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.
