February 2004 Archives

Cassini is 123 days away from its Saturn arrival and NASA has just posted this super-sexy Cassini shot from February 9.

Pretty impressive considering that it was taken from just about 43 million miles away.

If you read weblogs and you haven't been using Feedster, then get with the program :-) I've tried all of the various blog search and tracking tools and nothing comes close to Feedster, especially for up to the minute, date-sorted results.

There's just one thing that I really want from Feedster that it doesn't seem to offer and that's a "simple results page" -- a search results list that's nothing more than a list of results links.

I'm looking for a results list that can easily be opened in tabs with Linky's "open selected links in tabs" or "open all links in tabs". For my purposes I wouldn't even mind the short summary, but the current results page has about 11 links for every listing which makes using Linky pretty much impossible.

If any of you out there have any suggestions about how I could make this work, I'd really appreciate it.

update: and in case you hadn't noticed, I've added a search utility over on the left under the blogroll and archive links that lets you search this blog via feedster. It returns results sorted by date with the most recent entries at the top. Unfortunately, it looks like Feedster stopped indexing me a couple of weeks ago. I wonder what that's all about. (another update: maybe it's because if this.)

My Mozilla quality assurance and testing presentation went fairly well. I'll be posting the preso to the mozilla.org website in the next day or two. I also took some photographs during the developer day and I'll see if I can get some of those posted for those of you anxiously awaiting a look into the offices of the Mozilla Foundation.

Sorry for the dearth of Mars-related posts. I missed this morning's press briefing so I can't even offer you that. I'm pretty busy with work so I haven't had a lot of time for even reading Mars news myself.

Since I'm sucking as a source for information lately, be sure to check out some of these other great weblogs.

From Behind the Wall of Sleep has this informative update on the rovers.

periapsis.org collected up all of the Opportunity wake-up calls and shares them with us.

Martian Soil covers lots of recent MER news, including this blue-sky sunset on Mars.

Mars Rover Blog has a good piece on the RAT grinding wheel profile.

SpaceFlight Now continues its solid and consistent reporting on the MER missions.

Axon Chisel still has one of the best Mars resource links pages around -- bonus points for the firefox banner :-)

update: Sorry about the bad link to SpaceFlight Now. It's fixed.

I had planned on just picking one question and answering it as in-depth as possible but there were so many good questions I'm going to try answer several of them :-)

Without further ado, the questions and answers:

yacoubean asked, "Who writes the Book of Mozilla verses, and can you give any background?"

The Book of Mozilla, like other great works of truth, was penned by several prophets. The names of the various scribes are of little importance. It is the word of Mozilla and and how He reveals Himself and His plan that is most important :-)
The verses of Book of Mozilla, which have appeared in Netscape and Mozilla browsers going back for many years, were "easter eggs" triggered by typing 'about:mozilla' in the URLbar. They are displayed in white text on a deep red background.

Bibbl asked, "Will there ever be Mozilla Users on Mars? :)"

I don't think so. It's going to be a couple of decades before the first human explorers land on Mars and by then I expect the internet to have undergone at least one revolutionary change, maybe more, which will obsolete Mozilla as we know it. Mozilla will evolve, though, and some kind of Mozilla spawn may yet find its way to Mars with early human exploration :-)

Marcia asked, "How many squirrels are there in Mountain View, and are there any of the black variety?"

Marcia, the answer is "lots" and "yes". There are three varieties of squirrel in this area, the Western Gray, the Eastern Gray, and the Eastern Fox. "Black" squirrels are a coloring of the Eastern Gray and while the the black-haired variety are less common down here, you do see them around. We have a couple that hang out in our back yard. If you travel up to BC, you'll find that they massively outnumber the gray-hairs. It's rare to see any gray-hairs at all. Down here, I think the black (and dark brown) are outnumbered by the gray-hairs though.

Korou asked, "What are the Mozilla Foundation offices like?"

The office(s) is(are) nice. We've got plenty of space for the 10 or so people that work fulltime at the office. The space is mostly open with one wall of the offices filled with tinderboxen and build machines, and running down a section of the central space, we've got the sodacan bridge.

Av asked, "I've been wondering how many of the rocks on the surface of mars are actually small meteorites or fragments, and could the rovers distinguish between original martian rock and off-planet material?"

Av, I wasn't able to find an answer to this question. I'll keep looking. As you know, the Martian surface has been bombarded by asteroids and comets for literally billions of years and it's been turned up and over by volcanism and weathering as well. I'm not sure how easily we'll be able to measure the percentage of surface that's extra-terrestrial. The rovers should be able to characterize their local environments quite well and as they build up a catalog, I imagine they'll be able to start to distinguish "foreign" rocks. For the larger question about how many, we currently have two amazing orbital assets mapping the Martian surface and if I find an answer to the question, I'll bet that it will be a result of work done by the MGS' TES and Mars Odyssey's THEMIS.

Lor asked, "Is there a chance that the two sides in the MNG dispute will talk to each other and work something out, or has the situation gone too far?"

Lor, I think that something was worked out quite a long time ago. As I understand it, the MNG developers would need to meet a set of requirements for size, performance and functionality in order to get back into Mozilla. It's my personal opinion that the only part of MNG that would really matter to most people would be alpha transparency for animated image. I don't know a lot about how these image decoders are written, but it seems like we could get a lot more bang for the buck by just extending PNG to support animation.

Jose Jeria asked several questions but I'll field the one that was most intersting to me. He asks, "I read that Firefox 1.0 will be the last version taken from the trunk, does this mean that Firefox will kind of be in the same situation as Netscape, where only some selected bugs are added?"

The answer is that Firefox will branch for a 1.0 release. It will also, however, continue to be developed on the trunk just as Mozilla continued on the trunk after branching for 1.0. "Last version taken from the trunk" suggests a permanent branch, also known as a fork. I'm quite certain that's not in the works.

Jesse asked, "How do Firefox 0.8 downloads compare to Mozilla 1.6 downloads so far? Also, where's that graph showing the number of downloads of each Mozilla release that I keep hearing about?"

Well, to take the second part first, "that graph" isn't of downloads. The graph I have been building is of "start page hits" I don't think anyone's done any graphing of downloads and I don't know that the data's been consistent or complete enough to try. As you know, our browser has a default start page. We count hits on that page from the various Mozilla user agents and I get a daily email report covering those hits. It's useful to me to see how quickly a new release replaces the previous release but probably not very interesting beyond that. The first part of your question is also tough to answer. I haven't gotten any reliable download numbers since we moved to the new FTP mirroring system. The numbers I'm getting are incomplete and while I can make some educated guesses based on what we do know, it's nothing I'd stake my reputation on. I had slightly better data for 0.7 and 1.5 than the current releases and it suggested that in the first two weeks after release, Firebird 0.7 got about 75% the downloads of SeaMonkey. My feeling, based on some less complete data from the first week of Firefox 0.8 downloads is that Firefox is now passing SeaMonkey in downloads. I'll hopefully have a better answer soon.

van asked, "Where did the Beagle go? Seems no news about it for long..."

Van, unfortunately, the Beagle II lander, one component of the Mars Express mission, was lost. Investigations are still ongoing but the craft hasn't been heard from since it's December 19th landing. The orbiter, however, is alive and well, circling Mars and doing some amazing science.

Michael Perry asked "when, I wonder, will the Linux users be able to have the same integration of browser and email client as on Windows?"

We're workin' on it. Linux (Gnome in particular) needs to be working on it too.

michaell asked "You apparently have a new person called Gabrielle. Kerz said she was a new QA person. So, who is she? what's her role? and are there plans for QA that QA volunteer types should know about?"

I don't know any Gabrielle, and as I'm the only employee of the Mozilla Foundation with "qa" in his title, I think I'd know if we hired a new QA person. To answer the second part of your question, yes, there are plans for QA that QA volunteers should know about. We've got a lot to do and we're getting some new tools to do some of that, including the awesome feature upgrades we just got to Bugzilla and the soon to be minimally functional (I hope) testcase manager. In addition to the great tools, we're really making some good progress on BugDays slogging through the mess of worthless bug reports. You can find more information about BugDays in the posts below.

Jeff Walden asked, "Immediately after the release of Mozilla Firefox 0.8, mozilla.org, mozdev.org, texturizer.net, and mozillazine.org all slowed to a complete crawl. What sort of resources are needed to prevent this when Firefox 0.9 is released"

Jeff, the answer is that we've already taken steps to beef up the gang of servers that host our releases. There's more to do here, but we're much improved. As for mozillazine.org, mozdev.org, and texturizer.net, they're not hosted by the Mozilla Foundation. You'll have to ask them.

Robert Accettura gets the final question with "We were promised by various people that we would see pictures of the Moz Foundation offices. These promises were never fufilled. Why?"

Well, I guess the best answer is, "I suck" :-) A few weeks ago I took some photos of the office but the lighting wasn't great and then we started planning the developer day and I thought that might make for a more interesting "first look" so I decided to hold off on posting what I had. So it's "I suck" for a "why". How's "next week" sound for a "when"?

