UHF radio so we chose to revoke the phone privileges for one comm session to keep cooler on the surface. Next time we'll comm in 2 or 3 hours. The thermal issues, we'd mentioned tau is about .9 and we had designed for a predict of .2. this is not a bad situations but we have to work around it. the rover heats up when it's awake and communicating. we have 3 uhf and 3 xband passes. With the temps we have now we can't do all the comm time and all the awake time. yesterday we skipped a comm. today we're giving the rover a siesta. we're working on the longer term solution here. once we get off the lander it will get a lot better. we also talked about the high-gain antenna and the anomaly there. yesterday we had all low-gain connections. today we'll uplink a set of commands to move the elevation of the high gain antenna around the spots where we saw the current spikes. we spent time in the test bed with the test rover running the commands to move the elevation actuator up and down. in the mean time, we talked yesterday about retracting airbags, we did some testing in the test bed> Jessica's gonna talk about that. Today we'll try to retract the airbags.

Jessica: on our -x petal, looking eastward, that inflated piece of airbag, first we need to determine which airbag that is. we hit the test bed and simulated the landing to try to duplicate how the airbags lay. We got a similar result. By doing that case we determined that it was indeed the base airbag and we ran through a couple different cases for retraction. We have put a plan together to today around mid-day we will send a sequence to retract the basepetal 1 revolution (about 6 and a half inches) wait for 30 seconds repeat 3 times. Then we'll take an image on that same area and bring that data down. we hope to have similar results as we did in the simulation. we will continue on with our mini-TES imaging in the northern direction and continue on with pancam imaging.

Steve: I've got four images to show you. first highlights of Jim's beautiful pancam image. first thin is that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you're about to see in imaging. This isn't even stereo and is about 1/8th of what you'll see in pancam panorama. surfaces of rocks are very varied, some rounded and some angular. I'm speculating but if you have a very strong very fine grained rock that gets broken up by some process and is exposed for a long period of time exposed to sandblasting. What we're seeing is typical of rocks that go through this process. This tells us nothing of their composition. doing 90 degrees of mini-TES today, did 90 yesterday plus we got mossbauer and apsx to come. You see the tails of debris behind the rocks, a shadow zone from winds. We've landed din a fairly windy place. This is that stuff around the airbag retraction,. the way this surface has responded to airbag retraction is bazaar. look at these pebbled have been pushed down into the soil. the weird stuff is it looks like there's a layer of strangely cohesive material. Stuff sort of like this seen at Viking sight called "duracrust" it looks folded or scrunched up and there's something very strange and cohesive. not like anything I've ever seen before. This area is one of these shallow depressions that we've seen. they're lower topographically and sheltered from the wind so they have finer grained material. this may be a taste of sleepy hollow.

Jim: our first use of HD TV and what a great subject for that.

Q. That weird soil looks elastic. You think of a synthetic material.

Steve: I would certainly call it cohesive. Duracrust seen at other landing sites on Mars. Found high in elements like chlorine so maybe have a bit of salt. One theory is moisture precipitating to the surface causes cohesion in the soil. With the wheels on this vehicle we can dig holes and put the micro image or apsx on the whole and learn a lot.

Q. what day full stereo panorama. on the cohesive stuff which looks like damp clay to me. if from moisture how far below?

Jim: yesterday we took first wedge, today we took second wedge. if everything went well we'll have half of it on board. 3 or 4 more days to obtain everything. then it's up to how things go with HGA and UHF transmitter. 3 4 or 5 days to trickle down.
Jennifer: today we send a command to up Odyssey data rate to 128 kilobits (from 33?)
Steve: I wouldn't even want to begin. We've got the tools on the payload to answer these kinds of questions so lets wait on the tools.

Q. why is it cooler off the lander.

Jennifer: when we get off the lander we think it'll be a 5 degree decrease in temp just getting lower.

Q. elaborate on HGA and what other locations do you want to take pictures.

Jennifer: we don't have a lot of data so we worked on a set of commands we can send to the vehicle that will be safe, not causing any damage if there is a hardware problem, we also have some data still on board the craft that will help us understand the rest of the moves on sol 2. This was very early moves, first moves after deployment so we want to understand if we continue to see those spikes in the later moves. When we did establish the last comm session we used the HGA at full speed and our pointing accuracy was better than we expected. The only anomaly was the current spikes.
Jim: that airbag disrupted part of the scene, I want a closer picture of that. That really distant peak is 25 kilometers away (out of reach).
Steve: our planning has been driven by the low res images and our picture is going to change dramatically as new images come in. We're in awe and waiting to see more.

Q. Are these pictures better than what you thought.

Steve: my reaction has been one of shock and awe. I have an emotional connection. I've held these cameras in my hand (very carefully). We've taken pictures in sandbox, in labs, all of these have been like having an animal in a cage and now this beast is out taking these incredible pictures. We designed it to do this so we shouldn't be surprised.

Q. If spirit is a "she" what is opportunity.

Steve: they are identical twins. (laughter)

Q. do you think you're seeing lighter colored material here than Viking and it appears like rocks don't have the "rind" will that make things easier.

Steve: too early to say for sure whether they have weathering rind. Looks like the windblown sand has acted as mother natures abrasion tool. Mars may have cleaned them off. I assure you we're going to take our rock abrasion tool to one of these things.
Jim: on the colors, based on the three (of 8) filters, the color at this landing site is dominated by this fine grained iron rich dust component. dominates the color everywhere on Mars. similar to Viking and pathfinder. buried within that are varied tones of rocks. overall comparable to Viking and pathfinder sites. my suspicion is that based on the morphologies is that there will be some substantial differences with other filters, and mini-TES.

Q. Are the colors real (see some blue rocks)? Did you include sundial which included reference colors.

Jim: every person has different color perception and every printer and monitor has different colors. we don't see any "blue" rocks. the sundial is our calibration target. we have pictures available off the web site but I didn't bring them with me.

Q. you expected this sky color?

Jim: not surprising considering how much dust is in the atmosphere. That was seen during Viking as well. We may in fact see the color of the sky change with time.

Q. about the funny looking soil which to me looks like mud. does it look like mud to you?

Steve: Right. "It looks like mud but it can't be mud." It sort looks like when you scrunch it folds up. I don't know what it is and I'm not prepared to speculate.
Jim: i don't have any speculation. it's exciting to see a material or process that we're baffled like. We need to study it in much more detail before we go out on a limb and make a geologic interpretation.

Q. New pictures show greater variety in size of rocks. Is that consistent with the hypothesis that this could be a lake bed.

Steve: population of rocks we can determine in far greater detail. It has revealed a few good sized rocks but without stereo pancam yet we can't be exact. I saw one out there that looks to be the size of a Volkswagon but i could be wrong. Rock distribution is markedly different than Pathfinder of Viking landing sites. There are far fewer big rocks. Rock size distribution is much more skewed to smaller rocks. As far as lake question, way too early to tell. We don't have the slightest idea yet what these rocks are made of.

Q. Is this the first 90 degrees? I'm lost on what's down and what's up.

Jim: this is an example of what we call a "postcard". This one and the one we attempted on sol 1 are designed to be quick 3 color, one eye, not stereo, send the data back quickly. What we started yesterday was to build upthis big mission success panorama that's comparable in resolution but stereo with one infrared filter. we hope to have 180 degrees of this on board today.
Faruz: a frame is 16deg by 16 deg. the full panorama would be about 3 frames high and 25 across. About 75 frames. each frame is about a million pixels. A three color frame panorama will be roughly 50 megabits. A good odyssey pass will get almost 40 megabits of data down, almost aa full panoramic image.. What you're seeing here is about 12 frames of that 75.

Q. hills are 25 kilometers away.

Jim: one particular peak, mesa, is probably 4-500 meters high and as much between 20 and 30 kilometers away. There's a near horizon too, perhaps 5 or 6 km away.

Q. Do you know where you are yet and have you begun to name other features.

Steve: still working on it. Debate centers around how to interpret a cluster of hills off to the east. The initial thinking was that we were seeing this whole hill complex and you could judge how far away. We were getting numbers like 2 kilometers. Then yesterday we discussed that we believe there may be a broad topographic swell blocking out the lower portion of this range of hills blocking out a lot of these features so they could be a lot closer than they appear.We've got a factor of 2 uncertainty and that' kind of a big deal at this point. We're not planning on naming these 'till we know where they are.

Q. could ultraviolet light change the color of that weird cohesive substance. Is it fair to say that material hasn't seen daylight in a while

Jim: You mean would we see a change with time? That's a good question. We won't see it again in the mission success panorama but there are many people on the team who want to take a higher resolution picture with other filters before we drive off. Once we drive off it will be underneath the solar panels and difficult to see. It's fair to say that it hasn't seen sunlight, not a lot of things get moved around at that scale.

Q. did Bush give you a go ahead for a human mission to Mars.

Charles: maybe I'll tell you later ;-)

Q. Could the hills be outside the crater? how do you explain hills inside a crater.

Steve: inside the crater. we believe there is a history of several episodes water here (inferred from orbit). Gusev filled up partially with substantial amounts of material and a subsequent water flow cut through those deposits creating mesas. The origin of that mesa isn't something I expect to shed a lot of light on with this mission 'cause it's just too darned far away.

Q. What time of day was this taken. So do you have to take each wedge at the same time of day.

Jim: this pic took 20 minutes at 2:30 PM localtime. Each octant takes 40-60 minutes so we can't do it in one day but we try to constrain it so we're taking these pictures between 10am and 2-3 in the afternoon. Not at the exact same time but we don't loose much by opening that window some.

Q. In the stereo navcam image yesterday there's what looks like a great big trough running from the lander all the way along the landscape to one side of sleepy hollow. was that just an exaggerated effect of a slight differnce in ground elevation or something that's real.

Steve: I'm not exactly sure so let's put on some silly looking glasses at the end of the press conference and have a look.

