(Just a reminder, this is not an actual transcript; I'm not a fast enough typist for that. I hope it's useful but please don't use it to pull quotes because it's just not quite accurate enough for that.)
Natalie Godwin (press person): Tonight we expect spirit to roll on to the surface.
Jennifer Trosper: Today was sol 11. As you know for the past couple of days we've been turning the rover on the lander. We play wakeup songs at about 8:45 local solar time each day. Yesterday we plated "turn turn turn" and today "you spin me round" and "round and round". All activities completed perfectly. We planned to end up at 115° and that's exactly where we ended up. All of the subsystems are performing nominally. Some time last week we talked about transmitting through the Pancam mast and we tested that last night and the good news is that it didn't occlude as much as we expected. All of the mini-TES and Pancam mission success panorama data is down so nothing left to do on the lander.
Kevin Burke: How we prepared for this little endeavor - you're looking at our highest fidelity test rover. This is one of our last dry runs, starting at the 45° turn in place position moving to the 95° position - the most hazardous turn we have on the lander. That happened today and at the end of it we had a go/no-go decision to complete to 115°. When it completes the final move, you can see we're turning the wheels forward and getting ready to roll onto the ramp. Next slide is our 95° point in the testrun. The front wheel perched on the +x petal. That's where we are on Mars (which matches up about perfectly with the testbed location). This animation rolls through a series of lander Hazcam images showing where we were through the 95° point. We are very excited to be where we are. We've completed the exploration of our lander and we're about to explore the surface of Mars. In this last photograph, that is the sun setting on Mars, taken at approx. 4PM Marstime. We're headed in the North, Northwest direction and we're exactly where we want to be.
Justin Maki: I'm the MER imaging scientist. These pictures are the result of many years of work. Every time we get a picture back, it's the result of hundreds of peoples' work. As of 4 am this morning, we've downlinked 3900 images. We've acquired 4400 images. We've landed more cameras on Mars than all previous surface landers combined. We have 9 cameras and we're looking forward to 9 more (Opportunity). 6 of the cameras are engineering cameras used to navigate the rover and choose targets. Of the 3900 images about 500 have been engineering camera photographs. This image shows views from the Navcam which is the highest resolution image from the surface of Mars, beating Pathfinder and Viking by about 30% and only outdone by the Pancam. Next image shows an overhead view taken from the Navcam assembled from 20(?) images. Polar panorama is the result of a lot of work and careful calibration of the cameras and software. This image is from sol 10. Next image shows the turn. This is a panorama we built from the non-pointable hazcams. They're fisheye lenses with 120° field of view. This is what you'd see if you were under the deck looking at the lander. This is a new product, the Hazcam 360° mosaic. All imaging systems functioning - we're very happy with the performance. We post everything on the internet as soon as we have it. Join us on the internet.
Albert Haldemann: I want to thank the impact through egress team. I want to tell you today that we're doing something else historic tonight. We're also going to look up while someone else is looking down. We have been planning this for about a year. Credit to the multi-mission operations (something) team, Candi Hansen. We have MGS and Odyssey. The collaborative and coordinated science is offering us unique opportunities. Letter went out to Mars scientists looking for suggestions. Science team put together coordinated activities. We have a good Odyssey (nadir) overflight tonight while the lander is rolling off. We'll have that kind of opportunity for Odyssey every thirty days. The next day the Mars Express Orbiter will be flying over our landing site and that's an elliptical orbit that's at its closest. We'll collect the data, archive it and then evaluate it over the months to come. It won't necessarily be something from which you pull results right away.
Ray Arvidson: This Friday, sol 13, localtime at Gusev 14:00 Mars Express will fly over at altitude of about 300 km straight up. Three instruments on Mars Express including the German high-res stereo camera will produce high-res color images of the site at 10m/pixel. French imager called Omega produces .38 micrometers to 5.1 micrometers data. Third instrument, Italian, called Planetary (missed part of the name) Spectrometer. We'll be looking up with Pancam, tracking the sun that will tell us about the opacity of the atmosphere and particle size distribution as well as using mini-TES to get lower part of the atmosphere and boundary layer characteristics. We'll also be looking at the surface to get photometric and radiometric information that has the surface in it. The attempt is to use observations from above and below to do the best possible job to infer the dynamics of the atmosphere and then *removing* the atmosphere to see things we can't see now. In a couple months there will be a whole set of papers published discussing the atmosphere and geologic construction at the site.