OK, I didn't answer all of the questions (and several were answered for me) but I tried to respond to the ones that seemed most interesting. I'm also likely to be completely wrong about everything I've said. I'm not the sharpest pencil in the drawer :-)

Well, what do you all think? Should we continue with "Ask Asa"? If you think it's a good idea, then use the comments at this post to pose another round of questions and I'll see what I can do to answer them for next week :-)

I've been pretty busy with Mozilla stuff this week and now I'm in the middle of writing my presentation for Mozilla Developer Day talk this Friday but I know you all have been anxiously awaiting my responses, so I'm going to carve out some time tonight to post an answer to several of my favorite questions from last week's "ask asa" post.

We resolved lots of old and useless bugs today, making a dent of at least -250 bugs (about 230 invalid, worksforme, and duplicate). We're turning this bug curve down.

I put together a simple table from some bugzilla queries of the last 20 weeks to see what's been going on with SeaMonkey bugs. We've been doing weekly BugDays for about 10 weeks now and so I went back 20 weeks to get some before and after perspective.

Then I used the Bugzilla charts to see a graph of open SeaMonkey bugs over a similar time period.

My queries pretty much agree with the Bugzilla chart so I think it's safe to say we're making good progress on the SeaMonkey buglists. For some perspective, take a look at the open bug line for the last year.

If it's Tuesday then it's BugDay! If you're interested in getting involved with the Mozilla QA and testing effort, drop in to #mozillazine on the server irc.mozilla.org and find me.

Mozilla 1.7 Alpha is now available for download.

New to this release are support for multiple identities in Messenger, improvements to pop-up blocking, support for the onbeforeunload event, performance improvements, and much, much more.
There are too many great changes, new features, and bugfixes to mention them all here so go check out the "What's New in 1.7 Alpha" page and for a more comprehensive list of changes, check out the "rough changelog" at which lists the more than 800 bugs resolved as fixed during the Alpha cycle.

Release Information: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/#1.7a

Windows Installer: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.7a/mozilla-win32-1.7a-installer.exe
Linux Installer: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.7a/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.7a-installer.tar.gz
Mac Disk Image: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.7a/mozilla-mac-1.7a.dmg.gz

Release Notes TOC: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7a/
Installation Instructions: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7a/installation.html
Known Issues: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7a/known-issues.html

Have fun!

--Asa

Does anyone know of a simple way to remove the grippies from Mozilla? Is there a userChrome.css hack to disable or remove them?

update: well, a Google query gives me this userChrome.css change:

/* minimise grippies */
toolbargrippy {
width:0px !important; padding:0 !important;
}

or this one:

toolbargrippy { display: none !important; }

It sure is nice being able to customize Mozilla's chrome that easily.

If all goes well with our FTP mirrors (I'm still waiting to find out) we should have ourselves a 1.7 Alpha release on Monday.

I've finished up with the re-design of the What's New in Mozilla 1.7 Alpha page and I think it looks decent in winOpera and winIE, although the margins are a little funky in Opera. I also tested on Safari, which looks fine, and Konqueror which does OK except for chopping off the tops of some of the "legend" tabs. This page does get a lot of eyeballs each release and serves as a basis for much of the press coverage so I wanted it to look a bit sharper and to work in as many browsers as possible. Overall, I think it's good enough.

If you're using a browser I didn't test and you're seeing problems, feel free to let me know here in the comments or via e-mail. Comments are especially welcome if they come with a patch :-) Thanks to Bob Clary and Arno for the help.

Also, I've finished with the "rough changelog", a listing of bugs that were probably fixed during the 1.7 Alpha cycle. I say probably because it's not much more than a few smart Bonsai and Bugzilla queries and I haven't verified that each of those bugs was actually fixed during this release cycle.

A few people have asked me how I put that list together so here's the basic process I use:

I query Bonsai for all the changes between the 1.7a trunk opening and the 1.7a release tag. Using Jesse's wonderful "collect buglinks" bookmarklet, I convert the Bonsai list into a Bugzilla buglist. This list is pretty noisy and actually includes quite a few fixes that were present in the 1.6 release so the next step is to ask Bonsai for all of the changes that found their way onto the 1.6 branch, convert that into a buglist and subtracted it from the 1.7a Bonsai buglist. It's still pretty noisy so I take that list and sort on last changed date and cut a few bogus bugs at the top of the list that were just Bonsai linkification silliness (any number in a checkin comment gets converted into a Bugzilla bug link by Bonsai). I then run the list through Bugzilla a second time and trim out bugs where the resolution wasn't changed to fixed between the start and end dates of the 1.7a cycle and then further limit results to bugs which were still in the fixed state.

This gives me a pretty lean list but it usually misses quite a few bugs, sometimes as much as 20%. Commonly missed are bugs where the checkin comment didn't specify a bug number or there was a typo in the comment, bugs where a patch was checked in but the bug wasn't actually resolved (some bugs are held open for further changes,) and bugs which were fixed as the result of a checkin for a different bug. Because of these shortcomings in the Bonsai list, I also come at it from the Bugzilla side.

Now, a simple query for SeaMonkey bugs where the resolution changed to fixed sometime during the development cycle is really pretty noisy and so I do a few things to try to decrease that noise. The first thing I do is to query for the subset of bugs fixed during the cycle which have a patch attached with review flags. Then I make another pass on the list limiting it to bugs where at least one comment was made by someone who had checkin (Bonsai) activity during the development cycle. This helps to eliminate a lot of the bugs where a newbie bug reporter resolved his own bug as Fixed even though there wasn't a documented fix (or any developer activity, for that matter) in that bug. Finally, I subtract from this Bugzilla-generated list all of the bugs found in the Bonsai-generated list and do a quick glance at the summaries to see if any stick out as obviously bogus.

I combine the two lists, reformat a bit and post.

I'm sure I still miss a handful of bugs and I certainly include a few that didn't really get fixed during the cycle but I estimate between 90% and 95% goodness and I don't have the time to read through every bug on the list (about 870 this alpha cycle,) so without help it's not going to get a lot more accurate than this. Still, I think it's useful and if you're interested in what changed during the development cycle, it's probably the best place to start.

If any of you have suggestions about how to improve the list that won't cost me a lot of time -- or even better, that will save me some time, then feel free to let me know in the comments or via e-mail. Actually reviewing the list would be a good first step and if you've got time to help with that, I'll be glad to remove any you find that shouldn't be there. Thanks to timeless for his help clearing out a few bogus bugs over the weekend. Equally important, though, would be finding ways to get overlooked bugs onto the list. There may be some Bugzilla queries that could catch a few I'm missing, but the wider the net you cast, the noisier it gets, and the more time you have to spend weeding out the bogus bugs.

Well, there you have it, "What's New" and the "rough changelog" are done.

It's always nice to find something new to make an app work even better for you. Today I found, via Digital Media Minute, that David Tenser's great Firefox Help site, Tips and Tricks page, has a UserContent.css tip that changes the cursor for links that will open in a new window. Nice.

To follow up on my Firefox link-dump last week, here are some more comments on Firefox 0.8 collected from around the blogosphere:

random observations says "Firefox, O how I love thee. Seriously, this thing kicks ass."

John Wyles says "Please tell me you are not still using Internet Explorer (IE).... Download Mozilla FireFox now and you will not regret it! You'll never go back to that hideous IE ever again!"

kuro5hin says "MSIE 6.0 is a fine internet browser and usually does an adequate job for most people, just like your average toaster does a pretty good job at turning bread into toast.... But for those more-savvy internet users who demand a little more, I heartily recommend giving Mozilla Firebird a try."

Erik Anderson says "With the release of Firefox (the new name for Firebird) I decided it was time to finally make the switch. I'm not sure why I've stuck with IE for so long."

mtpolitics.net says "It's not often that I endorse a product, but I have to let you know that Mozilla Firefox is possibly the best browser around, especially if you are stuck using Internet Exploder.... Sure, Firefox is still < 1.0, but I use it everyday, and it quite simply kicks butt."

Who Censored Blogger Rabbit? says "...the best browser I've used so far. I started using it due to the recommendation of bloggers and I want to help share the wealth. Try it and check out the extensions page. After you've used Firefox you'll want to tell the world also."

Jessica Breckenridge says "I've been using Mozilla firefox after seeing it on a linkdump, and a comment from steve, and I have to say it's great. All the benefits of mozilla, without all the bloat."

eleven (or is it "out of context"?) says "If you use IE? I'm not fixing your computer anymore :op Get FireFox . Really, it's a great browser, has lots of features in, a pop up blocker, etc. It's fast, and so far, pages looks as GOOD as with IE, unless the page was poorly written."

Andrew Ducker says "If you're not using it and you're fed up with the ridiculous popups, adverts, crashes and general annoyances that come with Internet Explorer then you should bloody well be downloading it here."

113th Street says "Mozilla is a good program, but I prefer Firefox. It's extraordinarilly fast and has a very nice feel, with a very large content window. It blocks pop-up ads and has integrated Google search.... Mozilla calls this program a "technology preview" and warns users that bugs remain, but in my experience, this preview works far better than Internet Explorer."

