The Wednesday morning press briefing is about to begin. I'll post notes when it's completed. Also, I found another good MER Status page.
Press briefing notes:
Dr. Firouz Naderi (manager of Mars Program Office at JPL and MER Program Manager):
Before we give status I wanted to take a moment to mention that in our personal lives, in moments of great joy, we often remember and long for lost members of our family and so it is at this moment of our triumph in our professional lives we remember those we lost in the space shuttle Columbia. A plaque designed with the MER rover. (slide). The plaque is mounted at the back of the high-gain antenna and in addition to the names of the 6 astronauts it has the NASA logo and the shuttle insignia. We know that the crew of the Columbia would be applauding our effort as a part of the NASA vision to extend life to there and to find life beyond. also I would like to remind you that NASA administrator named the landing site in honor of the Columbia crew. I wanted to also give you some statistics on public interest through the internet. Yesterday 1 billion and a quarter hits. representing more than 10 million unique users visiting NASA site.
Dr. Joy Crisp (Project Scientist for the MER Mission):
Atmospheric advisory science team working hard with EDL engineers to compare the predicted state of the atmosphere at Gusev with the actual measure as recorded during descent. This is only the fourth time we've measured that. This is of great interest the engineers and managers who are going to have to be working on Opportunity. Mars has dealt us a complicated hand. Large dust storms last month have modified the atmosphere in ways we don't yet understand. (slide). A "1" corresponds to a really yucky day here in Los Angeles (looks like Dec. 15 peaked at about 1.5) A large regional dust storm began in December and raised large amounts of dust at Meridiani and some of that dust was carried to Gusev. We're trying to understand how accurate our predictions were and what we learn from the spacecraft measures we'll apply to predictions for Opportunity.
Dr. Jim Bell (Pancam Payload Element Lead):
The Pancam continues to perform very well and we continue to collect some pretty spectacular images from the surface of Mars. We've collected the first stereo pair of images from Pancam. (slide showing the panorama octants division and planning). On sol 3 we obtained the two pieces towards the +x or positive south side of the rover. On sol 4, this past day, we took the two pieces behind us and tomorrow we'll start with 7. We'll continue to obtain these over the next couple of days. We did get octant 8 down on the Odyssey pass a few hours ago. Red/Blue stereo anaglyph much like the one we saw earlier with the Navcam but at 16 or 17 times the resolution. Looking at an area just to the left or east of that "postcard" we saw yesterday. Those hills are approx. 2 kilometers off in the distance. They are 50 to 100 meters high. Definitely a potential drive target. You can also see some rocks that are very precariously placed or perched. We'll be examining these kinds of images in great detail to determine where to drive our vehicle. There are some pretty nifty sized obstacles and some interesting scientific targets. By combining with other elements of the payload we'll be able to get a better idea of where we want to go (ed. I think that's what he said, though I lost my connection briefly).
Ray Arvidson (Deputy Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload):
We're ready to go. Pancam is clearly working. Microimager (Athena Microscopic Imager), APSX, M�ssbauer (Gamma-ray Spectrometer), all in good shape. We have mini-TES data but not really the kind of data you bring to a press briefing but collection is underway. This is not your typical lake bed, if it's a lake bed at all. You can see rocks that are probably coated with dust. Good thing we have an abrasion tool. We're debating intensely what it is we're looking at. We've filled in the lower right hand corner of that image and it has some interesting textures. (slides) I was a part of the imaging team for Viking and I'd put that in Chryse Planitia... It will remain to us to determine what is holding this material together. I suspect that there's a very think coating of dust. Kick that around and you expose this cloddy material below. This is a terrain that's both familiar and alien. We may be looking at an area that is a volcanic terrain with rocks kicked up by craters, primary and secondary. We really need to get off the lander with this wonderful integrated payload that we have. We're in the process of putting together hypothesis. We need our engineering buddies to get us off this lander and on to the surface.
Arthur Amador (Mission Manager for Sol 5):
Spirit continues to be in excellent health, all subsystems in good health. 45 megabits and 52 megabits of data from the two Odyssey passes. At 128 kbits per second we'll be getting a MGS pass tonight. Both Odyssey and MGS are now at 128 kilobits per second. Yesterday we let Spirit take a siesta in the afternoon to manage our thermal situation. Nap from 2:30 to 3:30 before the Odyssey pass so that when it transmitted to Odyssey it would be nice and cool. We recorded 48° at the time of the transmit and that's consistent with our models. Besides acquisition and return of mini-TES we performed an activity to diagnose the HGA slewing anomaly and performed an activity to retract the basepetal airbags to assist us in our straight off egress. We put together a team to diagnose the spikes in the driving of the HGA elevation. We sent the sequence of commands to test on sol 4 and "everything came back clean as a whistle" so we got good results in the currents and everything looks fine so we think that there was some sort of debris in the motor housing or some stickiness and that was taken care of in the last slewing on sol 2. We've got a preliminary "go" to use the HGA on sol 5. The other major activity was retracting the basepetal airbags (animation of a couple of slides of Pancam photos). We did see that we pulled the airbags a little bit. We got about 5 centimeter lowering of the airbag to the left of the front of the lander, the one we're concerned about. The airbag is still a little bit too high and we're afraid we might hit it with our rover solar panels during egress. Yesterday we pulled about 3 revolutions but we need to work on it some more before we come off. Those are the major activities from yesterday.