Q. Gusev is thought of as having an unusually high concentration of water ice, as much as 35%. if this is the case (in one of the wetter areas of Mars) could that duracrust be evidence for a near-surface ice layer.

Steve: There are a lot of steps in that logic chain. I'd be careful about that. We want to be careful about that speculation. In the area where we've landed there is several percent water content not 35%. Odyssey sees to a depth of tens of centimeters so it doesn't say anything about meters below the surface. If we do find that this cohesive stuff has a compositional difference than what lies above or below it then we'll have some interesting discussions about that sort of thing.
Jim: most of the models postulate a very dry upper layer and that's what we're dealing with here, the upper layer.

Q. You've been describing this as a racetrack. How will the rover navigate this rocky landscape. Which ones can you drive over and which will you drive around.

Jennifer: The biggest rocks in the near vicinity is nothing over 20 centimeters and we can drive over that. "It's a bumpy racetrack." There are bigger rocks but they're spaced far enough apart that we can easily drive to them and around them....we'll be able to drive a lot further than we anticipated because we didn't know what the terrain would look like. Initial egress uses no autonomous navigation. We specify the exact navigation. Then we'll start enabling autonomy which will come up with a big map of red and green areas. We'll evaluate that map, what it sees as green and red. Right now we're anticipating that it's gonna be a good amount of driving and that we'll drive some distances.

Next press briefing at 9 am tomorrow morning

This story is claiming that the "postcard" color panorama has been released. I haven't found any confirmation of that but I've also been pretty busy today. If you know more and can point me to the details, I'd really appreciate it.

OK, on second read, I guess it doesn't really claim what I first thought. Here's the text:

"The US robot probe Spirit snapped the first colour images of its surroundings on Mars yesterday, pieced together by Nasa to form a panoramic view and stunning postcard from the red planet."

Indeed, Spirit did snap the pictures (though I suspect it wasn't yesterday as the report claims but actually the day before). As far as I know, we're still waiting on the data to make it back via an Odyssey or MGS UHF pass and then waiting for the image folks on the mission team to assemble the panorama. My request for updates still holds. If you know of any releases that aren't mentioned here, I'd love to hear from you in the comments or via emai. Thanks.

If you've enjoyed the press conference and mission status updates and commentary that I've been hastily almost-transcribing, do take some time to tune in to NASA TV and catch some of the replays and excerpts. Right now they're playing various high-impact excerpts from the first press conference and it's just a blast to watch these guys smile, to see the joy they're experiencing on that first night.

On another note, do most not-science reporters just suck horribly at reporting on this kind of stuff or am I getting a bad sample? Tonight, driving home from work listening to the radio, some reporter came on with a 2-minute piece about the doom and gloom around a "what-if" posed at this morning's news conference. I can't remember who asked the question but it was basically "what if you can't cut the securing cables that free the rover from the lander" and the answer was a pretty vehement "These are high-reliability devices. They're extremely reliable. It takes a lot going right to make this work but we don't anticipate any problems with the pyro cutters." Well, this guy on the radio didn't seem to care about that part of the response and just quoted Steve Squyres saying (from memory, sorry) "We'd turn from a rover mission to a lander mission. We wouldn't be able to complete most of the science mission. We could still pancam but you can pancam 'till the cows come home and the scenery isn't gonna change."

Now, a responsible reporter would not only have mentioned that the mission team clearly thinks that this particular device (the pyro cutter) is highly reliable, but he should have also made it clear that the mission team didn't just shout "hey, we're worried about this problem", they were responding to a question that was clearly phrased as a "I know it's unlikely but what if..."

This mission is going just about picture perfect so far, but if this guy's report was the only news you got on the Spirit mission, you'd probably walk away thinking that it was all about to fall apart. It's either incompetence or sensationalism (or maybe both).

It's too bad that most people don't have time to really follow a news topic closely. I'm sure glad I don't rely on woefully inadequate news outlets for my space news.

At this morning's press briefing they're showing stereo navcam imagery. I'll throw my notes up here when the briefing is finished.

No "postcard" here yet. It was taken but it's still onboard the rover.

If my notes are too "raw" and you're looking for just the highlights, tune in to the well updated Spacelight Now Mission Status Center.

Morning briefing notes (again, these are not exact quotes):

Matt Wallace: yesterday the focus was on establishing our direct to earth communications. data rate depends on how well pointed the HGA is. we seeded the rover with our best estimate of heading. (171 degrees.) then we send sequence telling rover to find the sun. this is all autonomously done by the rover. 11850 bits per second is maximum nominal rate on HGA and we had a session at that rate. driving the elevation motor in one direction was a little noisier than was expected. they'll be looking into that today. thermal and power subsystems look OK. better understanding of atmosphere and solar array power. we have plenty of power to get though the rest of our egress and nominal mission. we also spent time looking at the airbag imagery. today retracting airbags a little further, in particular the basepedal airbag. (stereo imagery) from the navcam! they're not worried about the airbag out the back side. the front left airbag bubble is one they're going to try to retract (run retraction another three revolutions). the airbag "bubble" on the right front side will also be a focus point for sol three.

Steve Squyres:
A fantastic day again. By far the best day yet for the science payload. focus of the day was health checks and I am thrilled to tell you that the microscopic imager, and the APSX, and the mossbauer have all checked out. (mossbauer not working properly for the flight, probably damaged from shaking during rocket takeoff). "same thing only in German". MER is an international mission. Of the six instruments, two are provided by Germany, APSX Max Planck institute, mossbauer is university of Mainz. DLR German space agency a key partner. The "arm" is still in place and that pyro firing is the last significant jolt we're going to see so we're "not out of the woods yet" but I'm really confident. We acquired the postcard image safely. we have their thumbnail images on the ground. we've got all 12 thumbnails for the mosaic. Pancam, micro imager, APSX and mossbauer are all healthy. No health check on mini-TES health. Today we have a mini-TES health check. We're going to acquire first 90degress (pancam and navcam). Focus right now is on engineering activities. can't say when we'll get that data down but acquire today. Consensus on basis of incomplete data we have so far we want to go to that circular depression (light sandy area?) roughly 30 feet in diameter, about 50 feet away from us. We think that this may have been an impact crater. You can see on the far wall of it that there is rock exposed. It's a very exciting feature and it's probably where we're gonna go first. We've named it "Sleepy Hollow".

Art Thompson:
I'd like to start off by saying "Wow!" Reality has far surpassed fantasy. "She's just too easy to operate at this point ;-)" "We're like kids at the candy store." Plan for this morning is waking it up at 9am local time (4:10 this afternoon PST). Cable cutting this morning. One cable cut on sol one. Cut cable 2 today and cut cable three in about a week. After cable 2 cut we'll work on airbag retraction noon Mars time. We have comm sessions scheduled today. 9am low gain session. 10:30 and 12:30 low gain session. Odyssey 4:45 local. Midnight MGS, tomorrow at 5am Odyssey. (an animation of the "standup" and "rolling off")

Q. Go for sleepy hollow with mini-TES as soon as possible?

Steve: mini-TES initial test is a full 360 degrees. first two octants are pointed in opposite direction.

Q. do you have any information on height and distance of bounce. when is standup time in PST.

Matt: EDL team still looking at telemetry and reconstruction. I've not heard any conclusion. There's a pool on number of bounces so I'm interested ;-) Standup is spread over 3 days. Sol 4, late in the evening tomorrow it starts. Final standup actions roughly 3 days from now.

Q. Stereo at panorama, anything leapt out?

Steve: sleepy hollow most appealing, there's a lot of these, maybe dozens. we don't have ranging data so we haven't mapped them. While we've got a generally flat surface, it's pockmarked with these things. I think it's plausible that these are secondary craters.

Q. Describe a bit about pancam. is that signal to Mars traveling at the speed of light.

Steve: it's traveling at th speed of light "not just a good idea, it's the law". We will send a set of commands telling pancam to acquire a set of images, which direction, etc. "capture image" command ha d47 parameters. When the images are taken they are stored in the computer's memory and ready to be downlinked. It can take from hours to days before we see something there on the ground. We like to get the thumbnails down quickly. They confirm that we got the data. Say we want to take some pictures and drive away, we can get the thumbnails and then drive away safely knowing those images are there. Sol 2 postcard images are there. We know that the camera's working beautifully, filters, etc.

Q. Can you describe cable cutting process is like. If it gets stuck on the platform, what science could you do.

Art: We have a series of events that have to take place to successfully egress. Cable cutting is just one. We have electronics that we have to be able to communicate to. We've jettisoned the cruise stage but we still have stuff on the lander that we're using like the airbag retraction electronics. Today we're cutting some of the electronics that we don't need. Should that fail, we don't have a lot of redundancy.

Matt: these are high-reliability devices. Just one of 60 pyrotechnics. The cutter doesn't have a backup.

Steve: if for some reason we couldn't fire a cable cutter we turn from a rover mission to a lander mission.

Q. Now that you're down, what are you telling your troops about keeping their eye on the ball for the second mission.

Matt: we knew that would be a challenge. We designed the activities on opportunities at this point on Opportunity to be minimal. Once we get through this first week with spirit and get closer to entry for opportunity we'll ramp up. Carefully staffed to meet the demands.

Q. About the color image, is that with the best camera?

Steve: pancam is the highest resolution, best we can do, I can't wait to see it. It's gonna come down most likely on one or more of the UHF relay passes. Maybe Odyssey around midnight.

Matt: reasonable to get it tonight. A lot of engineering today but if things go well and we get a good link up to odyssey then I would expect that we have a very good chance.

Art: eight minutes after midnight PST so 40 minutes after that PST

Q. how long to get to sleepy hollow? stop along the way to test instruments?

Steve: whether we'll zoom there or not we won't want to decide until we see pancam and mini-TES data. If they tell us that we have significant compositional variety we could visit a couple of those before we start motoring off to sleepy hollow. If on the other hand it's not a lot of variety, we might take a look at one of them closely before heading to sleepy hollow.