Ross Notes says "If you've previously been disappointed in the look and feel of previous Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Thunderbird releases on OS X, stop wasting your time with Ross Notes and start downloading Firefox.... It is truly a thing of beauty."

ryno_v_6point7 says "just installed FIREFOX and I swah foe GAWD I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever use IE ever again."

PD says "Glorious Firefox. Oh yes. For those not using it yet, Firefox (the successor to Firebird) is out (obligatory button/link below). Rather than rant on about how great it is, here's an article to get even more from this fantastic browser."

Things That Fell Out of My Head says " I am thrilled with it. I use it along with the Guidescope proxy and I just don't ever see ads or popups. Yes, I really mean ever."

nocs @ work says "i have to say this FIREFOX ROCKS!!! mouse gestures is friggin awesome! this is by far the best browser on the planet!"

kyrahjade says "I installed Firefox, which is the new Mozilla Firebird. Get it now! :) The way IE is going, I shudder, twitch, and do other undesirable things when I think about having to care and feed it."

Kev's Useless Bollocks says "Firebird, ahem, Firefox now rocks on Linux. I've stuck with Galeon for ages because Firebird used to render fonts awfully. Now they're *lovely* :-)....What a schweet browser. Sorry Galeon, I won't be using you again :-) In fact even my wife thinks Firefox is awesome and she won't be using IE again in Winders either :-)"

Stupid Evil Bastard says "The newly renamed (again) FireFox includes a Window's installer for the first time and continues the trend of being the fastest and most compliant browser available."

Manuzhai says "While I was a fan of IE 6 some time ago, Firebird and now Firefox have been installed as my default browser for a few months, and I haven't looked back. Firefox beats IE easily when it comes to features like the tabs, pop-up blocks and some pretty good extensions that I can get."

Jim Doty says "Firefox is faster, safer, and better than Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)."

silentblue says "Firefox 0.8 hints at a new level of professionalism within the Foundation with its sharp graphics and user-focused design."

snapturtle blog says "Are you still using Internet Explorer on Windows or god forbid on Mac? Do yourself a favor by downloading Firefox and start to experience features like built-in pop up blocking and tabbed browsing. You can thank me later."

furtive explorations says "Even as a "preview" FireFox is a sexier browser than most and is well worth your time even as a secondary. So small, so fast, so wiley, you can't help but hope it one day outruns the big dog."

the Jer zone says "You've dumped Internet Exploder already, right? If not, do it today. Mozilla.org is out with their latest update (including a name change): Firefox browser."

Cynical-Rose.Net says "Me thinks I'll be using I.E. quite a bit less now."

All4Naught says "OK, I finally down loaded Mozilla Firefox today and had to rant on how frickin cool it is. I've been using Mozilla for some time but I like Firefox even better. Takes a geek to get excited over a browser but for life of me how can you people continue to use Internet Explorer."

Kilrae.ca says "People should be using better software. Why use Internet Explorer when Firefox is so much better and easy to use?"

Warning: Boring Middle Aged Woman says "For Faster Browsing of Web Sites like this, try the Firefox Browser. It's free, it's fast and it's made by the folks who care that we have a choice."

LinuxDig says "First impressions are that this is a great browser. It loads fast, renders pages quicker then any other contending browser and it is not bad to look at either.... Here is my review for Firefox, it is now my primary browser on all my systems. What else can I say?"

Sampo: The Journal of Abundant Media says "I went and downloaded a copy of Firefox and I gotta say... not bad. I like that it's faster and smaller than Mozilla proper. It's prettier, too... and I like the logo."

shawnj says "was very, very impressed. It's the fastest browser I think I've used yet, and the interface is simple, clean, and intuitive. I was so impressed with how it operated, that I'm writing an entry about it. ;)"

brilliant corners says "Get Firefox! This is now my primary browser, and I only use Internet Explorer when needed for work stuff. There's nothing that I miss about IE, that this browser can't do."

Steven's Notebook says "I downloaded upgraded the Mozilla project Firebird browser to Firefox today and am immediately pleased. Startup speed, repaint speed, both very impressive. If you've been messing around with Firebird, time to upgrade. If not, time to give it a try."

simian uprising says "Mozilla has just released a brand new version of their amazing browser Firefox. It has all the obvious features of internet explorer, as well as a horde of new (if you're using IE) and awesome things, such as tabbed browsing (an amazing way to organize your web wanderings), as well as totally functional integrated popup blocking."

belt0033 says "Still using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your primary web browser? Why?"

Hendrik Mans says "But what's really sold the search bar to me is that you can use it entirely through the keyboard. Hit Ctrl-K to put the text input cursor into the search query input field, hit Ctrl-Up/Down to cycle through available search engines, and, obviously, hit Enter to go... it's pure love."

orangetrashface says "Do yourself a favor and quit using Internet Explorer. Too many stupid pop ups and spyware and all sorts of other badness. Go get yourself a copy of Mozilla Firefox (formerly Firebird). Tabbed browsing rocks my butterscotch."

Dailylife @ turtelina.net says "I am so used to IE, that I probably wont change browser for good, but Firefox loads every page so much faster than Internet Explorer, mad."

Genealogy Blog says " haven't seen a pop-up in over a year because Firefox blocks them all. Every last one of them. Yes, surfing the web is a joy.... How compatible is Firefox with the world wide web? I do all of my Internet banking with the browser, pay bills, and buy stuff."

Johnny Logic says "I installed Firefox (a fine web browser) and configured extensions that, effectively, make Firefox my News Aggregator, notebook, and mail app. Even without the extensions, Firefox is worth using-- it is flexible, stable, and intuitive. Highly recommended."

kiwidude says "Get Firefox, the ultimate browser. I use it all the time."

FlaBlog says " I have been underwhlemed Mozilla's efforts in the past, but wow! Mozilla Firefox is fast, fast, fast and impressive. It has tabs, password managment, skins, built-in pop-up blocker and other things ie won't do."

Martin says "Oooh, baby! It's fast, easy to customize and it's been pretty stable so far."

Paolo Massa Blog says "Stop using Internet Explorer. A wonderful alternative: FireFox."

tfosorciM.org says "Initial impressions are that, like Firebird 0.7, it "just works". Nice tabbed browsing. Fast. And, so far, stable."

Thompsonian says "These guys can't pick a name to save their lives, but they make a pretty good web browser."

tin_the_fatty weblog says "Go download Mozilla Firefox, then install the Web Developer Extension, and be happy. No, make it ecstasy."

felisha.com says "I'm in love with the new Firefox 0.8 from Mozzila. It's simple, loads faster than IE, and has Google toolbar integrated."

The Magnificient BaKsHi.us! says "Besides the browsing corrections found in FireFox, I enjoy its browse with tabbing, its godlike ad-blocking (Zero since install), and its huge plugin community.... It is only a 6 MB download and it is the answer to some of your internet strifes."

Jason Alexander's Blog says "Well, I'm totally hooked on Mozilla's latest browser version, FireFox."

Discopants and Haircuts says "GET THIS BROWSER! Firefox, by Mozilla. ..NO POP-UPs, FAST and it's free! BLOWS INTERNET EXPLORER OUT OF THE WATER!"

theantipoet says "I started using Mozilla Firefox instead of IE today. Just wanted to announce that it's wonderful :-) I've already changed my default browser, and am considering using ThunderBird (I think that's the name of it... same company as Firefox) for my e-mail."

hybridanalysis.com says "This browser is FAST! Alot quicker then IE and more complacent then Netscape. I am completely impressed with it's skinable theme abilities and it's plug-ins!"

hello, sorry about the mess says "Is my newest browser friend.... I know, I'm a little late on the bandwagon, but have been pleased enough with it to share."

jace says "Several small tweaks, and I'll dump Safari for Firefox."

xseraphx says "For those of you who haven't tried it, firefox kicks much ass! I would highly recommend it."

wind(the)frog(dot)net says "Given it's free, again I ask why haven't you tried this yet? Give it a go. Just for a week. if you don't like it, then at least you can say that you tried it first. Go on, download it."

bigkittywolf says "i finally got sick of OmniWeb crashing all the time. so i went out and grabbed Mozilla's FireFox (it has a cute icon too!) it is all that and a bag of chips."

Unruly Ramblings says "For those of you that have not tried Firefox yet, go straight there without passing go. My infinite experience of 2 days tells me that it is going to give Safari a run for its money. The area that Firefox surpasses Safari is in its ability to support extensions."

shades of the mad says "i downloaded firefox tonight...it is faster!!!"

GuysBlog says "Firefox Rox! I've been using it for about a week and a half (since Molly Hozschlag pointed it out) and it quickly became my default browser, displacing Firebird."

tygermoonfoxx says "I agreed to try out Firefox and I like it so much that I'm discontinuing the use of Internet Explorer."

Technorotica says "The Bagel.b virus is aiming to hit users. Backdoors; e-mail address plunder; spam relays ... it's got it all. Haven't you moved to FireFox and Thunderbird yet?"

RobZone Weblog says "I want to highly recommend a new browser. I have tried it on windows 2000, windows xp, Macintosh OSX Panther, and Linux. It is made from Mozilla but does things so well. I don't know that I will ever go back to Internet Explorer.It is Firefox."

