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