Q. Is that a fault line in the crater?

Steve: seam in mosaic.

Q. Estimates on those hills or mountains on the horizon.

Steve: consensus view is that the biggest hills we see are about 2 kilometers away. There's a vocal minority that thinks they're closer. We'll present that when we've really got it dialed in.

Q. 2 lovely looking rocks between here and sleepy hollow. Likely place for rover to stop and take a look? Deploy the RAT?

Steve: certainly well positioned for that. We haven't seen it with pancam or mini-TES.

Q. distance and time to get to sleepy hollow (now that we have stereo)

Steve: roughly 30 feet in diameter, about 40 or 50 feet away. By the time we get really experienced in driving it would be a day trip. We don't have our Martian drivers license yet ;-) so we're going to be driving very cautiously early. If it takes a week to get to sleepy hollow that's fine with me.

Q. what do you plan to do to assess rover trap quality of sleepy hollow.

Steve: imaging might tell us a lot. we're thinking that within sleepy hollow there are two dark blotches that "I think that might be airbag bounce marks". We can get over there and see if that looks like what they are. Combined with EDL reconstruction we can lear a lot about how dense that soil is. We could also use mini-TES to get a sense of how fluffy or how compact it is. If none of those satisfy us, dip our toe in, stick one wheel in and see what happens.

Q. noise levels being higher? could you elaborate?

Matt: HGA has two motors, azimuth and elevation. in process of deploying we drive it out then elevation in both directions almost full range. one of two directions on elevation, the current was spiking in a noisy fashion. Not unusual. We have 33-34 mechanisms and they all have certain signatures. First time operating in this environment but we're gonna spend some time trying to understand that signature. The mechanism worked great. The spikes are about 1/8th of a second long. No impact on immediate activities.

Q. Details on the standup? What are the cables being cut. That one hill in panorama that's really pointed.

Steve: no idea on that one hill.

Matt: standup over several days. more detail from the experts in that domain. Big picture items are firing cable cutter number 2, lifting the rover using the lead screw mechanism on the lander that drives the body of the rover up we then deploy the front wheels and drop the rover down onto the wheels. then we do a couple of short moves on that mechanism to make sure everything is locked into place. then all that's left to do is push the rear wheels back and release the middle and rear wheels as well and then we're pretty close to ready to go.

Q. HGA and mast of pancam, what happened there? What determines whether to use HGA or UHF to orbit assets.

Matt: Decision cycle is mostly timing. The pancam mast obstruction was not really a concern, just something we have to live with. Because the HGA has a focused comm beam, we have to deal with it. Fortunately we have two solutions, geometric solutions. We swung it around on what we call the "B branch" and we pointed at earth and got a great signal.

Art: engineering data DTE (direct to earth) used for overnight planning. Science stuff if it's height prior then we DTE it, the rest comes down UHF. In all honesty, UHF has been so good (unsure going into the mission) that we're using it for a lot more than expected.

Steve: DTE for high priority or "really small stuff".

Q. Perspective. When you stand up how extreme will the change in perspective be. Now everybody has a computer so the language seems easier.

Steve: demonstrated standup by actually standing up on stage.
Matt: sleepy hollow is a ways off so not much.
Steve: we describe things to you all pretty much the way things really are. We call them thumbnails and it's a lot like what you all experience web browsing.

Q. I'm hungry for this next picture too. Can you put the pancam stereo image into some 3-D format? Bounce marks, do you know it was bouncing that way or just a pure surmise.

Steve: we see smudges, we know something big was bouncing. we put 2 and 2 together and maybe got 5. We can use the blue-red glasses, polarizing glasses, we can take the 3 dimensional shape and paint the image data onto that and view it from different perspectives. that's gonna be really stunning.

Q. do you see any roll marks near the lander.

Steve: I don't know. We do see some disturbance from the airbag retractions. These are navcam images. We have a factor of 14 in resolution out in front of us (pancam).

Q. Given the notoriety that moving parts on space vehicles for sticking. Could you use the IDD arm to nudge a stuck wheel?

Matt: groan. if we find ourselves in an anomaly like tat we'll consider every option we have. I'd hate to say no but there'd be some real geometry issues. not even sure we could get the arm out.

Steve: we'd have to sort of trick the vehicle into doing that. It's got a lot of defensive. We'd have to outsmart it.

Matt: if it thinks you're telling it to hit itself in the back of the head it won't do it.

Q. named any other features.

Steve: no. sleepy hollow is it.

Q. which direction is sleepy hollow.

Steve: closeup of sleepy hollow shows it's almost looking straight back.

Q. how far is the horizon.

Steve: concentrating on specific features. can't really answer horizon because it depends on how you define horizon.

Q. Those hills you can see in the distance. from MOLA and orbital image data can you determine where those hills are?

Steve: debate about which hills are which hills in the MOLA data.

Q. how deep is the impact crater.

Steve: height of the lip is a few tens of centimeters. a foot, or two feet. The feature itself is very shallow. lets say it's a secondary crater. Like a bowl of milk, filled to the rim with dust.

Q. Is the medium rocks volcanic?

Steve: don't know at all. just don't have the data.

Q. Power system. Jennifer said solar array's producing 83%. Has that changed at all? will that change?

Matt: number has not changed. I think it is unlikely that it would change. There's some possibilities that it would but that appears unlikely. I think that's what we have to work with. If the atmospheric opacity changes.

Steve: If the interpretation is correct that this is tau related, and the weather changes, depending on what Mars does it could change and it could change in either direction.

While we're all waiting on the "good pictures" to come down, I've done a little bit of clean-up and enhancement of the two panormas that are the best of the early Spirit imaging. I've resized them way down because I don't have a lot of bandwidth but I think they're an improvement over the press release images and what most of the news sites are carrying.

panorama
polar panorama

If you're watching and you see new images make their way online and I haven't noted them here, please let me know with a comment or an email. Thanks.

I just stumbled upon a nice series of status updates from cbsnews.com. They're pretty timely and they're mostly accurate from what I can tell. Beats the hell out of the AP and Rueters hack pieces, anyway.

I just did a wordcount on my weekend of Spirit blogging and it comes to over 11,000 words. This was certainly a record posting weekend for me and I don't expect to repeat it any time soon. I hope that you enjoyed it.

Maybe I'll dig through the posts and try to write a nice short 1,000 word article on the success of the weekend. I suspect that I could top most of those lame AP and Reuters stories. I could probably rival Miles O'Brian's coverage for CNN (though I admit to only having seen his silly questions at the briefings and not his actual stories on CNN).

Waiting for evidence of x-band carrier. There's a single frequency that they transmit on and they modulate it to encode information on it. It's easiest to detect the carrier and they look for that before trying to get data from it.

They have the carrier.

"I see data flowing" (applause) and we have high gain data flow! Now at 11,850 bits per second.

"We're just stunned that everything has gone so right, step after step after step."

On the very first try they got the high gain antenna to work. I've been following the Mars efforts over the last decade and it's so damn nice to see this kind of success. W're probably going to get a lot of data out of this first high gain pass.

They've now confirmed that we can command through HGA at 1000 bits per second (applause)!

And we're acquiring science data. This is just awesome.

We should be getting pancam pictures. Hopeful that the "postcard" will have the priority enough to make it in this pass.

Data management confirms that with a priority of "45" images are right on the edge. There are probably some thumbnails at a higher priority. Even if we don't get this from the current high gain pass, we'll still have a good shot with the Odyssey pass next hour.

Commanding capability window has passed for the day. We won't be talking to Spirit any more today through low or high gain antennae.

"No faults. No errors. Solar groovy, and under control." (was that Jennifer? sounded like it.) I like that phrase, "solar groovy". It apparently means that we're still getting enough sun to charge batteries.

We have just finished downloading a complete log of all the telemetry from the lander since it touched down and we're getting science data now (thumbnails at the moment, I think).

Navcam thumbnails are coming in now and we might see them come up on screen momentarily (are you tuned in to NASA TV?)

Navcam thumbnail, first of "ring around the lander image" is onscreen (which measures how the airbags change when they get warmer and colder).

Ha! I see the little lego man :-)

Pancam thumbnail images coming down now. Full pancam images coming down now.

Pass completed.

Turns out, contrary to my reporting above, there are a few minutes left in the command window for the low gain antenna.

Spirit will have a restless night with a sequence uploaded that will wake it up every few hours through the night to take some measurements of the temperature on a calibration unit of mini-TES.

"All around, things are excellent." (applause).

News briefing tomorrow morning at 9am. Maybe we'll get the "postcard" panorama then.

Notes from the 8 PM press conference. All paraphrased, of course. I'm getting faster at typing but still not fast enough. I may do some cleanup on the notes later tonight.

Jason Willis:
I'm the EDL flight director and essentially over the last three years I've been developing that sequence. Worked with Prasun and Miguel.

Prasun Desai:
NASA Langley, collaborating with JPL. I've been working on this project since inception. I work in atmospheric flight. Also working the Stardust mission (fortunately EDL for that doesn't start for about a year). Also working Genesis. 4 craft roaming the solar system that I've worked on.

Miguel San Martin:
Attitude control system lead. Worked with the part of the craft involved during the cruise phase that points everything in the right direction (trajectory, solar panels, antenna, etc.) Worked on parachute algorithm, the airbag explosions, the backshell rockets, orientation of the rover on the surface. pointing the high-gain antenna to earth, etc. Also did the same work for Mars Pathfinder.

Julie Townsend:
Cruise operations team. I'm a dream team rookie. Been working at JPL for three years. Developed fault protection algorithms. Then working on cruise operations team as activity lead. Designed commands. Built and tested command files and help flight directors push those files to the craft.