Ken Robertson's Blog says " I must say that I do like Firefox, if only for the tabbing support!"

Chad's Weblog says "I am very impressed."

i dash pulse says "This browser is just, well, amazing."

An Englishman's Castle says "I was bored by Internet Explorer and so have swapped to Firefox. (And no I'm not a Microsoft hater, I just think it works better.)"

Heiko Hebig says "I have been a hardcore Internet Explorer user even since, let me think, IE 5.0.... Yesterday I installed the Mozilla crew's latest release, Firefox 0.8. Yes, they changed names again but this time they hope that Firefox will remain. Naming issues aside, Firefox is fun. It feels complete and very mature."

nebyoolae says "Download this superior alternative to Internet Explorer and never look back."

ModBlog says "FireFox was released a couple of days ago, and already like nearly every designer i know, from bloggers to GFX desingers are using it."

mustard says "I'm tired of worrying about what websites are potentially hi-jacking my computer. I'm annoyed with the amount of times I had to try to "fix" my Dad's computer over the phone because somebody mistakingly installed spyware.... Insomnia has caused me to finally take a "stand." I just downloaded Mozilla's Firefox browser."

daveXtreme says "I know I've ranted about web browsers before, but to quickly summarize why you should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer: pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, Built-in Search, no major security flaws that let people steal your bank passwords, and standards compliance.... Windows users: go download Firefox -- it has the daveXtreme seal of approval!"

To The Sky! says "I joined the bandwagon and downloaded Firefox as well. Gaaahhh. It's so cool."

Uber-Hindi says " BTW, get Firefox. The browser ROCKS. ;-)"

The Digital Duck says "I've been completely taken over by a new browser by Mozilla, it's called Firefox (previously Firebird) and totally rocks!!! You can download it here Mozilla Firefox. I haven't had any problems with it, and I've even seen one case where it rendered a page correctly where IE messed it up. I know that a lot of you may have encountered this before but it was a first for me. Now I'm sure Firefox isn't perfect... but so far it is in my eyes :D"

Lee Kok Mun's Log says "Installed Mozilla Firefox. Its still not as website-friendly as IE, but its definitely faster and more useful."

If I mentioned you twice, lucky you :-) If I left you off, please drop me a comment or an e-mail and let me know.

The structure of the RAT made primarily from an alloy of aluminum and beryllium called Albemet because of its low density, high modulus and coefficient of thermal expansion that is similar to steel. Other structural materials include aluminum (7075 and 6061), steel (Vascomax C-250, 4140, 302, 303, 440C, A286, Nitronic 60) and titanium (6AL4V). Additional materials include Vespel, Nickel and 18k yellow gold. All of the bearings and gears are lubricated with a grease plate application of Braycote 600 EF micronic and are sealed with Teflon V seals to prevent dust from entering the mechanisms.

Cool! Amazing how space-age the instruments on this spacecraft sound :-)

We've had some difficulties with our mirror network and so the 1.7 Alpha release isn't going to happen today. I'm hopeful that we'll have everything together by Monday morning and can do the release then.

I've just updated the look and feel of the What's New page. It doesn't seem to render very well in IE and I'd love it if someone that knows CSS could help me make it work in IE.

This morning I've been covered up with Mozilla 1.7 Alpha testing so I missed the JPL press briefing. I'll see if I can catch the CSPAN replay or webcast and get some notes posted later tonight or tomorrow morning.

And here it is:

Veronica: It's a little after 10 AM here on the Pacific coast. For spirit is it sol 45 just after 10PM at Gusev. For Opportunity it is sol 26 and a little after 10 AM at Meridiani. Today we're going to hear more about the trenching at Opportunity and Spirit's plans.

Andrea Barbieri (telecom sys engineer): I'm going to talk about the role of the communication network we've established on Mars. We have two orbiters, MGS orbiting since 1997, and Odyssey since 2001. Both communicate with rovers in short 15 minute sessions. Typically each rover are using Odyssey for two passes per sol and MGS for one pass per sol. MGS had a very important role covering EDL for both landers. There is a third element in this network, the Mars Express orbiter. 2 weeks ago Spirit demonstrated comm ability with this orbiter so it's international now. As of yesterday both rovers have transferred over 10 Gbits of data to the Earth. The second point is that more than 80% of the data is not direct through x-band, but rather through the MGS and Odyssey orbiters. The other point I want to make is that since we can connect with orbiters at 250 Kb/sec, this transfer of data is much more efficient. The orbiters have much bigger solar arrays and antennae so they are not as energy and bandwidth constrained as the rovers. I want to recognize the many organizations outside of JPL that have contributed to this. Lockheed Martin, Simcil Electronics, French Space Agency, and Malin Space Science.

Steve Squyres (principal investigator): Ever since we first opened our eyes and took a look around at Meridiani Planum we knew that we had two classes of problems, what's going on with the soil and what's going on at that outcrop. Basic strategy was to start with a good reconnaissance, then take some time getting that data down and while we do that really investigate the soil at and below the surface. That gives us time to get that data, really analyze it and while that goes on, really investigate that soil. As we're doing the soil investigation we'll plan assault on the outcrop. Where we stand is that we've got the first preliminary data on the soil and planned our initial attack on the outcrop. When we looked at the soil we recognized at least two materials. One, the very fine grained stuff, the sand, and then two, the coarse-grained stuff, one component of which is the spherical granules. The question was, what's the distribution within the soil. At the surface that's easy, you look around with Pancam. We had no idea what lay underneath so that's one of the pieces of the puzzle we wanted to go after. So we wanted to dig a hole. Would we see granules underneath or are they just at the surface. If we do see them underneath, are they just the spherical ones, just the angular ones, a mixture of the two? So we used the rover's wheel to dig a hole and stuck the arm in there. Eric will describe how we did it.

Eric Baumgartner (robotic arm lead eng.): We've given the arm a very strenuous workout over the last 3 sols. We've put the arm down in at least 5 locations in this trench, taken over 30 MI images and placed the Mossbauer and APXS in at least locations in the trench, one at the bottom and one on the wall. This animation is from the planning tool we used, sped up quite a bit. It covers the three days of activity. Complex but enjoyable planning activity. The IDD is a lot like a human arm, with a shoulder, an elbow, a wrist and a turret. It's about 4kg in mass carrying a 2kg payload. The accuracy of this system has been unparalleled on Mars _or_ on Earth, accuracy of within 5 mm, less than 1/4th of an inch. Even more precise is repeatability. We can repeat to within less than 1/3rd mm. Second animation is the still frames from the FHazcams. (ed. this animation and still pic slideshow is awesome).

Albert Yen (science team): These MI pictures are about 3 cm across. In the floor of Meridiani Planum we've got these spherules, likely coming from the outcrop and other granules from higher elevations above. The fact that you can see the sand-sized particles that make up the matrix here indicates that they're about 100 microns in dimension, consistent with them being brought in from the wind. In this video we can see the surface "kicked up". This MI picture is of the material on the wall of the trench. It's a mosaic of two MI pictures. We see the sand-sized grains cemented together. There's a idea that's been around since Viking time that water vapor changing between atmosphere and subsurface mobilizes salts in the upper few cm of the surface or more depositing a weak cement holding these grains together. We're looking for evidence of any salt products. This next image is of the wall of the trench and we're seeing spherules embedded. They appear shiny or polished. Data will hopefully help us figure out what's altering them. The final image is at the bottom of the trench, the imprint of the Mossbauer. What you can't see is the sand-sized grains. MI can't resolve them so they are finer than what's at the surface. When we get APXS and Mossbauer data back we hope to be able to tell more about the differences. I'll hand it back to Steve for the big picture

Steve: I got good news for Eric, if you liked the complexity of what we did in the trench, you're gonna love what we're going to try to do on the outcrop. While we've been doing the Opportunity arm moves, her comm system was sending back the highest resolution, most comprehensive view of that outcrop. We are using that to plan what comes next. There are 3 questions we have about the outcrop. 1. how were these materials deposited, air or water? 2. where did those spherules come from, dropped from above or grown in place? 3. what's the composition of outcrop and what does that tell us about the possibility of water involvement. What we've been doing during the trenching is looking at a wonderful piece of data that I'm about to cue up now. This is a pan across the outcrop. Mosaic from dozens of Pancam images from the "shoot and scoot". this isn't even all of it. We're zooming in on a feature we've named El Capitan. The place we're going to go next. The outcrop is exposed in it's entire stratigraphic section, the whole stack of rocks is well exposed. Different kinds of materials here. Lower portion gently sloped. Upper portion much steeper, even overhangs. Nice thing about going here is that from a single parking place we can get at both upper and lower part. We'll use the arm to try to get answers to those three questions. We want to go to a place where there's lots of those spherules. We want to grind into the rock. Put the APXS and see if it's sulfur rich all the way down. We'll do it on both the upper and lower units at El Capitan. While we're doing that we'll be looking at the next target.

