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.