Wendy Calvin:
Prof. at Univ. of Nevada, specialize in infrared spectroscopy. I'm looking forward to mini-TES pictures. Been studying planet spectra for 15 years. First mission I've been directly involved with, getting the data as it comes down.

Q. Wendy, when you look out on that scene what do you see? What should we be prepared for with mini-TES?

Wendy: I see a racetrack. It's a lot flatter and a lot less rocky. We can't tell a lot by the rock distribution. We're looking at some similar surfaces in Egypt and Canada. Once we get compositional info and chemistry we'll be able to start to unravel the geologic history.

Q. The press has shown all the animations and timelines for entry, descent and landing. What actually happened. How right were our numbers, timing, etc.

Miguel: We actually have that data. we need more time to analyze it.
Prasun: Things went like we predicted. Peak heating occurred at almost exact predicted time. Parachute deploy time was a bit later but well within bounds. We're still working on analyzing data. Heatshield separation, landing separation went like we wanted it to. Retro rockets firing right when we wanted them to. All in all things performed pretty nominally
Miguel: The last portion, terminal descent, things must be precise, we're moving at 20 feet per second. Everything was just what we wanted. Planned for worst case winds thinking it wasn't going to happen...we got winds and the retrorockets were activated. We need to go back and see if we survived thanks to the activation of the system or despite the activation of the system :-) For three years we have been skeptical and so far so good but we need to continue to be skeptical.

Q. Early today Odyssey relayed a photo of some terrain, a really high-resolution image. Can you tell us more about that?

Wendy: we have a few little pieces of pancam images but we only have a couple little fragments.

Q. What's been accomplished so far on this second sol.

Julie: high-gain deployment. High gain session tonight.

Q. Do you know where it landed with any exactitude?

Jason: We're still working to get exact. We have the DIMES data.
Wendy: Active debate in the hall.
Jason: We know where the DIMES images location is.

Q. Anything in the panoramas weird stunning or strange

Wendy: It's all stunning. Surprising that it is as flat as it is. We're all very excited about driving very far and getting to new horizons and seeing over the next hill. Very different from any other place we've been.

Q. Any other issues you want to remove uncertainty from before second lander (mentioned retrorockets). When you look at panorama do you have estimate of horizon distance?

Miguel: No. System performed beautifully. We have to study it but so far everything we've seen performed admirably. We still need to understand it. These are minor areas of concern. That we're even looking at those things means that we're very lucky.
Wendy: I don't know now, but we can get range data.

Q. What are the driving (rover movement) goals of the science team.

Wendy: sol 3 - 7 remote sensing data. Color imaging, 360 degree imaging, infrared, we'll get color, chemistry and that will give us a target that says "Oh! That's what we want to drive to". Then there's the longer range view of which direction to move in general.

Q. Wind you encountered during descent, temperatures, any data that could help Europeans with locating Beagle.

Miguel: It's still early in the process. We see a lot of activity. Seems that is due to winds. Possible 30 meters per second wind. Oscillations of backshell and parachute give us indications. As far as being able to help the Beagle, it's a different landing sight, I don't know what the windy situation is there. Wind is just very different from site to site. Gusev is windier than Opportunity landing.

Prasun: We'll be working on temperature and atmospheric density over the next few days, getting temp estimates from orbital assets (Odyssey and MGS).

Q. If this were in the US you probably wouldn't want to live there. Do you see beauty in these images?

Julie: It is beautiful. "Look it's Mars. there's no wall!" (brief explanation of the months of planning and simulations) It was so gorgeous to see the horizon in the pictures. It's beautiful the same way that the desert is beautiful. Beautiful vacantness. Beauty of an undisturbed landscape.

Q. Are you dying to get mini-TES? When can we expect it? Issues about surface roughness and how readily the orbital infrared instruments are able to detect carbonates. Will you see them if they're there.

Wendy: Yeah, we are dying to get infrared data from the surface but we're being patient. These people worked really hard to get us there. We're on the surface of Mars and we can wait a couple more days. My personal feelings are that the test data are going to be really interesting. Primary problem form data we get from orbit is the atmospheric dust content. Once we're sensing heat from a meter away, we're gonna see some really spectacular spectra. Full octants won't complete until sol 8 then there's calibration issues. My expectation is that we'll get good calibrations by the time all the octants are down. It might take longer. Be patient.

Q. Between now and when the rover gets off the platform what are the biggest risks. Jason or Miguel, when opportunity lands is there a scenario where a killer dust storm could have an impact?

Jason: There are numerous things that could go wrong. the team has walked through all the scenarios we can think about over the course of the last 6 to 9 months. There are things that can get us. We think we know what they are.
Prasun: from my understanding it's not really sandblasting. Particles are so small. I don't believe that we have risk from sandstorms. Temperature variance is the thing that we are concerned about.

Q. How far are the group of hills visible in panorama?

Wendy: we don't have a good estimate. Some of the near field stuff like the dusty areas are in the 10 to 20 meter range. No estimates for far distance.

Q. How many degrees was the whole thing clocking left to right and how many times did it swing.

Miguel: 15 degrees deflections as the system was going down. The parachute is not good enough to slow us down to an airbag survival speed. So in Pathfinder to breach that gap we put retrorockets in the backshell. That works. The bad news is that with that system, to make it simple, passive, if you oscillate and apply thrust you might apply it at a certain angle. You might apply a horizontal velocity and the airbags don't like large horizontal velocity either. WIth that you could skid rather than bounce and that could tear an airbag.

Q. Are people being sent to locations here on Earth similar.

Wendy: The sites we've seen on earth aren't really analog sites, just "scratching our heads" and noting places that the science team had already been that seemed similar. We're putting together a press release product that shows those images.

Q. what changes to land the second rover?

Jason: We're still early in the analysis of the data. What we learn we'll feed back in, but at this point in time there's not a whole lot that we're gong to change but there's still a lot more data.

Q. I assume some or all of you are in Mars time. What have you done to prepare for the next three months. "Is your cat on Mars time"?

Julie: My cat's on his own time.
Wendy: You just start doing it.

Q. One photo showed what looked like big rock right there next to the craft.

Julie: Imaging engineers said they got new images to determine if they were rocks or dirty airbag bubbles. We don't have a real conclusive answer to that yet.

Q. ?

Jason: Everything is working properly they're in the process of getting the high gain antenna up.

Q. Where did the backshell and parachute go.

Jason: We haven't seen them in the pictures yet.
Prasun: We don't know how far we bounced.
Miguel: I've heard rumors that people see them already (snicker).

Q. Detail about what's going to happen tomorrow?

Wendy: sol 3 we start with pancam optics. Octant in front of rover and sweep around to right hand side fill out 180 degrees.
Jason: Primary science and data recovery.
Julie: Most of us have been involved in EDL and not planning the next few days.

Q. ?

Jason: Power limitations limit us to 2-3 hours a day of direct to Earth communication. We also have up to 4 UHF passes. (2 each from Odyssey and MGS).

NASA TV will shortly be airing the 7 PM update from Pasadena. Hopefully there will be information (or eve better, good news) about getting the high-gain antenna up and functioning. It isn't likely to be a problem but they are having to perform a "flip" maneuver to get the antenna out from behind the pancam mast.

Mark Adler, the Spirit mission manager confirmed that we expect to be getting photographic confirmation via a low-gain session that the high-gain antenna opening sequence was successful.

Also to be confirmed is that the rover has used the pancam to find the Sun allowing it to pinpoint with great accuracy its attitude which will be necessary for aiming the HGA.

First pictures of "the cable cutter" are in and it sounds like they're uploading to Sprit a new plan for three direct to Earth contacts (via low gain antenna) and "cleaning up" some of the no longer necessary scheduled connections with Odyssey and MGS (I think.) It also sounds like turning off the rover's "look for home" failsafe. Additionally, Mark confirmed that right now we have 3 ways to get data in and four ways to get data out and that we can certainly talk to Spirit via low gain antenna.

Low gain data (40 bits per second, excrutiatingly slow) is incoming now.

While the UHF link (data via orbiting sattelites around Mars) is quite fast, our windows for relaying data are insufficient for science operations so we need the high gain antenna which has a roughly 20 minute turnaround (upload of command to Spirit and download of Spirit data each take about 10 minutes) at good speed.

Mark confirmed that the rover is taking about 30% less energy to keep warm at night which is excellent news because it means that the batteries don't need as much power when the rover goes to sleep at night leaving more juice for science operations during the day.

We're getting good signal strength from the low-gain antenna. Correction from above, it's engineering data (telemetry) coming in and not photos that will hopefully tell us about the HGA deployment and the sunfind.

Mark also confirmed that the craft has the capability of flipping the HGA and while they were hoping not to have to use it, just to keep things simple, he craft "knows how" and the commands we sent are enabling that logic.

Sounds like the second low gain pass is underway and it could possibly contain imaging data.

(Applause) The sunfind worked! This was based on a simple numeric success code (event record) received from the low gain pass. Now sunfind images coming in. We got the first 3 of 15 and it sounds like the rover found the sun on the third image correcting the estimates by 4 degrees.

We didn't get data on the high-gain deploy before the NASA TV commentary coverage ended :( I assume we'll get news at the 8PM news conference upcoming or the 9PM commentary.

Sunrise at the lander began about 2 hours ago and the sun is now high enough in the sky that the voltage in the solar panels should be getting up to necessary levels for the waking that will begin Spirit's first full sol ("day") on Mars.

To recap, today's big scheduled event is the raising of the high-gain antenna. First they'll be focused on waking up the lander, getting another healthcheck for the subsystems, testing out the low-gain antenna, and getting some high-quality pictures back to Earth. The low and high-gain antennae are direct x-band connections to Earth. All of our communication to date has been UHF through the high-speed releay on the Martian satellites, MGS and Odyssey. They provide a fairly fat pipe, but they're only available a few times a day where the low and high-gain antennae are available during the bulk of the martian day.