Dave Des Marais (science team): We're at an interesting point in Gusev crater. We're well into a traverse. The first graphic is a map put together on top of the MGS image. This was put together by Dr. Larry Crumpler. We'll be seeing changes in material as we traverse toward the crater, doing one kind of stratigraphy. The finer-grained material is interesting. We're in a situation where there are segments of the landscape we cannot see until we get further.We're seeing new stuff now. In the foreground you see a depression with fine-grained material and in the background there are larger boulders. We hope to find other rock types that speak to other processes. The little hollow, Laguna Hollow contains fine-grained material and in going to such a place we hope to get a more pure concentrate. Next image shows the drive into the hollow. When we looked at our wheel marks we found that the material was disrupted and some stuck to the wheel. Could be because it's fine-grained, because it's salty, or because it has some water in it. This next image shows pebbles in clusters and lines which could be similar to "patterned ground" from expansion and contraction. You can get that with freeze-thaw, or in salt flats, you can do it in mud flats. In any case, either we're looking at evidence of very fine-grained material, salt, or even a brine. So we want to trench here.

Q. When will you dig at the hollow at Gusev.

Dave: this afternoon we did planning for sequences. Similar to what you saw at Meridiani. Try longer rotations for a deeper trench if possible. Perhaps in a day or two we'll be sharing images like we just saw from Meridiani.

Q. How do you explain the finer grained materials down lower.

Albert: the 100 micron grains at the surface we expect to be moved by the wind so they can come from anywhere. Finer grained material is puzzling.

Steve: It's hard to pin down. We expect them to be pretty common over the surface of Mars. Global dust storms continually blanket the surface. But because the atmosphere is so thin, it can't sustain the larger 100 micron grains for very long but the really fine stuff might be atmospheric transfer. What might be going on here is that you had a process that created a mixture of the very fine grains and heavier grains. Over time the heavier stuff can be blown in. Or you could have the really fine-grained stuff lifted up and blown away and you get a lag deposit left behind.

Q. Spherules below the surface have a different reflectivity. Different composition?

Albert: lighting is similar so it's not purely a lighting effect. There could be a coating but we don't understand completely.

Q. You're seeing these spherules above and below the surface as well as embedded in the bedrock. Does that tell you anything?

Steve: the spherules we see in the soil, we don't know where they originated. We know that some fraction of the spherules are coming from the bedrock. But there's a lot of evidence that there are other spherules coming from somewhere else. If you look above the outcrop you see spherules. These things won't roll uphill :) I don't think we're going to be able to piece the whole story of the spherules until we climb out of our hole and do analysis up on the surface.

Q. About the MI pictures at Meridiani, on sol 19, in the trench wall, you can see thread-like features? Have you seen these? What could they be?

Steve: You've got a sharp eye craig. Yes, we have seen these very fine thread-like features. They are mm to a few cm in length. They are extremely thin, tens of microns. Before I would get too excited, I would recall that this vehicle landed with quite a lot of fabric. I'll be honest, we don't know.

Q. To follow up, if we rule out wild flower roots, are you brainstorming to find out what these are.

Steve: I don't know that these things are Martian. We could climb out of this hole, get as far away from where we bounced and rolled along and take a look around.

Q. Steve, you gave us three hypothesis. Are those still standing.

Steve: yes they're still standing. No more new hypothesis in play. We haven't been back to the outcrop since we developed those. Not till we get to El Capitan will we start to winnow it down.

Albert: there are regions with higher concentrations and we hope to be able to get their minerology and chemistry.

Q. The shiny factor, what does that say, anything on earth even remotely similar.

Albert: if you bury something the processes are different from what you have on the surface.

Q. Seeing deeper layers from the crater as you get closer. Can you talk about how you know which rocks in the ejecta come from which layers?

Dave: two aspects. first is to imagine what happens when you have this impact, a detonation that takes the rock and flips it up and flops it upside-down in a flower pattern. As you approach the crater you encounter some of the older material that's thrown out further. We're now beginning to see an increase in the abundance of rocks and expect some of that to be from deep within the crater. The second question, how we figure out which layer they came from. Pancam is a great tool with its color filters. As we get to the rim we can look down and see exposed rock along the walls of the crater and compare with the Pancam to see a match of the rocks we've seen and more closely analyzed on the trip up to the rim. There's always the hope that we can go down into the crater. One of the reasons we wanted to get to the crater by around sol 60 was that if we can go down in then we wanted to get there with enough life in our legs to do it.

Q. In Laguna Hollow, are you saying that the clinging to the wheels that this brine process is still existing or something that did exist.

Dave: you can have brines at very low temperatures. Concentrations might not be very high but might be enough to create the stickiness. Could reflect an ongoing process.

Q. So there could be liquid water there right below the surface?

Dave: to caution, you don't have to have much moisture to cause this stickiness, I don't expect to see a pool of water below the surface.

Q. You're more than half-way though the projected life. Can you say how much is left? Batteries, sun, etc?

Steve: not the right people to talk about that but I'll take a shot. These vehicles are holding up really well. The 90 days was always 'that's when the warrantee expires' but we got some darned good hardware here and they're gonna last a good bit longer. Depends a lot on predicting Martian weather but the power system and thermal systems are behaving well. All of those point to a longer than 90 sol lifetime. I won't say it's going to be 110 days or 150 or 210 days but I will say ;-) that I have talked to people at my apartment complex about staying here through the summer :D

Q. Steve, you mentioned high sulfur content. Can you tell me what the possible implications of sulfur are and what it would mean if you do see it in the interior.

Steve: if we see it at the surface only then it's some kind of coating and that would tell us something about recent processes but it wouldn't tell us about the formation of the outcropping. We know that this outcrop is weathering away. If we see it below the surface then there's the possibility that it's telling us something fundamental about the composition of this outcrop but you also have to look at the minerals, not just the elements. This could be telling us there's some kind of sulfate. They form in different ways, some volcanic, some form in water. If we find a sulfate that is the kind that forms only in the presence of liquid water, that would be very exciting.

Veronica: Starting next week we're going to go to just one briefing a week, Thursdays at 10 AM.

We had an interesting geographic trivia session at the Mozilla Foundation offices this evening and it got me thinking about how almost all of the answers to all of the questions that I ever have can be found online.

Well, Google has "Answers" and now you have "Asa"! I'm starting a new project here at the old notblog called "Ask Asa" where you all post questions and I'll do my best to give a useful answer. This isn't intended to be a "stump Asa" feature, more like a "Hm. I bet Asa could help me with that" thing.

So, if there's any interest, once a week I'll post a "Ask Asa" column where you all can ask questions. I'll pick one question to answer and post my answer for the next week's column.

Let's get this ball rolling. Do you have questions about Mozilla, or Mars or anything else that you think I might be able to answer? If so, post 'em here and I'll try to answer the one I find most interesting.

We're getting very close to a Mozilla 1.7 Alpha release, so if you know of any major problems that should block an alpha release, be sure to nominate them with the blocking1.7a? bug flag.

I've got my hands full with another Mozilla BugDay! so I won't be able to get the briefing notes posted until this evening. If you're looking for something to do between now and then, why not download the latest Mozilla Firefox release and join us for BugDay! on the server irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine?

Veronica: It is sol 44 for Spirit at Gusev, sol 24 at Meridiani Planum.

Richard Cook: You can tell by the fact that Pete and I are both here that something must be going on. Obviously it's been a long Presidents day weekend and a number of the team have spent some time with their families but we did get a lot done on both vehicles getting good science. Spirit accomplished sol 44 earlier today. Last press conference on sol 40, we tried our 256 Kb/sec UHF communication with Odyssey and that worked fine, we got down 148 Megabits of data, a new record, another opportunity to boost the amount of science data we could get. We did a short drive to Stone Council area that day and spent the next day doing IDD on sand and repairing for sol 42 rock IDD. On sol 43 we did a 27 meter traverse but had plans to do something longer than that but got busy with IDD. Today, yesterday I should say, we did some more IDD observations on soil before the 22 meter traverse. We've done a total of 108 meters with Spirit which breaks the Sojourner record of 103 meters. Opportunity had another exciting few days exploring the outcrop and doing some trenching. Starting at sol 19 at Bravo site, one of the areas of the outcrop, we used the IDD on that, then did a drive to the Charlie location using visual odometry capability, first time we'd done that to automatically track to a feature and compensate for wheel slippage. On sol 20 we were going to place the IDD down and ran across a sort of IDD feature, a kinematic singularity, we can't move it the way we intend and have to approach it from a different direction. Sol 21 we drove to the trench location and did some pre-trenching on sol 22 and did the actual trench on sol 23. Very active, very busy over the last 5 days. Final piece of information is that there is a point in a project when you've spent a lot of time putting together a capable team and one of the unfortunate things in this business is that you have to begin to say goodbye to members of the team as they go off to do other things. The first person we're going to have to say goodbye to is the project manager, Pete Theisinger who has been asked to go work on the Mars Science Laboratory '09 project. I'm sure it'll be as big a challenge as MER has been and he's up to the task. Wish him a lot of luck. From my own personal point of view and what a pleasure it's been to work with him for the last 4 years. We talk a lot about the quality of the team, that the team makes it possible, and you cannot have a team without a leader and it's a credit to him that he's been able to assemble and deal with this group of people. We owe a great debt of gratitude for his ability to manage this diverse group. He has a zen-like quality, at times a requirement on a project like this. But there's also some hard points in there as well, he's been able clearly communicate to the team what are the important things to making this a success and at the top of that list is risk and making sure we always keep our eye on the ball. Getting the mission to succeed and achieve what we're supposed to is our number one objective, nothing else matters. Schedule doesn't matter, performance doesn't matter, it's getting it to be a success that's the number one thing. And finally from my own personal point of view, I've had the fortune of getting to work for some really great project managers at JPL and I include Pete in that list. This is a learning experience for each one of us, not like we do these things 10 or 15 times in a career and each one of us learn what is possible and how other people would do it and it's been a pleasure and an honor to work with Pete and he's taught me a lot about what it is to be a project manager.

