As raw as they get. Expect typos and missing chunks of content. I think I got about 90% of what was said and haven't even re-read them to see if they make sense (no time this morning).
Steve Squyres: Good morning. Opportunity has now sent us the most striking photographs yet sent us by the MER mission. Wonderful finely layered rocks. Pancam panorama. Jim Bell still working on putting together color. We have all the color frames, just want to get it right. This is a 7x2 frame full resolution, still highly compressed Pancam mosaic. As you pan left to right it just gets better and better. Sense on the left of flat tabular rocks. As we get further to the right more layering. Upper part of outcrop eroded to create a more massive appearance where lower shows more layering. Overhangs higher up. Some things that hint at crossbedding. Some of the best layering exposed here. Appearance of layer cake structure. Some of the layers weather to different degrees. It's gonna be fascinating beyond words to get up close and personal with this thing. Next visual shows 3-D reprepresentation of this. Looks massive but it's actually tiny. Showed the rover on top of the rock outcropping demonstrating how small it is. Scale suggests it isn't lava flows. Units too small.
Andrew Knoll: (Harvard) Let me just take a moment to tell you why I'm excited. In my day job I study history of geology of Earth. Layered rocks help us develop a history. We have a "document" in front of us at Opportunity. At Meridiani Planum we have the opportunity to make measurements with the Microscopic Imager, from 1mm all the way up to orbital observations. At this site we're going to be able to link them all together from the microscopic to the outcrop to the spatial scales seen from the orbiters. Clearly you're seeing layered rocks. Many could say I have something like that in my back yard. Problem is that if you live in KY, you probably have a sedimentary layering but if you live in Hawaii, you could see a similar scene laid down by a volcano. It could be a fine scale volcanic layering, not lava flows, but maybe ash layers. Other option is that they're sediments transported by water or wind. These are I think not ice-born sediments. Those two hypothesis would lead to very different natures of this site. The good news is that we have the tools to evaluate the two hypothesis. They each have a set of predictions that we can measure, sizes, textures, cross-bedding (only thoughts, still difficult to resolve at this distance) Once we get better imaging in the next few sols we'll confirm that we see cross-beds or we'll see textures that convince us that these are volcanic rocks.
Jim Erickson: Status of Opportunity rover and what we're doing now. Wonderful science (gesture to Steve). Still working to get rover in the dirt. Last night we began lifting up the rover to get the wheels down. We've successfully deployed our high gain antenna and everything worked fine on our trail run. That datapath is now available. We verified operation of the lift mechanism. Tonight we'll begin that. We have fired one of our last remaining cable cutters, one to go. One new issue. We discovered a power loss going on in the vehicle. A set of thermostatic controlled heaters, one in the shoulder joint of the instrument arm. Heater in the arm. We don't normally always want it on when the arm isn't in use. Right now we're believing it's going to be continuously on when it's cold enough. Teams looking into what's wrong, possible workarounds. Tonight we're going to start jacking up the rover, front wheels will be turned out, verify all the components are secure, lock joint in wheel arms, verify all that's happened and I'm sure we'll have a little bit of science for you too.
Jennifer Trosper: high noon on sol 24 at Spirit. First comm window of the day is happening as we speak. Not a lot of new data yet. Subsystems all nominal. Batteries are in good shape. No degradation from discharge a couple nights ago. Thermal working. Today our intent was to try to get a trace of the task causing the problem. We don't have that data yet. Maybe at a later comm today. We've done some analysis of data we already had on ground plus some testing in testbed. One data is the position of the HGA based on potentiometers. Rover doesn't rely on that, just for measurements. HGA was active when we started to get problems. We got info that in the mooring of sol 18 our comm dropped out 10 minutes early. As a result we attempted to command a HGA session. We saw nothing. It had a calibration where we move to hardstop and then track earth. Position now indicates that it only moved through calibration half way. Important because activity that started the reset was not in the HGA because it moved fully to the correct position after the reset problem. That's good news. The other information we got was a result of running tests in our avionics test environment. Loading up a bunch of files. Couldn't reproduce it fully. Got some key aspects of the problem. Looking forward to getting more data down. Continuing to dump out the flash memory, get that data down. Yesterday only about 18.5 megabits. Expect to get 80 megabits today.
