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.