Michael Smith: I'm going to talk to you about mini-TES observations. First plot shows what the sky looks like in infrared as a function of wavelength. This is one of three observations mini-TES made of the sky. Spike on the right is CO2 gas. The smaller peak to the left of that is caused by dust, and those little bumps on the left are water vapor in the atmosphere. There happen to not be any water ice clouds during this measurement. We use the shape to derive atmospheric temperatures as well as abundance of those materials in the atmosphere. Next plot shows results for atmospheric temperature as a function of height. We're sensitive from about 10 m above the surface to kilometers above the surface. The temp changes quite rapidly near the surface. The atmosphere is a dynamic place, it's always changing as a function of time of day and season. Our best weather forecast now, here at the end of summer, is that temperatures will cool, dust will settle out some, and we'll start to see water ice clouds.
Q. For Kevin, what tonight will be like. You've had new looks at exit ramp. What do you expect to happen? How much of a jump onto the surface. For Jennifer, is it turning into zombieville over there? You guys OK?
Kevin: One of the things we're doing right now is getting Navigation camera images which are stereo so we're getting ranging to get final assessment of our height. It was about 40cm before the turn which means a 10-12 cm drop to the surface. We've tested as high as 57 cm so we're confident and we're going to have a go for egress after final assessment. We'll poll subsystems and then we will be driving 3 m forwards onto the surface of Mars and leaving the lander for good. We do plan to take a couple of parting shots. We should be on the surface with knowledge sometime around 1-2 am PST. I'm looking forward to seeing that rearward image of our lander.
Jennifer: The team has worked extremely hard with long hours and on Mars time which are longer days (36 minutes longer). Very soon, we're going to deploy the robotic arm. First day we'll hover over soil and take microscopic images then the next day put the arm on the surface. We'll be giving our egress team a few days off and bring in a fresh team with the arm and mobility guys. Tonight's the night that's gonna happen. For Impact to Egress phase, we ran pre-determined tasks as we had time. The new process is a daily planning and implementation process, a big undertaking with flexible planning. Science team is going to have a good time.
Q. Can you compare mini-TES results looking up with MGS looking down.
Michael: Very complimentary. With mini-TES very good measures of temperatures low down. With MGS you don't see very far down into the atmosphere. Results so far are very consistent. No big surprises yet.
Q. Role that Mars Express is going to play? What day is that going to happen? During the egress time will there be an overpass from Odyssey or MGS?
Ray: Friday, Jan 16th, sol 13, 2PM localtime in Gusev.
Jennifer: We're going to have a noon local solar time egress and a 4 PM Odyssey pass. We will have DTE comm. before the Odyssey pass.
Q. Could you get more specific about the kinds of things that you can see from Mars Express. Will you be able to see things about that 200 m crater that's a prime target?
Ray: Omega will have either 16 or 32 pixels across strip from north to south for hundreds of km. Within any one of those pixels you can pull out a spectrum from .38 to 5.1 micrometers and we can see a lot into rock forming minerals. By looking up while we're looking down, we can do the best possible job of taking the orbital data and removing the atmosphere. If we have measurements from top and bottom we can get atmosphere-free spectra. Iron oxides, sulfates, nitrates even, will show up in these data. Important to getting at "where's the water".
Q: Strategy for Microscopic Imager?
Ray: The strategy we've been planning for years. This is going to be one of the most exciting set of data from the surface. This instrument has pixels of about 30 micrometers. We'll move the arm to get stereo so we can do micro-topography. I expect we'll use the sequence we've planned over the past few years.
Q. For Ray, can you tell me more about collaboration with Mars Express folks.
Ray: Express went into orbit around Christmas. Timing of overpass wasn't known until a couple weeks ago. By coincidence this beautiful pass right in the afternoon, right overhead, at their lowest elevation so we blocked out time on our assets to match up with their assets. We've been planning collaboration for a lot longer. Some of the US investigators are participants on ME and vice versa. I think the first discussion took place in a cafe in Paris.
Natalie: We'll have live commentary of egress starting at approx. 12:45 am PST and 2am PST for egress. Dick Cheney address to JPL at 2:45 PM this afternoon. QA session with Dr. Alachi following Cheney address. Visit the website.
Q. General public and children have questions. From the public, what's the quality of the image like compared to normal photographic equipment. From the children, how do you get the pictures that look like they're taken from above.
Justin: Each of our cameras is a 1 megapixel camera. The neat thing is that we mount them on actuated devices so we can take many, many pictures and stitch them together so you can get (from Pancam) a 90 megapixel photograph. Overhead views, we use a set of mathematical equations to project each pixel onto a model of the ground and render that as an image. We can do this because we know exactly where the camera is and where it's pointed. We can do even more exciting stuff as we move around. Tell students to study math and science so they can do this kind of stuff :)
Q. What kind of data will you be imaging first on the ground. When would you get first picture of wheels in dirt.
Jennifer: We will be sending egress command at noon local solar time (after midnight PST) and we'll get data back at 1 am PST. After we drive we need to find the sun again. (I lost signal here, sorry.) Then we have some cleanup for parameters that are different between egress and the rest of the mission. We'll get a picture tonight or tomorrow morning.