As per tradition, wake-up music is being played at JPL. (I think it's The Beatles "Good Morning" but my connection is pretty bad the audio's pretty poor.)

Indeed it is "Good Morning" :D

(While I'm here I want to plug the main Mars Rover site which is starting to see regular new content updates including this nice large polar panorama.)

I've posted a slightly adjusted version of the polar panorama that brings out some detail by lightening and shifting contrast levels. I trimmed it in size because my bandwidth is limited but for those of you that can't wait for the next images, feel free to check it out.

Next update from NASA TV will be at 7PM.

The Mars Explorer Rover team will be sending a wake-up call to the Spirit rover between 2:30 and 3 PM this afternoon. I just found a nifty Martian time calculator over at the Goddard NASA pages. You can use it to display the time and a very cool sunclock that will show you (if you look at it now) the sunrise at Gusev crater where Spirit is awaiting its wake-up call.

Commentary/coverage of the wake-up call is underway on NASA TV.

Thanks again to Kipp Howard for the tip. Most of the raw images can be found at the NASA Raw Images gallery. These are the early low resolution images mostly from the navcam. Expect much better image quality soon when the full-frame, high-resolution pancam images start to arrive.

Currently on NASA TV: replay of last night's EDL (the fun parts).

Odyssey made a pass over the rover and is relaying more than 20 megabits of data to Earth. Right now the MER is using its UHF antenna to communicate with the Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecrafts in orbit around Mars. Starting today we hope to be communicating directly with the MER via its high-gain antenna.

The first images in from the pancam have arrived at JPL. Update: The pancam image they're showing now is actually data from the MGS flyover this morning that gave us about 6 megabits of data. We're still waiting on Odyssey data. The MER data via Odyssey is expected to contain dozens more images (about what we got from Spirit last night with it's first 24 megabit upload to Odyssey).

Engineers are currently paying close attention to the warmpth of the rover and its subsystems. It's a bit warmer than expected but probably not problematic. This is likely the result of temperatures being a bit higher at Gusev due to the tau.

What we're about to see: More pancam images. More of the DIME images. EDL bin data. UHF link debug report. Thermal survey.

Thermal: there may be a convective cell keeping the mini-TES warm which might save us some battery power.
Telecom: the link is good all the way down below 10 degrees elevation. The next couple of passes will have a slightly less favorable position so we may get slightly less data than previous passes.

Also noted was that MGS made a maneuver to adjust it's flyover for the anticipated Opportunity (the second MER) landing later this month. This was an anticipated maneuver and seems to have gone as expected.

Schedule for today: At about 2:25 (as late as 2:55) this afternoon the NASA TV will cover the project sending a wakeup call to Spirit. Between 7 and 8 PM there will be status updates and commentary on NASA TV. Between 8 and 9 PM there will be a press briefing. Between 9 and 10 PM NASA TV will cover the deployment of the high-gain antenna.

New pancam image showing a piece of the rover in the forground and some surface features near the rover has just been displayed.

We're still dealing with the low-resolution black and white imges from the first pass last night - things are going to get so much better when we start getting full frame, full resolution, color images this afternoon and later tonight. But for those of you who, like me, can't wait, here's what we have so far. Both of these are mosaics built from the same image frames.

First Panorama
Polar Panorama

You can find more at the Nasa MER Press Release Images page. You can also read more at the Jan 4 Press Release

I cleaned up my notes from this morning's press conference. I still haven't had my coffee so I don't expect a Pulitzer for this but figured some of you might be interested. Again, I'm not a fast enought typist to do a real transcription and much of this is paraphrasing so don't quote these folks based on my notes. (ugly spellcheck problem fixed. thanks Joe.)

Jennifer Trospar:
Engineering has done analysis of the data from last night.
Rover is currently asleep and will wake up around noon for an Odyssey pass. Around 2:30 PM we'll play our good morning song and wake up the rover.
We're completing our assessment of the thermal environment. Initial assessments said the hardware on the outside of the rover was warmer than we expected and so we think the temperature is 10 percent warmer than we had predicted. Because of the tau, temperatures are more moderate (the hot of the day is less hot and the cools are less cool). Overall this is a good thing but it can have impact on the solar cells charging of the batteries. Today's main goal is to get the high gain antenna deployed. We have a minor problem with occultation with the pancam mast. When the earth is at 30 degrees, the position we want to be in for the high gain antenna to transmit, the pancam mast is in eh way so we've been working overnight to flip the high gain so we don't have to worry about the pancam mast blocking it. ACS is good but we have to work around that.
Assessment of mechanical systems: We saw that they actually look very good. We didn't see any current readings that would indicate pulling in any rocks. in one case something that looked like a rock last night might be an airbag.
Imaging: downlinked 60 of 64 images. Imaging system is functioning nominally. Prior to uhf pass we collected one image and after that the vehicle did some more pancam imaging and those missed last night's pass and are in this morning's MGS data but not yet processed.
Power: last night someone asked about the solar array current being less than predicted. That seems to be the case and that's where this tau was more than predicted so we are getting a little bit less current from solar arrays. We'll have a better estimate of just how much less at 2:42 when the batteries reach a set level and the rover wakes up.
Communications: 6 megabits from MGS pass (this morning?)
Egress assessment: We believe that we're facing south, 9 degrees off of south pointing slightly east. We'll tell the spacecraft those numbers to help it with its sunfind later today. We looked at the airbags and we believe that both the airbags are above the egress aid and what we thought is probably not a rock. These are poor resolution images, though, 2 bits per pixel 256x256 images. We'll take some full frame 8 bits per pixel images today to determine if that's a rock or a darkened patch of airbag. The front deck height is 37 centimeters. We've never had an opportunity to egress off such a low height. The egress path is the straight off egress. In a basedown landing case we don't want to be that high so we don't retract the base petal airbag as much. We'll leave that, retract the side petal airbags, hopefully without moving the petals.

Matt Wallace:
Engineering activities: We've been making efforts to establish our heading to be able to accurately point the antenna. We are able to sense the rotation of the planet and since we know what latitude we're at, we can come up with a heading. We've been doing analysis of shadows and that's helped too. Steve will talk about exactly where we are in that ellipse. We can also use features on the horizon to help us better understand our heading. Because we landed facing south, the imaging mast is in the way of the high gain antenna beam. We're testing the sequence of commands to flip the antenna around to avoid that interruption. We hope to be able to uplink that command today. We're doing more imaging to better understand the position of the airbags. The rover continues to be healthy. We're trying to prepare some of our mechanisms for follow on activities tomorrow on sol 3 when we'll start unfurling the rover in prep for standup and egress.

Steve Squyres:
Science activities: Just as i think any explorer would do, the science team has been focused on where we are and where we're gonna go. We have a number of ways we can tell where we are. The science team has been focused on looking at images from DIMES (Descent Image
Motion Estimation Subsystem). it worked perfectly to figure out if wind was moving us and when it determined that was the case, signaled to fires the mini retro rockets that straightened us up for landing. It also provided pictures on the ground and we almost immediately spotted some features on the ground that we recognized from THEMIS and MOC images. We have Three dimes images. The last of the three has (1200 meters altitude estimated) shows a heavily cratered surface. This image was taken seconds before touchdown. Exactly where we are in the image you can't tell by looking at the image because we bounced, but we know we're in this image. The team is looking at hills to match them up against landmarks. (Here he compared the DIMES image with a THEMIS image). "We hit the sweet spot." Mother nature has cleared off the rocks for us. See the dust devil tracks. We've landed right in a place with dust devil tracks. We know with great certainty that we're absolutely in the place where we want to be in Gusev. "We're in a marvelous place".
What are we gonna do when we drive off the lander. It's going to take 8 or 9 sols to get this vehicle safely off. The science team is thinking about what will come next. We're anxious to get the arm out. The first thing we plan to do in the first few sols (cautiously) is to put the arm out and look at whatever's in front of us after the egress drive. The polar panorama view shows some of the rocks in front of us. If we drive off in the forward direction, terrain in front of us is littered with ricks. We'll probably drive forward about 3 meters. We may have both soil and rocks within reach of the arm we'll get measures on soil and rock without moving the rover after the egress park. We probably won't use the RAT but we could use the , mossbauer spectrometer, the microscopic imager, APX imager. I don't know where we're going to drive yet. The egress drive will be based solely on safety. Once we've done that we're gonna get the arm out and look immediately in front of us. Then look to more distant travels. Once we've got our exact location there might be some wonderful feature that we find out is within range that will tempt us. If that happens then that may be the direction we'll go. The other possibility are these very strange looking depressions. The lip of nearest depression exposes some rocks in a very interesting way. We've got pictures 14 times sharper coming soon (pancam better than navcam). That depression may be a tantalizing place to go. We don't know what the texture of that stuff. I don't know for sure that it's not a rover trap. (don't want to sink into it) we're gonna tread carefully. Science activities on the current sol is health checks, mossbauer, apxs, microscopic imager, mini-TES plus we want to get the "postcard" image taken, sent, and processed. It will be a truly spectacular image. It'll be taken this afternoon and will come down on one of the subsequent UHF passes. One last thing. I got a congratulatory call from Beagle 2 Colin Pillinger. They're still holding out hope of contacting Beagle 2. I haven't given up on Beagle 2. I told him that "a whole bunch of people on this side of the Atlantic are rooting for you."

Brian Tortock:
DIMES and EDL reconstruction people have given us an estimate. We are less than 10 km from the center of the ellipse. In the days ahead we'll be using Spirit data (some direct and some via Odyssey) to get the lander location.

Q. Jennifer, beyond today what will rover do before egress?

Jennifer: Today we'll focus on the high gain antenna. Tomorrow start the standup. Wheels are folded in so first thing we do as part of standup (tomorrow or delayed a day based on airbags) is to lift up the rover from its belly using a lead screw and deploy the wheels and get the rover standing stable. Standup takes two days then we release wheels. Then we'll release the IDD and move it from the travel position into stowed position. Then final releases and cable cutter. Then egress "bump" (short drive). Then egress drive on sol 9 or sol 10.