Pete Theisinger: Thanks Richard. Laboratory last week went through a couple of steps in response the President's initiative and I was asked to become the Project Manager for Mars Science Laboratory which is in phase A scheduled for launch Oct 2009 and it was easy to do because I had such a highly capable deputy manager behind me so that there's not going to be a drumbeat missed as I walk out the door. This has been a very rewarding job for the 46 months that I've been the project manager for MER. It's been a great challenge. The team is great. As I've said this last week, this job has not really been very hard for me because of the quality of the team, the dedication of the team and the commitment of the team. MER will achieve great results with Richard's leadership. I'm going on to another challenge. We'll continue to have wonderful press conferences and wonderful data as you've gotten used to and I'll be back in a few years for a press conference like this to talk about the upcoming MSL landing.

Ray Arvidson: I've worked with JPL engineers since 1970 and I've known Pete I think since I was a kid and this is the best experience that I've had in terms of interactions of scientists and engineers and it starts at the top with Pete and Richard in terms of providing that camaraderie. Let me give you an anecdotal experience. The planning process is very intense. Begins in the morning of a sol and ends in the early morning of the next sol in order to get the uplink together. Last night, it was actually the case that the engineering lead was actually telling me to put more sequences in -- more science sequences in! I was holding back, saying do we really want to put this in. The engineering and science elements really interface beautifully and I think that's a measure of Pete's leadership and Richard's leadership that that's the case. This has been an excellent experience all the way around. Pete, you've got a really big job ahead of you :) Now, let me get you up to date with Spirit and Opportunity. Remember that we're doing robotic field geology. On Spirit we're in the middle of a long set of drives with traverse science, beginning at the lander and moving up to the rim of Bonneville crater. The idea is that impact crater would have overturned the stratigraphy and exposed it for our viewing pleasure. We're about 108 meters toward the rim of the crater. This graphic is a Navcam view that looks back at the lander. We've driven another 40 meters since this was taken. You can see our tracks where the lighter dust was disturbed. One of the things we want to do is look back and notice the extent that the dust settles out of the atmosphere onto the surface and decreases the contrast on our tracks. We're also looking out ahead and picking science targets and acquiring data. This next graphic is a Pancam panorama from sol 44. The horizon is a couple hundred meters away, the rim, our target and we expect to reach it in some number of sols and that depends on what we find on the way. We're looking for new materials. Our next target, about 20 meters away, a little hollow. This image is a noseprint of the Mossbauer plate next to the rock called Mimi. What we think we're looking at is a soil like material put together by wind and perhaps cemented a bit. Awaiting results of Mossbauer results to put the whole story together. Let's move on to Opportunity. We're in this 22 meter diameter crater, about 3 meters deep. We've driven about 35 meters. We've been keeping toward the bottom of the crater to avoid slippage but we've made some attempts to get up to the rocks and do in situ science. We've done a number of complex traverses on a slope. This graphic shows the complex traverses we've been doing. The spectacular event on sol 23, we dug a trench. I'll let Jeff, a rover planner, and Rob Sullivan from Cornell, tell you about this massive ;-) 8 cm trench we dug. This is part of a coordinated experiment where we're doing remote sensing and IDD deployment with MI, Mossbauer, and APXS data prior to the trench and we're in the process now of deploying IDD after the trench was dug.

Jeffrey Biesiadecki: Yesterday we dug a nice big hole on Mars. I've been working with Rob, and Ray and a number of other people over the last couple of months to develop sequences that causes the rover to dig holes and trenches using its wheels. We ran one of those sequences yesterday on MER-B. We took a patient gentle approach, a gradual process that digs deeper and deeper as it goes on. We started with the wheels in a turn in place position. We start with the right front wheel digging by itself, half a degree in the negative direction and we image that with the front Hazcam so we can see the initial scraping of material that we dig up. then the rover will turn in place to the right about 12 degrees and followed by another running of the right front wheel, this time in the opposite direction, kicking up material behind the wheel. We'll turn in place back to the left, running the right front wheel and it continues this process over and over again as long as we let it, growing a wider and deeper trench as it goes. On each end before we reverse directions the rover will drive onto the material to compress and compact the material so it doesn't fall back down into the hole we're digging. Finally, as we're driving from one end to the other we have the rover pause and do an extra scraping maneuver to prevent a mound from forming in the middle of the trench. On flat ground we let this sequence run for 11 passes and we can get quite deep. But on Meridiani we're on the side of a crater on a 9 degree slope so we made adjustments so we just did 6 passes. We also started with an initial turn to make the trench downslope. This animation is rover data. It ends with a 2 meter backup so that the IDD is in position to view the trench. These images are the trenching in progress. 6 minutes of motor over 22 minutes. 66 mobility commands. We grabbed about 8 images. Time for imaging and cooling motors.

Rob Sullivan: This is the best view we've had of the trench so far. We don't have color images yet because we can't see the wheels with the Pancam up on the mast so these are the Hazcam during digging before we pulled back the 2 meters. This image takes the stereo data and turns it into a 3-D model. The trench is a little over 20 cm wide and about 50 cm long. Deepest area is 10 cm. Most areas are about 9 cm. We've only had this final image for a short while but so far catching the science teams attention is the high contrast and the cloddy nature of some of it. Not sure the cause of the contrast. Could be a distinctive material or just compacted fines that reflect differently. We're looking at the cloddy material with MI. Then the MI and the arm are moving down to that brightest spot then the Mossbauer and APXS will perform long integrations. We'll compare with the before shots. We'll also compare the MI images taken down at the bottom with those taken right of center. Over the next couple of days we'll be getting more images in. Science team considering taking an extra day to look at the wall materials more.

Q. Are you seeing the pebbly things in the trench?

Rob: the reason we're here, and let me pause to congratulate the engineers who got us here, a really difficult and ambitious drive, so why are we here, well Mini-TES determined that it was richer in hematite. We drove here to determine if this hematite is a lag deposit or something more intrinsic to the soil and can be found at depth as well. That's one of the reasons we're spending the time to look with our spectrometers out on the arm. The Sperules, we found looking at our tracks that those tend to get pressed down into the surface so I wouldn't expect to see those sticking out of our tracks in the trench. We might be able to spot the tops of them with the MI images.

Ray: we'll look at the walls of the trench to see if they're embedded there.

Q. Pete, what was your favorite moment out of this mission so far?

Pete: There are four favorite moments. Pictures after landing on the 3rd and 24th and the pictures of the empty nest on egress days. That's why we do this, to get to those moments. Those are my favorite moments.

Q. And what will you take with you?

Pete: hopefully a lot of good people :D Any effort like this has a lot of lessons learned, good people with great experience, so a lot to take with me.

Q. (lost the stream here and didn't get the question)

Ray: for Spirit, the focus is on the traverse science. We should get to Bonneville expeditiously and depends on what we discover of new materials on the way. Once we're on the rim the issue becomes can we get into the crater or do we head for the hills. We are using the DIMES images and the new MGS c-proto high-res images. The other thing we're doing is using Mars Express assets. Those data are just being digested now to help with Spirit. For Opportunity, we did this great excavation so we want to take advantage for a couple of days then the intent is to move back to the wall rocks and do a whole suite of measurements including pre and post RATting on the outcrops. After that we'll exit the crater and head to the crater that's 600 meters east and the idea there is to do a radial ejecta traverse similar to what we're doing with Bonneville. The orbital assets are being used to advantage to get topography, morphology and to place us in a regional context.

Q. Was the right wheel designed differently from the other wheels for trenching?

Jeffrey: none of the wheels were designed expressly for digging but we are able to dig nice holes with them anyway. We have a mirror sequence for the left front wheel but we picked right because we wanted to dig with the downhill wheel. Front wheels tend to work a little better than the rear and center wheels because they have a little bit more pressure because they don't have the bogey.

Richard: the features you saw on the wheel there are actually on all of the wheels.

(stream signal problems, missed the last few minutes of the briefing.)

Next briefing is Thursday at 10 am PST.

Alex Bishop, over at mozillaZine gathered up all of the press on the Firefox 0.8 release. If you haven't seen enough Firefox news, go give Alex's post a look.