Art Thompson (Rover Tactical Activity Lead JPL):
Truly amazing to come to work every morning and see a new batch of pictures that are probably better than the day before. It's currently about 1 in the morning local time so the rover is asleep. We're working on the plan for sol 5. Vehicle will wake up at about 8:45 local solar time or 17:14 PST. One of the first things is to go for an airbag adjustment. We're going to try for a "lift and tuck" maneuver where we lift up the petal and pull in the airbag then set the petal back down. A little different than what we did yesterday where we did a straight pull. Hopefully switching over to HGA for last two data passes this afternoon. The baseline plan is to continue with airbag work but if we hit the lottery and everything goes well we could begin standup. Shutdown today at 14:50 for thermal reasons. DTE comm. at 9 am LST on low-gain. Shortly afterwards we hope to switch to HGA. At 11:15 and 13:00 two HGA sessions. If not able to go to HGA then we'll have 3 low gain sessions at 9am, 10:00am, and 12:30. Afternoon Odyssey session at 16:50. We're truly amazed at the quantity and quality of the data. We also have an overnight Odyssey and MGS data pass. We want nothing more than to get this rover off the lander. "We are chomping at the bit to get this puppy off the lander and get the scientists working". At this point we would expect to egress around sol 12 (next Wednesday).
Q. You said this is not a typical lake bed. could you elaborate?
Ray: This is rock strewn, a number of secondary craters so it's not a primary depositional surface of what you'd see in a lake bed. If a lake bed is there it's been chewed up. It's our job to use this integrated payload to find the evidence if in fact there is evidence of a lake bed there. Microscopic imager will be critical to pick apart the different grains and say something bout the origins.
Q. What kind of cement would be holding that together and can you say more about what you saw with Viking.
Ray: With Viking, we didn't use airbags. We used rockets. Lander feet disturbed the surface. When we saw the disturbance from Spirit we were reminded of Viking dig sites which were dark and crusty due to elevated values of sulfur and magnesium, kieserite, an epsom salt that forms in aqueous solutions. This (Spirit) site is complex. We're gonna get down there and look at it and the vehicle is a digger. We can get in 20 centimeters on a good day (spinning a wheel).
Q. What could form a landscape like that?
Ray: It looks like there was a lake at some point in Gusev. Is the landform we're seeing today a lake bed? I suspect not. The environment may have changed, lava overfilled the lake beds, cratering continued, secondary and primary craters stirring things laterally and in addition some deposition of windblown material. Looks like a desert, desert pavements. I've seen similar in Earth deserts. Sand and dust actually work underneath cobbles and lift them.
Q. It looked like you pulled the petal down more than you pulled the airbag in.
Art: The action was successful. You're seeing a secondary action of petal settling. We have lots of options. We're being very cautious.
Q. What are your strategic options.
Ray: thinking about the landforms and how they might form and how we get evidence of water. We're debating lots of hypothesis. We certainly want to characterize deposits in the immediate vicinity. That's never been done before with a payload like ours. If it's all homogeneous we need to do a good job getting material properties and then drive to interesting places. The closer we get to the hills in the distance, the bigger they get and the more pixels you get from Pancam and mini-TES to characterize them. We want to get off the lander and make more measurements then we'll convince the project manager to do a long drive (big smile and a look over at Arthur).
Q. In the stereo image there was a point that looked like a channel or a wash and a ridge a few inches high....Any idea what that is? Dust devil track?
Jim: I think you're looking at a wind tail perched on a little ridge.
Q. that funny stuff in the bottom right hand corner, is that Casenite (sp?)? Can you talk us through the lift and tuck.
Ray: I don't see those materials as anything special. We dropped, bounced and dragged so you're gonna create interesting surfaces, just a mechanical interaction between the craft and these clotty surface materials. Kinda like silty loam so there may have been some smoothing and dragging. Just not particularly exciting to me.
Art: we're putting together the lift and tuck sequence now. It's just one sequence that we'll send up. When that's complete well have comm. sessions with engineering data, hopefully imaging. Then we can do another maneuver in the afternoon if necessary. The amount of imaging that's coming down is important. A couple of days ago it was "gee, we gotta get off the lander and go over to sleepy hollow now!" now it's not nearly as interesting compared to all the new stuff in newer images.
