NASA TV will shortly be airing the 7 PM update from Pasadena. Hopefully there will be information (or eve better, good news) about getting the high-gain antenna up and functioning. It isn't likely to be a problem but they are having to perform a "flip" maneuver to get the antenna out from behind the pancam mast.
Mark Adler, the Spirit mission manager confirmed that we expect to be getting photographic confirmation via a low-gain session that the high-gain antenna opening sequence was successful.
Also to be confirmed is that the rover has used the pancam to find the Sun allowing it to pinpoint with great accuracy its attitude which will be necessary for aiming the HGA.
First pictures of "the cable cutter" are in and it sounds like they're uploading to Sprit a new plan for three direct to Earth contacts (via low gain antenna) and "cleaning up" some of the no longer necessary scheduled connections with Odyssey and MGS (I think.) It also sounds like turning off the rover's "look for home" failsafe. Additionally, Mark confirmed that right now we have 3 ways to get data in and four ways to get data out and that we can certainly talk to Spirit via low gain antenna.
Low gain data (40 bits per second, excrutiatingly slow) is incoming now.
While the UHF link (data via orbiting sattelites around Mars) is quite fast, our windows for relaying data are insufficient for science operations so we need the high gain antenna which has a roughly 20 minute turnaround (upload of command to Spirit and download of Spirit data each take about 10 minutes) at good speed.
Mark confirmed that the rover is taking about 30% less energy to keep warm at night which is excellent news because it means that the batteries don't need as much power when the rover goes to sleep at night leaving more juice for science operations during the day.
We're getting good signal strength from the low-gain antenna. Correction from above, it's engineering data (telemetry) coming in and not photos that will hopefully tell us about the HGA deployment and the sunfind.
Mark also confirmed that the craft has the capability of flipping the HGA and while they were hoping not to have to use it, just to keep things simple, he craft "knows how" and the commands we sent are enabling that logic.
Sounds like the second low gain pass is underway and it could possibly contain imaging data.
(Applause) The sunfind worked! This was based on a simple numeric success code (event record) received from the low gain pass. Now sunfind images coming in. We got the first 3 of 15 and it sounds like the rover found the sun on the third image correcting the estimates by 4 degrees.
We didn't get data on the high-gain deploy before the NASA TV commentary coverage ended :( I assume we'll get news at the 8PM news conference upcoming or the 9PM commentary.