Alex's got the tech press covered, so I took a few minutes to gather up some Firefox feedback from blogland and here's what I came up with. It's by no means a complete list, so if you reviewed 0.8 and I neglected you, drop me an e-mail or post here and I'll add you to the list.

William Grosso, at O'Reilly Network Developer Weblogs says, "I decided to check it out, and wow it feels good."

Claudine Chionh at Claudine's Weblog says "I heart Firefox."

Rich Bowen, at DrBacchus' Journal comments, "I don't get terribly excited about new browsers very often. If it loads most pages, that's probably enough for me. But the new version of Firefox is just amazing."

Charlie Rich, Jr at Daily stuff proclaims, "It's probably THE most compliant browser I've seen as far as web standards go, and everything looks nice in it."

Henri Yandell, at bayard said, "Wow. Firefox is impressive. Very impressive. Unless some nasty issue crops up, today marks the end of my IE usage except for grabbing binaries of firefox to install."

Scott Mcdowell, at Slowchildren.com says, "So here�s my message to all Internet Explorer users, �It�s time to switch.� Mozilla Firefox (which used to be called Firebird) is a much better way to view the web than IE."

Michael Pereckas, at BeigeJournal posts, "If 0.8 is this good, just imagine 1.0. I highly recommend it."

Robert Stewart, at WombatNation says, "I can't say it enough times. Dump IE and use Firefox."

Don Park, at Don Park's Daily Habit said, "I predict that Firefox browser marketshare will be near 20% by end of year 2004. It's that good and getting better."

Matt Burris, at Good Blimey declares, "If you're not using it, and you're using Internet Explorer or AOL's browser, by all means get Firefox. Don't you know that IE/AOL is bad for you?"

Kristal, at echo says, "I upgraded from Mozilla Firebird to Mozilla Firefox over the past few days and I�m really enjoying it so far."

George Edward Purdy, over at No Name, No Slogan blasts, "Custom searches in Firefox. This is better than you know."

Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture says, "In addition to faster rendering times than IE (on my machine anyway) it features tabbed browsing, popup blocking, built-in Googling and other niceties."

Barry Irwin, at Static in the Ether said, "Firefox 0.8 particularly impresses me, its fast faster than IE, and so much nicer to use."

Jim Trosper, at Blather://03 posts, "The Gecko engine combined with a very luscious interface. What more could a person want? Oh, and several nifty built-in features."

Jim Bray, at Jim Bray: The Blog says, "Fastest browser I've ever used."

Matthew Mastracci, at grack.com said, "I'm impressed with the number of people that have started using this browser - people who I would have never expected to switch have done so. You never hear the words 'this site doesn't work in Firefox' .... Overall, I'm very impressed with the polish of this 0.8 release. It's solid, fast and so far beyond IE in terms of standards compliance."

Ken Liu, at The Tech Blog of Ken posts, "Mozilla Firefox (.8) is mind-bogglingly fast, even on my PIII 600 MHz laptop. Fast as in 'did this thing read my mind and preparse the next page?'"

Donn, at eDonn.com says, "I opened up my web browser today, and realised how I loved its new look of my web browser (I'm using Mozilla Firefox on an Apple eMac)."

Requiem, at Requiem Overflow says, "firefox rulz and if you aren't using it im sorry for you."

Philip Dhingra, at Philosophistry says, "Thanks to Firefox, Mozilla's newest beta browser, you can combine the utility of RSS feeds with the aesthetics of the web."

Dwight Wallbridge, at Geek Blog said, "For playing BlogShares the tabbed browsing is a major blessing, and the same goes for posting. I have to say I give this new version an A, but only because there are a few little annoyances that need fixing."

MVP, at retroactively testifies, "I'm hooked. [Edit] Usually I don't do endorsements, but this browser really is better than Internet Explorer. And it's Freeware."

Mark Stevens, at Momentum said, "There�s a new Firefox in town and it�s the hippest, happening web browser this side of� well, anything this side of Microsoft�s Internet Explorer, to be brutally honest."

Ceri Jones, at away with words says, "A fast upcoming alternative, however, is Mozilla Firefox, a fast, feature-packed browser based on the open source Mozilla code. Check it out now."

Arvind Satyanarayan, at C:\Arvind.blog declares, "I have finally joined the rest of the world and adopted Mozilla Firefox as my default browser."

Ed de Quincey, at blogaholic says, "Whenever I've spoken to someone about it the first thing they say is that "it just feels better" and that's the best way of describing it - go and get it!"

Mike Wendland, at tech:knowledge said, "I find it every bit as fast, efficient and robust as Safari and have encountered no Web pages that it can't handle, unlike Safari since Apple sent the 1.2 update through."

Somabish, at Somabish days remarks, "i'm trying out the mozilla firefox browser, and it's so much fun! :D "

Dongdong Zhang, at Dong's Blog says, "Today I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox, I am impressed. It looks better than IE, the tabbed window is great, and I can access my IE favoriates directly, and It display Chinese website just fine. I am sure I will find more pleasent features as I using it."

T1Pimp, at Huggybeer posts, "I personally thought Mozilla had some strong qualities but never could get myself to use it. It was slow, big, my site rendered better under IE, etc. I've grabbed Firefox and have to say... so far I'm impressed."

Jason Burfield, at Bitching, Moaning and Other Fun Stuff says, "FireFox...good stuff. Looks much better than Mozilla, at least on my machines. Seems to render fonts much, much better. It is also very, very fast. Go get it right now."

Chris Hileman, at TechnoBlog said, "This week Mozilla Firefox came out, and of couse like past versions of Phoenix/Firebird it totally kicks ass."

Katrina Silvermoon, at katrinacat proclaims, "Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. Don't argue, you know it's true."

Jeremy, at Happy Panic Productions says, "Have you been itching to throw the MS Internet Exploder yoke off ever since Netscape turned into a huge steaming pile of software poo? Then try Firefox today"

Will Pate, at Will Pate.org posts, "Since Monday I've been convincing people left and right to use Firefox. I've got Sandy Peardon to download it, my Dad (a longtime IE stalwart) is giving it a shot, Nat Babineau's loving it and my friend Julien also enjoys it. I also spoke to a dozen business owners in Summerside this week, I can only hope they give it a try. Anyone want to start up a competition like Gimli and Legolas in Lord of the Rings?"

Chris Gonyea, at Chris' Corner posts, "I must say, the direction Firefox is taking is exactly how my vision of what a web browser looks, does, and feels like is. The Firefox team and everyone at the Mozilla Foundation have been doing an incredible job."

Will Turner, at In Perspective says, "I have for the most part given up on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Given that I am still in the stone age of dial-up internet access I need a browser that is quicker. Firefox is that browser. It is a lot faster than IE. "

Michael Oliver, at Dispositive says, "My eyes have seen the glory. I just downloaded and installed the new Mozilla FireFox browser (version 0.7 I think) and I am in love... This is the first browser that 1) works like IE 2) Contains all of the features I want (and some I didn't even think of) 3) Doesn't render most webpages like abstract art."

Eitan Levi, at skrud.net said, "If you�re not already using Firebird/Firefox/Phoenix, I suggest you start. Once you�ve experienced tabbed browsing you never go back."

Jack, at foundation.eleven.com says, "For now I think I'm done with Internet Explorer"

Stuart Homfray, at Weblog says, "On the whole, Firefox, like it's predecessor Firebird, is a fine, nippy little browser. I'm happy to keep it as my default browser for the foreseeable future - it seems at least as stable as IE 6, it's definitely smaller than IE 6, it supports Web Standards more than IE 6, and unlike IE 6, it's Open Source!"

Joe, at Attaboy says, "If you're looking for better browser performance, conside taking Firefox for a test drive. You might never go back to that 'other' browser."

If you happened to hear some clueless news person this weekend mention "first use of the interplanetary network" and wondered how we were communicating with the rovers on Mars before this "first use", well, chalk it up to another case of a clueless news media.

It seems that a lot of people (especially the generally confused mainstream news media) are giving a bit of coverage to NASA's press release about the first international interplanetary network and leaving off the only bit of the release that's actually news, the international part. We've had an interplanetary network for some time with the Odyssey and Mars Global surveyor orbital assets, and we've actually had an international network with the DSN components at Canberra, Goldstone, and Madrid. What's new here, and newsworthy here, is that we have a third Martian orbiter called Mars Express that's operated by the ESA and we've used that asset to communicate with the NASA/JPL Spirit rover.

The CNN ticker seems to think it's doing some sort of service reducing this to something like "interplanetary network comes online".

TV news actually makes you stupider.

Doron Rosenberg has packaged up a nice Flash XPInstaller for Linux Mozilla which installs Flash to the user's Mozilla profile. If you've had difficulty with Flash on Linux, give Doron's package a try.

I haven't laughed this loud in a loooong time. You really must install the firesomething extension.

On each launch, it cycles through different combinations of these two lists to give Firefox a new name:

animals - ant, bug, cat, dog, dragon, emu, frog, goat, horse, impala, jackalope, kangaroo, kitsune, lemur, lizard, manatee, monkey, narwhal, oyster, panda, pig, quail, raccoon, sheep, starfish, tiger, unicorn, vulture, whale, worm, yak, zebra

forces of nature (or something) - Fire, Water, Lightning, Space, Moon, Super, Power

When I'm a little further caught up on my plumbing emergency and my work that's fallen behind over the last couple of days because of the flooded house, I'll post briefing notes.