Q. Elaborate on power problem. (arm thermostat problem)
Jim: It's too early to think about worst case scenarios. Right now we're seeing about a 15 watt resistance being dissipated somewhere and have evidence that this is where it's happening.
Q. All things being good, sol 9,10,11 driveoff?
Jim: We're taking a lot of care to pay attention to Jennifer's findings. Being very careful. We'll get the rover off when the rover's ready to get off.
Q. When will we start seeing mini-TES.
Steve: expect to begin acquisition tomorrow. A sol or two before we get it down and calibrated. A little while before we begin releasing mini-TES results. More complicated to calibrate than a camera. Two big questions are where's the hematite and what's that outcrop made of. We'll see. Hematite itself may not be in view from here. Three materials, stuff down in the crater, the band of rock and the stuff out on the plains.
Q. Specifically what do you look for to distinguish volcanic, wind/water.
Andrew: Textural and chemical. Mini-TES to give us chemical. As parent rocks are stripped down and weathering and erosion alter chem of parent rocks. If we see mini-TES profile with mineralogical and chemical constituents that represent processing of volcanic rock then we have to have sedimentary component. It is possible that we could have a parent rock that was volcanic eroded physically without undergoing a great deal of chemical alteration like in the Earth arctic today. In a cold Mars, one could have transport without the chemical alteration. The textural issue is one that when we go and look first at the level of a couple feet across we should be able to see the finest layers situated relative to one another. If they're volcanic rocks that have fallen out of the sky or transported by gas driven fluid, fine layers. If they're sediments, they tend to erode into the layers below them a little. If they're sediments one layer might truncate the older one. Finally, at the microscopic imaging level, if these particles in this bed have been transported by sedimentary processes they will tend to be somewhat rounded, not true of volcanic. If they're sedimentary particles they have to be cemented in place and at the level of MI we should be able to see that.
Q. Sense of scale, how thick are the layers?
Steve: thinnest layers are a centimeter, something like that. The total height at highest point of outcrop is a foot and a half, maybe. That's good news. Less threatening to the rover because you can drive right up on to it.
Q. Deleting cruise files on Opportunity?
Jim: haven't started deleting cruise files yet because that's not normal so we're primarily deleting ones we've created recently.
Q. Heater issue a problem?
Jim: not on continuously, just when it's cold out. We're paranoid people :) so we've already asked people to look into whether it could be long term an issue. Always assume a problem until we prove otherwise :)
Q. When you get mini-TES images, will you be able to tell about mechanism that formed those layers. If water-born, where'd the water come from. Lake? Muddy bog? What?
Steve: The answer is we have high hopes that acquiring mini-TES data on outcrop will help us in revealing what the material is. Understanding minerology, if we see chemical alteration it would favor sedimentary process over a pure air fall. Don't know when we'll have mini-TES data that will reveal that. Pretty small rocks. Best in the middle of the day. Best data when we can drive up and get mini-TES right on it. When we get close, we're going to do a very good job of verifying.
Andrew: Thin white unit is very widespread. Covers thousands of miles of Meridiani Planum. We can ask does the topography suggest a deep basin? as near as we can tell, no. If you poured a lot of water in this area today it would simply run downhill and out of the Meridiani Planum. Doesn't preclude water from rapidly melting ice. The scale of the outcrop. We're used to think about sediments accumulating in long-lived basins. I think that's unlikely for the scene in this image. Timescale if it was sediments could be a single event, a Thursday ;-) or long timescale perhaps a thousand years. If this is a sediment, it doesn't indicate long-term standing water. If we see crossbedding that's even more evidence against longstanding water.
Steve: this bright rock unit extends over distances of hundreds of kilometers. Hematite extends too. Because this extends, we are able to learn something about widespread geology by understanding what's in front of us.
Q. missed.
Jim: eliminated that.
Jennifer: a victim and not the perp but we're not absolutely certain.
Q. Crater still 20 meters in size?
Steve: haven't scaled down the size of the crater. Outcrop is 6 to 8 meters away. Dimensions are as we had worked them out. More Pancam stereo will help better work that out. Tim Parker is still trying to make his mind up which of the two craters it is. Mike Malin's photo will tell us definitively. Only two prime candidates in the DIMES image that are 20 meters.
