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.
