The press briefing is about to start; notes when it's completed. (It's either starting late or my feed is broken.)
Press Briefing 9:05 am (These are really rough notes. Sorry. My connection was spotty and I haven't done any real editing to clean up the notes so what you're getting is direct reavideo to asa's brain to asa's fingers to the blog communication with no filters. Man, I wish I got NASA TV over cable so I could TiVo it.):
Albert Haldeman: We've landed safely and we're looking forward to a safe egress. To do that we have a concept called first time activities. One per sol. Incremental driving activities, the use of the IDD, doing science activities during the night time, use of the rock abrasion tool. We've practiced on earth but we want to understand the Martian environment. Crawl before we walk. Reaching our stride in maybe a month and a half. Asking science team to be patient with engineers and asking engineers to hurry up :)
Jim Bell: status on Pancam then show new postcard then talk about how we make these pictures. Pancam is very healthy and happily taking many pictures on Mars. Busiest day on Mars sol 5. We got 4 more octants. We've now acquired (on board) the full mission success panorama. The whole team is ecstatic. We've got 40% on ground and thumbnails for the rest so we know it's there. Over the next two or three days we'll trickle down the rest. Next I'd like to show you an image that is fresh pixels off the presses. Taken at the end of sol 5, late afternoon. (slide) looking North, to the minus x direction. Yesterday's view was to the south to the egress direction. This is also a possible egress direction. See a rise in the horizon. Horizon is pretty flat but the lander has lifted. Spectacular 8000x3000 view. Spectacular sand dune with an interesting dark top. We're panning across to that area known as sleepy hollow. Seeing it in 16 times better detail. ridge of rocks in the back. maybe a meter high. Those dark donut shapes in the middle might be the airbag marks as it bounced to it's landing. Color is approx what you'd see with your eyes. Dominated by iron. Hints on some compositional variations. We'll end (the pan) at that spectacular dune. We also took a look at some of the equipment (more panning around the lander). We pass by this piece of the airbag (the one we thought was a rock early on). We end on this little object, the Pancam calibration target, a very important object (shows one in the studio) about 8cm x 8cm. Essentially a photographer's color chart. It's got three grayscale rings and 4 color chips (green, yellow, red, blue). It's also a sundial. This was made very clear to us by Bill Nye who works with the mission team. Inscription: Mars 2004, two worlds, one sun. Made an educational tool/project with this.
Courtney Dressing (student astronaut): Students around the world can join the mission by looking at the images online (slide of sundial) The sundial can be used to tell the time. A group of people including Bill Nye created the sundial to demonstrate that we share the same sun. Explanation of ring near the bottom for late afternoon and early morning. Blue dot and Red dot represent orbit of earth and Mars. Students in the Red River goes to Mars project are working on the sundial. We've used software and information about the rovers's position, we overlayed the hour information. Useful way a calibration target could encourage public participation. Slide of the DVD please. (slide) Another public outreach effort. Lego man surrounded by a coded message (online you can attempt to decode message). The DVD was paid for planetary society members and Lego company. Additionally it includes magnets to collect dust.
Rafael Morozowski (student astronaut): Planetary society chose 16 students to work with JPL and the science team. We're using the Marsdial images and writing diaries at planetary.org website. (short video clip). This is Courtney and I in the control room watching rover health data. This is a picture of the sundial and a conversation we had with Jim Bell.
