The egress commentary / briefing on NASA TV is about to start (12:45 am PST).
It's 11:34 am in Gusev. About 30 minutes ago the team gave the rover the command to roll off. We'll get a comm. pass (Odyssey?) in the next hour.
Morning wake-up call was Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild".
Rob Manning, EDL mission chief, explains the origin of the wake-up call tradition. Picked up from the shuttle missions.
Rob: We have testbed rovers here on Earth and we used this test environment test the sequences. We had some concern about where the wheels are and a possibility of getting a wheel hung on a cantilevered piece of aluminum called the "diving board" - a track used in driving the rear wheels out. Detailed testing in the testbed gives them confidence that the wheels won't get hung on the diving board.
There's some discussion from one of the designers of the MER wheel. He explained the wheel cleat design from spring 2001 that looked really scary (long metal spikes) and the concerns about taking that across the "first 10 feet" where snags were possible. He then explained the spiral design in the wheel. (passing a couple of wheels around the room). They needed a large open volume and an energy-absorbing spring-like design. There were over 30 iterations. The spiral flexor was the best design for a "long path in a tight package". He then explained the strange "pocket" in the bottom of the wheel. The mass of the vehicle is concentrated in the middle with six satellite masses in the wheels. It all needed to be restrained. By holding onto the bottom of the wheel they avoided any large stick-up objects that could catch the rover in its egress. Explaining the "orange stuff", they came up with an opencell foam that fills the gaps, bonded into the pockets between the flexors of the spiral hub for the wheel. Why are they black? The outside of the wheel needed to be anodized. Created ceramic anodized later to prevent sticking or jagged edged carving that could happen to the wheel moving on the lander. Aluminum 7075T73 (?).
Rob explained that this is a traditional "lunch time lecture series". This discussion, lecture fills the rover "siesta" downtime (conserving power and keeping heat down).
Kevin Burk explains the video of the egress testbed maneuvers of turn in place 1-3 and the final wheel pointing. He continues showing the vehicle rolling down the egress aid and explains that the little bump was nothing to worry about. Lookin' forward to seeing that rear hazcam view of the lander.
Rob explain that this is all actually completed. The command went up an hour ago. The rover's on the ground and doing a navcam sunfind to re-point the HGA to Earth. We're waiting to hear back the results.
Steve Squyres at the podium mentioned something about putting 5 km on the rover (with a big smile, so I'm not sure what he was talking about). "We want the first-time activities to be as clean and free of risk as possible." We want to characterize the geologic diversity. We want to find the unusual stuff but first we have to find the typical stuff and get a really good characterization of that stuff. Steve mentioned the Mars Express flyover and the unique opportunity there. We're going to have a (sols 22, 23, 24) 3-day "stand down", a scripted set of events covering a few sols to ease the burden on the team during the first days of Opportunity on the surface. The first thing we're gonna do exercise the IDD and look with the APSX, Mossbauer, MI and that's gonna be really cool. We want to do rock first, followed by soil. Get the vehicle some place where at the end of sol 21 we have the IDD deployed and the Mossbauer on soil. Mossbauer is highly temperature dependent. Trying to count for as long as possible. Typical lasts for 6-8 hours and temperature changes significantly smearing out measurements. By parking for a multi-sol period we can measure in chunks when temperature is the same. We'd like to be on a fine-grained soil patch for the "stand down" few sol period. Rocks, sushi, sashimi, and pyramid (which needs a new name) and these are readily accessible. Bulk of science team wants to go to the pyramid shaped rock. Longer term plan and Chris Voorhees' 5 km theory - really trying to go after the stratigraphy. First get to this wonderful big crater. Then we head for the hills. Closer we get the higher resolution will be. Another is that there are a variety of materials that may have been shed from the hills. And the image all of us want is the view from up on those hills looking back down on the plane where we came from. The crater rim is 3,4,5 meters high, gently sloping. Distinguish between soil and wind-blown dust. Soil is ground up and mixed material from this location.
10 minutes from confirmation signal.
Rob explains that we'll get a carrier, we'll lock up on that and then the sub-carrier then it locks on the data and then information starts straming in.
We have carrier lock! (applause).
Engineering data streaming in.
End of drive, three meter traverse. Copy that. (applause).