Q. 2:42 this afternoon the sun should charge enough to wake up rover. What's the plus or minus minutes based on the new tau estimates.

Jennifer: Assuming a tao of .9 then we should wake up at 2:42. We could wake up 40 minutes sooner.

Q. Who took that picture.

Steve: THEMIS.

Q. The ridges off to the lower right, can you correlate those?

Steve: Those are certainly among the landmarks that people will be looking at to pinpoint our position. Guys on my team are arguing vigorously. They'll have it settled very soon.

Q. The "press science team" (smiles) has begun their "analysis" They're convinced that they can see a huge amount of 3-D details.

Steve: Just wait! We've got stereo pancam, stereo navcam images coming. There is structure, there's plenty of it. It will be revealed in all its glory in the next several days.

Q. Jennifer, can you explain tau. Steve, how far away is that depression.

Jennifer. Tau is related to dust in the atmosphere from dust storms. If it impacts the mission, then it gives us a little less energy margin. We've planned our activities with enough margin that this amount of change won't affect the egress. Once we're into science, then clearly if we're getting less energy then there will be a little bit less for the science. We can do trades, for example, do one less comm pass and a little more driving.
Steve: We don't know the exact distance of the depression. I was just talking with the team and it's still rumor and hearsay but the number I heard was 30 meters but don't take that to the bank. A couple tens of meters or something like that. We'll have a good number soon.

Q. Gross comparison between this site and pathfinder Viking?

Steve: Easier to drive on. Too early to talk about the composition, we don't have color images yet. It's too early to talk about the texture, we don't have the high resolution images yet. So we're talking about population now. We're seeing a surface that is remarkably devoid of big boulders and that's glorious news because big boulders are hard to drive over. If you look at the Pathfinder site, you'd have a hard time driving around parts of that. I'd say we nailed it (finding a good sight to drive on).

Q. Is that (pointing out a feature on the image) a playa?

Steve: It's playa-looking but it's not a playa. I'll be willing to bet that it's something that's been filled in very recently with fine grained dust. Fine stuff has been swept away exactly consistent with the THEMIS images showing all the dust devil tracks. We're left with lag deposit of courser grained materials. These hollows or depressions look to contain significant amounts of dust but we don't have the big "dunes" that would make driving difficult. This is a "great place to drive"

Q. Is this dust devil season? Concerned?

Steve. Martian wind is not something to be concerned about. It's less than 1% the pressure on earth. This is a big rover. The chances of a dust devil coming around and flipping over our rover: "ain't gonna happen." Guys on my team are talking about making a dust devil movie. Dust devil time of day early afternoon hours, noon, one, two o'clock. It's not really a season but a time of day. They've done us a favor cleaning off rocks and I'd like to catch one in the act.

Q. How to determine if you can safely enter one of those depressions.

Steve: We're dealing with low res now but we're gonna have better images and the morphology when shown to an experienced geologist should tell us more. Another technique is that we may be able to use mini-TES which can measure temperature. You can learn about density by measuring temperature at different times of day. You know when you're at the beach and it's mid-day and the sand is hot, you can jump to rocks and they're cool. In the evening, the opposite, the sand is cool and the rocks are warm. Also, "you can drive up and dip your toe in and see what happens".

Q. Wakeup calls.

Jennifer: The flight director will (as per the tradition) play the song selected for the day then do the wakeup call.
Steve: "Don't worry be happy" played last night during the landing sequence.

Q. What time will we get the "postcard". Is that notch in the horizon a mosaic artifact?

Steve: pancam postcard 11:30 tonight at the earliest. Mars odyssey afternoon flyover (late tonight) is the first shot. 3 UHF passses have performed well but we don't know. Yes, it's artifacts of big blow-up of a low res image.

Q. Everything looks good on the lander? Have you done tests of things? Can you elaborate on the condition of the lander and the rover. (The Reuters guy seems a bit lame)

Brian: We do regular detailed assessments. We have models to validate all of the numbers. We have teams of experts. Each time we do a comm pass we look at each of the subsystems, power, thermal, software, etc. This is an extremely healthy rover system.

Could the AP get it more wrong with their headline "Stream of photos from Mars rover shows rock-filled landscape"? Anyone that's been following the Spirit landing, even just watching the two press conferences would know that they've actually hit a very smooth area with few rocks and that that's a good thing™.

update high-res image up at nasa

Tune in to NASA TV and the press conference to see more of the images. Since I didn't go to sleep, I figured I'd continue to share with anyone that's reading my enjoyment of the NASA/JPL press conference. I tried to get a slightly more accurate transcript but it's not quite up to "quotable outside this blog" levels :-) so don't go quoting these fine folks based on my record. It is pretty close though.

Ed Weiler:
"I will stop calling Mars the 'death planet'...For the first time in history we have an interplanetary communications network."

Steve Squyres:
"These people are the future of NASA. These people got us onto Mars. An amazing team and I'm proud of you guys...Not only have we landed in Gusev crater...but we have hit the 'science sweet spot' in Gusev crater...Team has already been able to match impact craters up with images taken from MGS and we landed in the sweet spot...We see enough rocks that we can do great science but they're not going to get in our way...This area looks like it has been swept free of dust. We see a lot of exposed rock surfaces...There are some 'pits' and I don't want to call them craters but we see what look like topographic depressions. They could be impact craters or deflation hollows. They are filled in with very fine grained materials and we're certainly going to want to take a look at these but except for these, the area has been swept clean which is ideal for our equipment, our cameras, and our wheels...It's a beautiful day."

Jennifer Trospar:
"Not one of our tests was as good as today...We've spent the last three and a half years together in an incredibly challenging and stressful situation...let these people know how important their contribution is" (applause).
"The state of the vehicle: clearly it's in good shape. We were base petal down...The solar array current is as expected and the batteries are fully charged. The telecom subsystem has performed. We projected 16 Megabits of data in this pass and we got 24 Megabits...We have the capability to send commands from Earth to the rover as well as to send commands to Odyssey and then to the rover...No faults, we're all green...There probably won't be much more pancam data until tomorrow...We have a lot of [egress] options...The big things that will happen tomorrow morning is 7 hours from now MGS data pass then four hours after that we'll have another Odyssey pass and then around 5PM tomorrow we will have direct low-gain contact...Later tomorrow we'll have high-gain contact."

Richard Cook(?):
"Relay equipment from MGS and Odyssey worked like a champ...We got a really amazing machine on the surface of Mars. We got a long surface mission ahead of us which is good because we're going to be driving a long ways..."

Q1. Can somebody say when we can expect a color picture. Also, chatter about 83% efficiency off the solar panels. We wanted to know what that was.

Jennifer: "If we get the high-gain set we'll get color late afternoon and evening tomorrow...Solar was working. I'm not familiar with any comments about that."

Q2. Dr. Squires, anything about the hills?

Steve: "We could have bounced and rolled a kilometer. I'm sure that right now my guys up in the science area are trying to do some triangulations. Between the descent images and the hills on the horizon which can be used as landmarks for triangulation...is going to give us a position really fast."

Q3. What's good about a dry lake bed?

Steve: "Sedimentary rock is what we are seeking here in Gusev. They can give us a great deal of information about what it was like here long ago."

Q4. Did you get back all of the descent images and why so soon.

Steve: "Sorry." (laughter).
Jennifer: "Things went very well."
Steve: "We got more than we expected because the geometry was such that we had a longer pass than we expected."
O'Keefe: "They all wish they had bought lottery tickets today. We have been so lucky. Sorry that we've kept you up so late" (laughter).

Q5. Did you expect this site to be rockier and have bigger rocks.

Steve: "It's definitely good. This rock population is as close to ideal as I could have possibly have dreamed...This is taylor made for driving on. The rocks really look swept clean and is a much cleaner surface than we had any right to hope for....The dust devils and wind have swept things clean. A lot of exposed rocks and a good surface for driving. It's quite possible that these rocks are so clean that we might not have to use the RAT much."

Q6. Next few days, how will it work.

Steve: "We're in the portion that is totally scripted and we'll be in this for the next few weeks...First the health checks...Second we're going to start acquiring some big panoramas. We will also get infrared panoramas. We've divided these panoramas into octants to do them piece at a time over a number of sols...We've wedged these data acquisitions in between the activities of getting the rover up and active...Everything's planned for the next 9 sols and we don't start reacting and planning until we have wheels in the dirt..."

Q7. Can you say anything more about that one big rock you're right up against. Could the lander have rolled to a stop against that rock.

Jennifer: "We don't actually have the size of the rock yet but we'll be working on that tonight and tomorrow...It is possible that we kinda butted up against it...Actually we have an estimate, 75-80 centimeters.
Steve: "These are not our best images...Give us a little time and we'll tell you about that rock."

Q8. Can you tell us about the mini-TES and what you expect to see.

Steve: "Fist mini-TES data around sol 4...Before that a health check. Starting around sol 4 we will get a full 360 degree panorama...This is a really good scene for mini-TES."

Q9. We've seen the two panoramas. Is that the same image data?

Steve: "Yes. They are exactly the same data projected in different ways. The thing I like about the polar panorama is that you can see the craft."

Q10. The one descent image looked oblique.

Steve: "It's actually not. The reason it looked oblique is that we do some on board summing and the way these cameras work is that we can sum it in one dimension in hardware...factor of 4 distortion...in fact that is just an artifact of how the image was handled in hardware."

Q11. Could you confirm that your re-turning job has restored the mosbauer spectrometer.

Steve "We won't know that until we've completed the tests....We've managed to get some nice data out of it during cruise. All of the instruments have just been through a lot. We'll be doing health checks over the next couple of sols. If it's doing as well now as it was during cruise we'll get great data out of it.