Q. Two distinct levels in outcropping, implications?
Andrew: upper layer appears more massive, may be courser materials. That would tell us only that there is heterogeneity. Doesn't help us differentiate between volcanic or sedimentary. You can see in Hawaii it done only by volcanos and in Appalachia only by sedimentation.
Q. What kind of environment based on those two scenarios.
Andrew: if it is volcanic then all bets are off for liquid water. Simply wouldn't need it. If it's sedimentary I think you need water, I doubt these are windblown. Doesn't tell you about the duration of the water though. There has to be a roll for liquid water in sculpting the surface of Mars. The question we're trying to answer is was it a short burst or persistent water. Both Gusev and Meridiani are interesting because they could be consistent with persistent water. What we see in front of us today makes no strong claims for longstanding persistence of water.
Steve: if we find out they're volcanic that would rule out liquid water as medium for depositing those rocks but would not rule out liquid water being active in this site.
Q. A week to a month at this outcrop still the plan?
Steve: we got a lot of places to go and things to do. My estimate of a month was that it was going to turn out to be a tasty target and that turned out to be a pretty tasty case. At Gusev we're almost a month. You don't want to make assumptions and find out later you were wrong. We don't want to run away from something interesting until we learn what we need to learn. We'll spend the time to do a good job on it.
Q. When did these rocks form.
Andrew: think they're very old based on distribution of large craters in the area. I think the features we're talking about you would describe in multiple billions of years in age, a remnant of a young Mars. There are large volcanos known at Mars. Mars is smaller with thinner atmosphere and it may be that the dynamics of ash expulsion are different than on Earth. I'm not bothered by the idea that there isn't a volcanic cone nearby. Anything that can happen did happen :-)
Q. Software for flash memory developed in house? Not developed with enough capacity?
Jennifer: it's actually the capacity is manageable and we have the volume we need. We're 2000 products away from capacity. The problem is more subtle than that. It's what it takes to manage that flash from the software in RAM. Not apparent in testing because we never operated for 8 months straight. Lots can happen in that 8 months that you can't simulate exactly. Natural for things like this to creep up. I don't know the details of that, the majority of our hardware developed in house and we do use commercial vendors for that (?)
Q. how do you explain billions of years at the surface like that.
Andrew: very little happened :) On earth, we're at a disadvantage because plate tectonics rework the planet. There may be more reworking at Mars then people thought 20 years ago but relative to Earth, Mars is a quiet planet. If you think about a rover being plunked down on Earth, you would probably see hundreds, maybe thousands of feet of sedimentary or volcanic rocks. We're looking at a finer scale of features on Mars.
Q. You're looking at a light layer, might be a water feature or air fall feature. Where's the hematite?
Steve: believe hematite is most likely to be present in finer grained soil. In floors of craters the soil is strikingly dark. Surrounding plains somewhat lighter (though still dark relative to rest of Mars) We think that soil has hematite. What we don't understand is the relationship between the soil and this rock layer. Not a surprise to find no hematite in this layered rock unit. We'll find out soon enough.
Andrew: Intriguing in the hematite and this rock layer, if you back up and look at the distribution they're co-existent. The light rock unit and the hematite are found together. While there's a range of processes going on, if we can understand this bed in front of us it will be helpful in understanding this co-existent pair.
Q. The weather differences between the two rovers?
Jennifer: only bearing it has is, a little warmer than predicted environments, we're updating all our models, we've been tracking with updated models closely, it impacts at night we have mini-TES instrument is waiving in the wind and gets pretty cold. We have survival heaters that would get turned on for that and the electronics even if they're not operating. We're not using those regularly because it's a bit warmer. We'll use them more later in the year when it gets colder. We have to heat the various tools that we're using at the moment. That's all standard operational process.
Jim: At our site, in our own little crater we get a little colder because of shadowing of crater walls in the morning and late evening.
(briefing note: back again tomorrow morning at 9am)
Q. There aren't many 4 billion year old rocks on Earth to study. Can you learn something about early Earth by studying these old rocks on Mars.
Andrew: short answer is no. Early Mars had somewhat different history than Earth. We do know something about Earth 4 billion years ago from chemistry of some crystals on oldest outcroppings. They tell us that Earth already had a level of chemical differentiation in lavas that never happened on Mars. We were making granites in some abundance then on Earth and that never happened on Mars. Happy to learn about old Mars but cautions about making assumptions of Earth based on that.