Q. Is Wednesday really the earliest for egress and is that a delay from the nominal schedule? Could you characterize what your discussions are like.
Art: 3 days past when we had originally planned. In planning, we spread it out to about 9 days if everything went perfectly. We have experienced a couple of hickups with the HGA and the airbag so we're being careful. The current plan will take us to Wednesday. I wouldn't be surprised to see it be even a day or two later that.
Ray: We're getting data down from Pancam and mini-TES. Once we egress it's clear we want to stop and drop the instruments down to the surface and make measurements. Then there are rocks in the vicinity of the lander that we'll want to measure. Then in the longer term we'll be searching the mid and far distances from the Pancam image. Even longer term strategy would be to try to get to horizon features - which one and we have our favorites in the south east. Debate, like herding cats.
Q. Which is the wildest hypothesis.
Ray: Hypotheses range from the mundane, like mine from earlier, that there may be lake bed deposits that have been broken up, covered up, etc. to having the rocks and soil brought in by rivers, to having liquid CO2 involved (laughter).
Jim: There were suggestions of glaciation, increased eolian environment. Even Ray's mundane hypothesis has some fantastic to it.
Ray: This is totally healthy science with multiple working hypothesis.
Q. How long, months days years before conclusion to characterization of this as a lakebed or not.
Ray: It could be next week or it could be longer, depends on the evidence.
Q. There's been a theory floating around that Gusev might be covered by debris from volcano 125 miles to the west. Could the rocks we're seeing, could this be basalt thrown from that volcano.
Ray: There is a large volcano to the (direction?) of Gusev. Having blocks thrown that big from that far is highly unlikely. Having volcanic ash deposited is highly likely.
Jim: we haven't seen any unambiguous evidence of one process or another. We're scouring the data set looking but we've only got one little wedge of the data so far.
Q. Explain what's interesting in the southeast. Sleepy hollow is to the north. Would that delay grander strategy of moving to the south if you have to go north first?
Jim: The way that art described it is humorous but quite fair. We're getting slow glimpses as we get more imagery. What's going to happen is that as we build up this data set these instant gratification biases will settle down and we'll figure out which way to go. We're going to keep our minds open, collect some measurements. and not get ahead of ourselves.
Q. In that airbag retraction it looked as though the airbag on the left might be catching on the corner of the petal. Is that motivating the lift and tuck.
Arthur: That is part of the concern, we don't want to pull it too hard or too much and grab that petal.
Art: We yesterday, our mechanical team came in with actual egress aids and mechanical and airbag material. There's a silver knob that protrudes at the end of the egress aid and we tried to get it to hook or catch and we were not able to do that. We even cut the material and still couldn't get it to catch. We do not wanna snag this but we don't believe we will. We'll lift it up approx. 20° and retract the airbag.
Q. Is there progress on linking hills (we see in the Pancam images) to an overhead view that would help us pinpoint our location.
Ray: We know where we are within half a kilometer or thereabouts. There are three teams working with MOC narrow angle, THEMIS and DIMES images and there's some debate still.
(note about all images being available on website and next press brief tomorrow at 9am)
Q. In pathfinder there was suggestion based on orientation of rocks that they were lined up by a flood. Anything like that here?
?: no. not yet.
Q. There seem to be a light coating on some of the rocks. Looks like a salt coating. Are there differences in the kinds of coatings.
Ray: There are thousands of rocks here, some coated with color similar to soil, some different. Also, depends on the angle of the sun. That bright rock...
Jim: What you were seeing was a black and white image with a red filter. Not necessarily white. When we put the color together you'll see it's not really white, white represents a strong red content.
Ray: We'll get the RAT on this.
Jim: Resolution is a big part of it. There are some very large clean rocks but there are lots of smaller, coated, rinded rocks.
Q. For Joy, about the dust issues. How best can we characterize landing sight 2.
Joy: Mars Observer Camera, wide angle images, will tell us if there is a new storm, where it is and if it's spreading. THEMIS on MGS is giving the kind of information critical to us, density of the atmosphere (ed. something else I missed). This dust storm is decaying but differently than at Gusev. Gusev had less dust, but higher up and a bigger effect on atmosphere than at landing site 2 which has more dust but down lower. We're watching the decay.
Jim: This is an incredible time because we have these other crafts in orbit giving us all this data.
Q. Charts show you still have an opacity greater than 1. Will this be a solar problem
Joy: may be similar to Gusev so it'll probably be fine.
Q. I grew up with dust storms that would completely cover cars in thick layer of dust. Is dust covering the spacecraft an issue?
Joy: Probably not a concern. There's a lot less atmosphere on Mars. At Gusev we didn't even get hit directly by the storm. The dust is high up in the atmosphere. At Meridiani (Planum) it should have decayed by the time we get there. I don't think we'll have a problem from this storm.