Matt Wallace: Thanks Rafael. Now that I know you're on Mars time I've got a few jobs for you (laughter). Primary objectives from yesterday, to re-establish our HGA link. We've had some very successful UHF connections. We had 2 successful HGA links at high data rates and when we combine that with our strong UHF orbiter links we get a lot down. The other thing we were attempting to do was to retract the airbags in. We were attempting yesterday what we call a lift and tuck maneuver. Lift the petal up about 20°. Before and after pictures from the previous two days doesn't show much difference. The front left hand side of the rover airbag was the one we were attempting to pull in. We were not successful. We're going to retract it another 6 revolutions and see if we can get the airbags down a little more. Independent of that we'll go ahead and drop that petal back down and move on with our standup. If it is successful we'll continue with our front egress. If not successful, we'll egress 20 degrees to the left or 60 degrees to the right. Both are very viable paths for us. We prefer to drive forward if we can but we've practiced and can use other directions. That's the primarily the plan for tomorrow, another 6 revolutions and a drop of that petal. We'll then begin the standup. First we use a lift on the underside of the lander to drive the lander up. Then unfold the front wheel arms and drop the lander down onto its legs. After that we do a short little lift and drop to verify those legs are engaged. Then we complete standup and egress activities. We also will sequence more of those beautiful Pancam images. We also have two of the mini-TES octets planned for tomorrow. Earliest egress looks like sol 12. If we have to maneuver the petals some more that could be delayed 2 or 3 days. "Brave but not stupid". We're gonna do what we need to do to safely get this vehicle off the lander and on to the surface.
Dr. Henry Stone: HGA anomaly rundown. The HGA is a gimbel actuated device that can be pointed to Earth, track Earth and talk directly to Earth. On sol 2 there were three activities. First deployment which did not involve elevation. The second activity was a swing around of both axes with a very large slew of the elevation actuators to turn the backside of the paddle to show that Columbia (plaque) view. Following that antenna was re-stowed and later we made a HGA pass. That HGA pass went off fine but we received engineering telemetry data that indicated large current spikes during the elevation. (slide) The blue jagged line on here shows the current spikes across a motion that lasted about 33 seconds. Normally we see .1 amps and spikes were up at .7 amps. The azimuth slew had a normal line (slide). The return motion did not show current spikes. That was particularly interesting to the anomaly team. We expected the flaw to show itself in both directions. We looked at the rate at which current spikes were occurring. Seemed to be occurring in alignment with the last stage of that gearing. We hypothesized that some debris had been lodged in the very fine teeth of that drive. He (ed. missed the name) put together some simulations to study what might cause this spiking of the current. We were unable to do that. He then came up with a technique for simulating some debris on the drive and got similar current spikes to what the telemetry was showing. We think that the second motion, reversing it, kicked that debris out of the gear tooth. We halted further use of the HGA until we could put together a diagnostic. Sent that up on sol 4 and executed it. Small, safe motions. We got all that data down, 7 slews. All came back with clean current measurements. We decided that it was appropriate to go ahead with use of that antenna on sol 5 with the caveats, use caution and reduced the rate at which we drive those actuators. Upped the priority for the data products monitoring those actuators. Also reset the position at which the HGA is stowed following the comm. passes. Done such that should there be a failure we'd be left in a situation where we could still perform one HGA pass in the afternoon. On sol 5 we performed 2 HGA passes and the actuator data came back clean. Increasingly confident that we've got this one addressed. Final thing we'll be doing is making some adjustments to how we look at these data products when they come from Opportunity.
Q. Can we get an update on mini-TES. More about the airbags, residual gas?, what's causing the headache.
Albert: Mini-TES is gathering data and we're working on it. Not ready yet.
Matt: We're not 100% certain. A couple of theories including that we snapped some of the tendons that go out to points on the airbags. It's conceivable that we snapped some tendons. It may be that the areas that are puffed up aren't tendon attachment points. Telemetry suggests we are pulling on something. There are other possibilities but those are some of them.
Q. When are we gonna see the mini-TES data. What's the delay? Also, can this rover chew gum and retract bags at the same time? Is it all sequential or can it be done in parallel.
Albert: The interpretation of those spectra is critical so the calibration has to be done right. When Phil Christenson releases it, it's good stuff. Plan to co-register mini-TES and Pancam when rover stands up.
Matt: Rover is definitely capable of multi-tasking well beyond what its handlers are capable of. We create localized activities but that's in the planning and the handling side. The airbag activity is a short activity, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. There's plenty of hours in the Martian day to do a lot of great science while working through eng. activities.