Q12. Can you get to that big rock with IDD without moving off the lander and have you seen the Gs that you took on landing.

Steve: "No. We're going to drive a nice safe distance."

Richard: "Right now it's too early to have gotten that data... In the next couple of days we'll be able to get that."

Q13. total number of images? Is that sunset?

Richard/Jennifer: "70ish. No, it wouldn't be sunset yet. You can actually see the shadow on the sundial and the sun's pretty high up. Taken about 2 or 3:30."

Q14. When will yo know how far away those ridges are.

Steve: "We've got a pretty good idea where we are from descent images. That gives us a starting point. I wouldn't be surprised if my team's up there and they already got it figured out. It could be really soon."

Q15. If this stuff is pretty windblown already and you don't have to use the RAT, how much extra time/science can you get.

Steve: "I don't thin of it in terms of extra science. I think of it in terms of now that we see what we got, what's the best science we can get out of it...If these are sedimentary rocks the 'bingo' we've got what we want. The other possibility is that we have to find a crater and count on mother nature to have dug a hole for us...It's too early to say. This is going to be a month's long voyage of exploration."

Q16. Restate what's with rolling off.

Jennifer: "We don't' have the petal height but we're guessing 45 cm which would be fine for the egress. In the forward egress path there's a fairly large rock we'd want to avoid. On the left side the airbags appear not to be fully retracted. We could do more retraction and drive down there. It's not clear if we'd need to do a bit of a petal lift to retract the airbag. Another option would be to turn in place a bit backwards...do a 120 degree turn and drive off that way. You can't always tell from the images. We'll be doing the assessment tonight and tomorrow. This is great. We have lots of places we can drive off here. It'll be a lot easier than many of our tests."

First press briefing will be at 9am in the morning. They'll discuss the MGS fly over and more.

Spirit's first "day" on Mars has gone better than anyone could have imagined. The entry, descent, and landing went so well that we were able to get a first big data dump from Spirit, via the Odyssey orbiter, giving us engineering data which confirms the health of the craft, its ability to communicate with the orbiters, and we were able to also get some amazing photographs.
The JPL teams are settling down from all the applause and gawking at pictures and getting back to work analyzing all of the data and I'm calling it a night for blog updates. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Good night and check back over the coming days for updates and links.

update: Kipp Howard, in the commets, points us to some stills from the JPL mission control room that show some of the first images Spirit sent back in it's first big data batch, including that "polar panorama" I mentioned earlier. Thanks Kipp, and thanks to Spaceflight Now for getting these pictures of pictures up so quickly. image 3, image 2, and image 1. Now let's hope that JPL/NASA can get the originals (something closer to the originals) posted quickly.

Additional "pictures of the pictures" can be found at Space.com, MarsToday.com, BBC Science/Nature, and cnn.com

The first data batch has just arrived.

Engineering data: "green. no new faults" (applause)
Thumbnails: (applause). First is the camera calibration target.
Further subsystem data: no new faults.
Full-frame images are coming in! (more applause).
First images of Gusev crater on the surface of Mars.

The parascope is up so we're likely to get panoramic images.

WOW! Big beautiful clear images.

Descent images!

Things just could not have gone better today. Wow!

Awesome panaramas. There's a bug huge rock right near the rover! Sweet!

They're starting to assemble mosaics already. These guys rock!

A nine-frame mosaic has already been assembled. and it's awesome!

A number of smalish rocks in the area, one larger rock near the rear of the lander. The rover is facing 10 degrees off of south. The landscape looks much more smooth than where Pathfinder landed.

Polar panarama (appears to be looking directly down on the craft and surrounding land). They're nearly perfectly level. So much is just working out perfectly.

More replaying of the really nice animations of the MER entry, descent and landing.

Recap on the good fortune of base petal down landing and functioning UHF system.

It's 7PM on Mars so the rover should be asleep.

Applause as information comes in! If we got any data at all from Odyssey then everything on the surface is perfect, the rover is safe and healthy. Data upcoming.

Fist pictures would be from the hazard avoidance cameras. As the mast is deployed we may get panoramas.

More applause and I'm excited. Sounds like the first data in is engineering data with health of the rover information and images are upcoming.

There are two possible paths that we could be on for this pass. The conservative path is mostly engineering and systems data for EDL reconstruction rather than a lot of images.

We can expect first engineering data, then thumbnails, then full-frame images.

24 Megabits of data! A lot of smiling faces.

It sounds like it'll take about 12 minutes to get that data downloaded.

Link had to be re-established, the prioritization of sending at Odyssey had to be adjusted, so the wait will be another five minutes. The team is "more than happy to wait another five minutes" and pretty much everyone at mission control seems to be wearing a smile.

Image processing at JPL only takes about a minute. The front and rear hascams (down low) are the first images, then the navigation cam before the mast was deployed and then images after the mast was deployed.

The most exciting piece of news I took out of the press conference is that we might get pictures tonight. Fortune smiled and the craft landed with it's base plate down so it doesn't have to right itself, and we know that UHF communications is functional, so that means that if the airbag retraction goes as expected (doesn't get caught on rocks, etc.) and the petals can all open normally, that Spirit may be able to get some photos of its surroundings, radio that data to Odyssey, and we could get the data as soon as 11:15 tonight. Woo-Hoo again!

The post-landing press conference is happening now.

Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, pours some champagne for the rest of the panel and proposes a toast that I couldn't quite hear. He mentioned yesterday's Stardust sample collection and today's "extraordinary achievement" by a "remarkable team" followed by general praise for the NASA organization and a the project leadership.

Ed Weiler, Associate Administrator for Space Science, NASA Headquarters: "I'm not usually speechless but I feel speechless tonight." Praise for the team, their devotion to the goal, their teamwork and communications. "It was 'six minutes from hell'".

Charles Elachi, director of the JPL: "The finest and the best team of young women and men that this country could put together."

Pete Theisinger: "We got a good system and we're alive on the surface." Praise for the team. Praise for the Deep Space Network people, especially Mars Global Surveyor for getting data back to us so quickly. Thanks to the families of everyone involved for their support. Thanks for support from above. "We got everything we asked for. We got

Richard Cook: "I really, really like doing it when it works like this". Discussed 7 years ago in the "highs" when they pulled off Pathfinder and 4 years ago at the "lows". Thanks for some of the leaders that aren't on the stage.

Rob Manning: Praise for all of the "very cool people" he gets to work with. "It's such a pleasure working with such awesome people. It's so awesome to be a part of that crowd." EDL team still in the war room looking at the data. Quick overview of the "very, very normal" EDL. "Everything worked perfectly". The cool new backshell rockets were actually used to correct the descent, "those little rockets did their job". He described the amazing number of components that all worked perfectly to bring Spirit safely to the surface. We actually got 7 minutes of UHF data from MER to MGS during the bouncing. The DSN almost immediately locked onto the signal on the Martian surface which was surprising. "Maybe we'll here something more tonight so stay tuned. Thank you."

O'Keefe: "This is a big night." He goes on to praise a lot of the deputies and others "you don't hear much about."

Odyssey flyby in 30 minutes.

(below are all paraphrases, I don't type fast enough to actually put together a full transcript, sorry)

Questions 1. What are the chances that Odyssey might have some pictures from us tonight.

Pete: We know that the UHF works and we are base petal down but the chances are pretty good that we'll get pictures tonight. 11:15-11:30 if there's anything there.

Question 2. Walk us through tomorrow.

Pete: UHF from Odyssey tonight. 8am engineering data from MGS. Team will do assessment of engineering system and picture examination (rover and surroundings for damage) and then a high-gain antenna deploy in the afternoon with maybe more pictures tomorrow night.

Question 3. Would you have been near danger without the lateral correction from the backshell rocket system.

Pete: These were late additions. We added them after studies and modeling suggested wind and self-induced gusts could cause problems. They were done early enough that we got compete testing and development.

Rob: I don't think I can say that we were really, really close to the edge but it was "up there". The winds as we expected at Gusev, exist. Probably not close to disaster but it was on the edge.

Q4. what does a bounce look like in the data. can you tell how high it bounced.

Rob. Yes. We have the data. We may have bounced for quite a while. We'll be able to come up with a pretty rough motion of how it moved and maybe even animate it in the next day or week give you a movie. Can't promise. Have to look at data first.

Q5. Might you stand up earlier than 9 days planned and walk around.

Pete:There's a lot of different challenges still and I would not expect to get off the lander early.

Q6. Could I have some personal thoughts comparing this to last time man was on the moon and any scientific or commercial value.

crosstalk. Who is old enough to answer. Ed Weiler "Apollo had to be like this. It doesn't get better than this. "I started believing when that parachute went out."
Elachi: With Apollo, you could look up there at the Moon and say 'we landed there'. When you walk outside today you can see Mars and you know we landed there.

Q7. 10 minutes of silence gave you pause. tell us about your feelings.

Rob: "Near tension for the last 3 and a half years. We practiced so many times that the brain can't help but think that you're in a practice. When the signal faded I started to realize "'uh oh, this isn't a practice'". Talked about the tension in the room and how surprised he was that he was so calm.
Cook: "Did we really see something there" and the agony built rapidly. Then "surreal when Rob said we saw the second signal".

Q8. any information about where you are in the ellipse. Also, you mentioned you might be able to learn something from the bouncing data. Would that tell you about the land you bounced over?

Rob: I don't know. Excited about images taken from descent camera. We don't know where in the ellipse where we landed. Pool has already begun :-) Lots of ways to figure out where we landed. People will race each other to figure it out. We're in that ellipse and very likely we're near the middle, an area where there aren't a lot of craters with one big one to the south and bumpy cliff-like mesas to the south. Not clear we'll see them from the landing site but they're not that far away"

Q9. Did you learn anything in this EDL that you might change for Opportunity.