Q. What time will you know airbag success?
Matt: building and evaluating sequences now so I would say in 12-14 hours we'll have gotten through our first HGA pass and have some indication whether those airbags have retracted. We intend to move forward regardless because we have other options for egress.
Q. Colors look much richer in than they did yesterday.
(ed. sorry, lost my connection)
Jim: (ed. missed during lost connection).
Q. Then what we're seeing that's in that Pancam image doesn't correspond to what we'd see if we were standing there?
Jim: we have a pair of red filters that give us stereo. The red you're asking about is the infrared filter which is different from the red humans see. We can convert that red easily. We also have a red filter that matches human sight red but we prefer to use the infrared filter to get matchup with both cameras. Two cameras each have 8 filters. One filter on one eye is a dense welder-like filter to look at the sun. On the left camera is low frequency and the right camera is higher frequencies. Total of 11 unique wavelengths.
Q. What's the very soonest you'll start standing up the rover.
Matt: under nominal case we'll start tomorrow. First the lift and revolving out of the front wheels and dropping down. Then a day of evaluation followed by a day where we deploy the rear wheels and fire our pyro devices. Then there's some time to release, deploy and stow the front arm, deploy cable cutters, perform the 'bump'. The big question is whether we need to move the petals.
(note that all images are available at website and next briefing is tomorrow at 9am)
Q. Is there consideration of updating software for Opportunity airbag retraction.
Matt: there's an opportunity and a team in place looking at that. We're still in the middle of evaluating Spirit. I don't think we'll chance it but there's certainly a possibility and a plan if we decide to do it.
Q. How high is the deck?
Matt: The forward lander deck is approx. 40 centimeters and the airbag protrusion is 65-70 cm above that. Frankly I think we could egress over that. We'd skirt inside of the two bubbles and the airbag height is not so that it would cause problems for our solar panels but there's a little bit of non-determinism but we have other routs. Take the safest rout. We certainly could if that was our only option.
Q. Courtney and Rafael, what's your most exciting moment in mission control.
Rafael: landing. Courtney: I agree. Matt: good answer, I agree (laughter).
Q. Color differences in the rocks. how certain are you that it's compositional differences in the rock.
Jim: we're just starting to get data and from only 3 filters. What we need to do and what we'll start doing is trying to focus on the most interesting targets, spin those filter wheels and start to get a better picture. There are some hints in those three colors that there's some variety.
Q. How has this experience impacted the students lives?
Courtney: It's made me sure that I want to go into the space program. Consider working at JPL rather than becoming astronaut.
Rafael: It's been very exciting. Working with this mission changed what I thought about science.
Q. Pancam images, colors on the two screens were very different. Which one is more accurate? Any change in plan to go to sleepy hollow and what about the assessment that you are in a dry lake bed.
Jim: every monitor and screen is different. Mars is often depicted as a bright red planet. It's not really, it's a much more subtle brownish, reddish, ochre, salmon. Beware of garish colors. Sleepy hollow, there hasn't been any decision yet as where to go. Personally I'm still really enticed by that place. It looks like we may have been there already (bounced through in our airbags). Bright deposits on the floor of the depression. That area, perhaps more than any other close to us, might be the best place to start testing those hypothesis about water, a dry lake bed.
Albert: the rover drivers are warming up. They're using our data to prepare themselves for driving on the surface. They've been given like half a dozen potential targets.
Q. Scientists talk about looking at the whole panorama to pick a target and engineers want to egress out the front. if the most interesting isn't out the front why egress there.
Matt: we want to egress out the safest direction. there's no other answer to that. science team have been very supportive of this. we have to pick the safest.
Jim: we can drive around after we're off.
Q. Speculation about what the debris in the actuator might have been.
Henry: no. very small teeth, small debris, grain sized. (END)
You will (hopefully soon) find the press release images at the Mars Rover Gallery. You can find the full-sized images at Planetary Photojournal including the nice big new panorama in tiff format.