Pete: We've got a team for doing EDL reconstruction and they'll be pouring over the data. "The one thing we know is that the design was solid... a risk reducer and a confidence builder."

Q10. Are there any slight differences between the rovers.

Pete: They are as identical as we could make them except for the radio frequencies. they were built at the same time. One fuse difference between the vehicles.

Q11. Parachute deployment timing change, was it important.

Rob: I don't think it made a critical difference. We won't know until we do the data processing. This is among the key questions that this reconstruction team will be asking. We can reduce overall risk to Opportunity here.

Q12. What does it mean for us to have another craft on Mars.

Pete: a 4th place we've visited on Mars. imagine you came to earth and you had only visited 3 places and now you get a fourth. This is a great site.

Richard: hopefully we've inspired people as well.

Rob: Mars is not that far away and though we don't visit very often and it's not cheap, it is achievable and as a people if we choose to dare to go visit our neighbor we can and it's achievable. It's our neighbor and it's right next door.

Ed Weiler: in terms of science we're in a place water existed for a long time and we're there with the instruments to investigate this.

Q13. some question about the technique and system for landing. will you continue doing this?

Rob: we are still in the infancy of how to do this. this is not the best way to do it. our inexperience means there's a lot of uncertainty. we have to keep practicing.

Mission team members returning to operations area.
(I'll spell check this and make further updates)

The base petal airbag retraction is finished or nearly finished and the sidepetal retractions are underway and should be finished in under 10 minutes.
When the airbags have been fully retracted, the petals of the lander will open and the Spirit rover will get its first look at the Martian landscape.

We have a solid signal from Spirit. "This is beautiful". Things look good. Base panel is down so the craft won't have to flip itself to open. Airbag retraction should be underway. News briefing in 30 minutes.

I'll keep an eye on things and post more as it comes in but that's the end of my dedicated full-time reporting ;-) on the MER EDL. Hope you enjoyed it :D

It's alive!!!

Wooooo-Hooooo!!!

Some indication of receipt of enough data at Mars Global Surveyor from MER to suggest that MGS got data after Spirit touchdown. We'll receive the actual data from MGS in about 4 minutes.

Update: MGS was receiving data from MER during the descent. Initial indications are that MGS has enough data (greater than 250 KB) which might be indicative of reception of data after landing.

Vehicle could bounce and roll for another 7 minutes. Still no signal.

Any signal from here out indicates that the craft is on the ground alive.

ALIVE!!!!

"We are bouncing on the surface of Mars. This is a very good sign!"

No signal now :|

Bouncing and rolling could continue for 10 minutes.

Atmospheric entry has begun. 73 miles altitude 12,192 mph.

Atmospheric deceleration has begun (nav team reporting).
1 minute after entry vehicle is at 46 miles altitude. 12,175 mph.
Peak Heating upwards of 1600 degrees Celsius.
Tones coming in. Decelerating at 5.9 Gs.
2:21 seconds after entry. 16 miles altitude. 4,000 mph.
Deceleration at 2.4 Gs. Parachute deployment in 60 seconds.
Wobbling increasing. 3:35 after atmospheric entry. 45,000 feet altitude. 1.1 Gs deceleration.
Parachute deployment should have jut occurred at 25,000 feet.
Parachute detected. Craft is subsonic.
Heat shield jettisoned. (applause).
Retrorockets firing.
Craft should be on the ground.

All substation reports are reporting ready for EDL. Everything's "green". We are 3.5 minutes away from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere. We are 11 minutes and change from landing.

Once Spirit has entered the atmosphere, the craft won't be transmitting its detailed telemetry but will broadcast a series of semaphores/tones which indicate the success of the various stages of descent.

As expected, Spirit jettisoned the cruise stage, and along with it the communication link that we've had with the craft for its journey thus far. Communication with the lander has been re-established. Lander 12 minutes from entry.

The Cruise stage has likely burned up. Applause and thanks to the cruise stage and the cruise stage team.

Spacecraft has not yet begun to decelerate.

Sub-station polling in progress.

Cruise stage separation at 8:13 - (confirmed).

Vehicle pointed 1.2 degrees from desired attitude (could be off by 10 degrees and be OK so this is good).

Venting of coolant has occurred confirmed by pressure telemetry.

Airbag engineers reported that the temp situation isn't going to be an issue :D

Another sub-station report in progress.

Each of the EDL substations (hull protection, flight software, power, flight ACE, telecom, comm, MGS, MGS MOC, Odyssey, nav, mdot, and a couple others that I missed) have reported in and everything sounds good except for a minor incident with the Gas Generator heaters. The heaters are rising in temp slightly faster than expected and will be at 5 degrees Celsius rather than the desired ?

Global Surveyor, including the MOC, as well as the Odyssey satellite are online and in position to track Spirit EDL.

Telemetry indicates that the coolant has been vented into space. During this venting the craft wobbles slightly. Tiny rockets fire to do a "clean-up" which should be complete in about 20 minutes.

More info from Pete Theisinger: 40% chance of hearing the landing tones tonight. Depending on how easily the airbags get pulled in and the petals open, it will talk to Odyssey tonight about 10:30. Then tomorrow at 8am with MGS, then noon at Odyssey then afternoon with sunrise (and earthrise) it can try to talk directly to us again.

Next major event is separation of the cruise stage flight package.

54 minutes to atmospheric entry.

Wayne Lee says that at 7:47 polling of subsystems will happen to confirm that turn to entry has completed.

Additional info from Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' science packages: It will probably be about a week and a half before the rover rolls into action. Between landing and then, we'll be "taking a look around" with the rover cameras and picking target rocks. The cameras on this vehicle are 3.5 times the resolution of previous surface pictures, giving the rover much better "eyesight" to pick our targets and drive directions.

Next major event in roughly half an hour is the venting of coolant which isn't needed for the surface mission.

Additional commentary from Rob Manning, EDL lead:
Minor adjustments have been made in the last couple of days to account for atmospheric temperature changes from duststorms. Enabled pyro switches a bit earlier than planned. Several improvements have been made since Pathfinder. We have a descent camera and small rockets in the backshell to help stabilize the descent if necessary. This descent is all automatic. No intervention from Earth.

The maneuver should be complete. 1 hour 6 minutes from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere.

The heaters that will bring up to temperature the propellant for the rocket boosters which inflate the airbags have activated. Canberra tracking stations are locked in at 10 bits/sec.

Correction from previous post: Turn to entry won't be finished until 7:27.

When turn to entry completes, we will be about one hour from contact with the Mars atmosphere.

The turn to entry, a maneuver to orient the craft with heat shields facing forward, has begun. The antenna is pointed toward the Earth during the trip to Mars but when the turn to entry phase begins, the antenna start to point away from us so the signal strength decreases. The project team has measured the beginning of this signal weakening indicating that the maneuver has begun. It should complete in about 10 minutes (7:21).

From the broadcast:

Wayne Lee, a mission planner for Pathfinder, MGS and MER interviewed.

None of the possible 3 trajectory corrective maneuvers that could have been made in the last couple of days were necessary. The craft is "perfectly on target".

The project team will be listening for transmissions directly from Spirit and from MGS. Spirit will be broadcasting signals (tones) directly back to Earth as well as to the Mars Global Surveyor which can forward that on to us.

Standing by.

MER broadcast has begun.

There are a few different RealMedia feeds available. I'm getting the best bandwidth from the Kennedy Space Center feed. The main NASA feed is doing OK as well. You can find additional KSC feeds here, including closed captioned. MER programming is about to begin.

Some timeline info that I think I've got right (please let me know in the comments if you've got better info). Times are PST:

6:45 - NASA TV begins Mars Exploration Rover coverage.
8:29 - Spirit enters martian atmosphere at about 12,000 mph.
8:33 - Spirit has slowed to about 1,000 mph.
8:34:40 - Parachute opens at an altitude of about 30,000 feet, and Spirit slows to about 200 mph.
8:34:54 - Airbags inflate, retro rockets fire, the spacecraft slows to a hover at about 60 feet from the surface, and spirtdrops to surface.
8:35 - Spirit Touchdown.
(about) 8:45 - Radio signals from Spirit begin to arrive at Earth and we start to get the reports that Spirit will have broadcast about every 10 seconds of the descent.

I hope to be able to provide some updates this evening as the Spirit MER makes it's descent and landing (and hopefully phones home). If you're interested, do check back here periodically throughout the night, starting at about 8PM PST.

If you want to keep an eye on the sites I'm watching for updates, NASA TV, marsnews.com's Mars NewsWire, spaceref.com's Mars Today, and the JPL MER website are all good sites to bookmark. Other good resources are Space.com's Mars Rover Report, NASA's MER resources, the Houston Chronicle's Going to Mars special report, BBC NEWS' Sceince/Nature section, and Google's Mars Directory.

We're 5 hours away. Stay tuned.

"Life is good!" says Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at JPL, "Things couldn't have worked better in a fairy tale."

Not only does it sound like Stardust was able to gather it's comet dust and gas sample, but it also took some very close-up photographs when it was just about 300 miles from the Wild 2. Good show!

You can find more of the good news at the Stardust press release. Don't forget that tomorrow night is the scheduled landing for Spirit, the first of the two MER missions that will tackle the Martian surface this month.

After last week's disappointing Beagle 2 news we've got two exciting events this Friday and Saturday. Tomorrow at mid-day the spacecraft Stardust will pass through comet Wild 2, collect some dust and gas with its aerogel grid, and begin its two year jorney back to Earth. Saturday night, the first of two Mars Explorer Rovers, Spirit, will touch down on the red planet and we should hear something from the rover within 24 hours of that landing. It's gonna be an exciting weekend in space news and I'll try to post some updates here as information becomes available.

There certainly aren't many of us. According to Name Statistics, 0.004% of men in the US (about 4900) are named Asa. It's so uncommon that there are more women named "Richard" than there are men named Asa.