Thursday, February 12, 10:15 A.M. (PST)

Natalie: It's about 3am at Gusev and about 3 in the afternoon at the Opportunity site. We'll have updates on the rovers as well information about the Mars educational program.

Art Thompson: Very pleased to report that we have two very busy rovers on the surface of Mars and that translates to two very busy operations teams. Report card on Spirit is that she's in outstanding health. For the past 7 days Spirit has been a fully functional science platform with absolutely no ill effects from earlier memory problems. Current big picture plan to drive to Bonneville crater 340 meters away. We have started the drive and completed approximately 58 meters of that traverse. 3 successful sol drives. Sol 36 we did 6 meter drive. On sol 37 we did 27 meter drive and I'd like to show a movie on the Hazcam as we performed that drive. Snapshots, not realtime, much faster than we go. We're also taking a bunch of images and making a goodness map which tells us where it's safe to traverse. This second video shows colors, green and yellow are safe, orange and red are areas the rover will want to avoid. Taken from today's 24 meter drive on sol 39. On sol 38 HGA was shaded by the PMA early in the morning so we lost the morning session and didn't get the drive done. Successful at commanding LGA and HGA sessions later in the day (yesterday) and did in fact drive today to a place we're calling Stone Council. The plan is to be attempting to drive to Bonneville and maximize our ability to maximize driving per sol. We'll be staying at Stone Council for a day and doing in situ measurements with the instruments on the IDD. At Opportunity, we're cruising the outcrop. Doing a survey of the outcrop. Started at a place called Stone Mountain. This overhead picture shows the targets, Stone Mountain, then Alpha, then Bravo and Charlie. We were successful at getting to Charlie. We did experience significant slippage early and have studied that and corrected to overdrive up-slope and underdrive downlslope. We pretty much understand the slippage problem. At targets we spend the night, then first thing in the morning do Pancam and an IDD touch and go with MI and Mossbauer, then stow the IDD and drive to the next target. The only problem at Opportunity is that on sol 18 one of the ground modeling tools didn't accurately reflect and we failed to complete the master sequence as planned and so we corrected and executed today. Longer-term to drive over to Sand Patch which has a higher hematite concentration. On sol 21 we'll prep to trench. On sol 22 we'll trench. On sol 23 we'll stick the IDD into the trench and on sol 24 drive to a place we're calling El Capitan.

Mark Lemmon: Images we've been getting from MI at both sites have been fabulous. But there's much more than meets the eye in these images. This image shows the MI and the white arrow points to the lens. The yellow disk is the lens cover that keeps dust from the MI and it is semi-transparent so we can take images through it. First video shows the type of images we take with MI. We usually take a series of 5 images to make sure that one is in focus. MI has a 4 mm depth of field. The series of images is also useful for determining depth, topography. By looking at focus we can build 3-D models of the topography. We've looked at the floor of the crater itself and it's exciting. In particular, this area is covered by finescale sandgrains and these irregular grains coming down from the outcrop potentially and the most spectacular are these rounded spherules being called blueberries because they're relatively bluer than their surroundings. They're actually the size of a bb. This technique of looking with multiple images can also give us anaglyphs. The next still shows a place where the Mossbauer has pushed one of those spherules down into the sand. The other thing we can do is go beyond the anaglyphs so we can push the process and this video shows the best way we have of looking at this kind of terrain. Zoom in from Navcam to color Pancam to MI image. This scene was built from that focal series. This is a depth map video. These are the highest resolution topo maps we've taken of another planet.

Don Banfield: Tough act to follow but I'm going to tell you about some atmospheric studies. Critical because there was concern about the atmosphere during landings. MER rovers giving us good profile data of the atmosphere which should help in future landings. Also, currently the agent of geologic change on Mars is wind. In the past with Viking and Pathfinder we had temperature data at only about this 1-1.5 meter off the surface. With the MER rovers we can use mini-TES to look at the thermal emission of the atmosphere. Much richer dataset. Mini-TES designed originally to look down but can look 30° up. Mike Smith put together the algorithms to build this graph. This is a plot of temperature across time, an 8 or 9 minute block of time after 10 am local solar on sol 12 at the Spirit site. New way to use Mini-TES. We hadn't even thought of this until we got to the surface. Stare up at the sky and every 2 seconds, looking up at the sky take a spectrum and get a profile. Red line is temp at 500 m up, -51°C -58°F Yellow line is temp at 30 meters up. Both lines slowly trending upwards. Red line jitters are just noise but the yellow line has huge jumps on a minute time scale. This is a significant change. This second plot shows the same temperature as a function of time and altitude above the surface on the Y axis up to 1 kilometer. Seeing warm and cold blobs passing over the rover down near the surface. We think that the ground is warming, transmitting heat to atmosphere, warm rises and goes up to 100 meters and gives its heat up to the rest of the atmosphere and then there's a cold blob that comes down. You're watching the boiling of the atmosphere. It's really convection. This is really exciting data that will allow us to much better constrain the models that were used to understand the winds that were a danger at the landing sites.

Sheri Klug: I'm here today because we're highlighting opportunities to tie in the surface mission with NASA's overall goal of trying to inspire the next generation of explorers. A first, landing during the school year. Providing lots of ways classrooms can participate. There are opportunities like being able to send in rocks from your back yard. Over 1000 rocks sent in so far. Children learning about rocks on Earth and rocks on Mars. Tying in to the students' curriculum. We have a program called rover quest which are classroom activities that follow along with the rover, the science discoveries, authentic data. Cooler than just a textbook lesson. We have some specific examples. First slide shows the Mars Exploration Student Data Team using the orbiters, Odyssey and MGS, 25 states involved, looking at landing sites, characterizing the weather, etc, real science in real time, amazing experience, the real stuff, real science, in real time. Next video shows Mars Student Imaging project, about 1.5 years old, almost 3800 students, 5th grade through college, using real tools, targeting actual locations and imaging Mars, and doing analysis and delivering that to NASA. More Mars missions coming up, hope to replicate this every 26 months for the longterm. Exciting for us and the teachers across the country. Red Rover Goes to Mars program highlight as well as the Onsight Participation program.

Wendy Calvin: I'm here as a mentor in the Athena student intern program. Kathy Bowman's brainchild. Approx. 15 students. I got involved to bring my experiences back to highschool. A good chance to show kids you could end up some place you never through you might have. Good way to bring NASA and NASA science into rural communities, small towns. Reward has been to learn how to teach. I have a research position at the university, but not teaching. This is the real stuff. They're using the same tools we are. I'd really like to thank Kathy Bowman for the inspiration, organization, all the legwork, logistics, allowing us, as mentors, to focus on interpersonal communication with the students.

Shannon Theissen (highschool student): When I came here I was not expecting to actually be working with the scientists. I thought I'd be put aside and come as they want me to. But. I actually got to work with the scientists. Wendy has been an awesome mentor. We actually work on the computer with her. You don't have to be a scientist or an engineer to work for JPL or NASA. There's many different jobs. If you want to be part of it, follow your dreams and go for it. It's a great opportunity for any student so if you want to be part of it, go for it.

Q. (this woman from ABC, I think, clearly hasn't been following this mission closely). I'm fascinated. Will you guys put the 3-D images up on the website. These 3-D images are going to be the story of the day. This 3-D stuff is just fascinating. I've never seen anything like it. These glasses. I'm assuming website hits is going to just continue to grow.

Mark: yes. MI is spectacular. Ken Herkinhoff at USGS did just a great job. I never thought that the 3-D products would be this cool. I'm surprised that website interest has continued to grow. Glad for the mission.

Q. Shannon, what inspired you to pursue this?

Shannon: started out in a robotics class. When I got used to it and my teacher said I'd have an opportunity to come to JPL and do that, I was very excited.

Wendy: Teachers are selected and then the teachers pick the best and brightest students. After the internship, they snowball out and go talk to elementary schools and talk about it.

Q. Opportunity, what's the strategic thinking for after you climb out of the crater?

Art: from an engineering perspective, we serve the science community. We'll do what they tell us to do. We can't tell you when.

Mark: I think you've named some of the subjects of the debate. We've kind of figured out the path we want to follow to get out of this crater. Then there will be a discussion about the targets, the blocks or the crater. A chance to hit more than one, look forward to having a rover and debates like that.

Wendy: We're starting to get some high-res from Mike Malin's MOC of areas outside of the crater. Those images still coming down. No decision yet.

Q. What's been done to Spirit to avoid that antenna glitch? What's the latest thinking on what formed the layers in the rock at Opportunity and any more on the blueberries composition.

Art: This is a problem when you've got a dynamic vehicle. We were working around the problem but when we got driving the antenna actuator got much cooler and so it failed the calibration maneuver. Now we do that in the afternoon when it's warmer. We have a group that anticipates these types of things and we just missed this one and it cost us a morning.

Mark: I can't tell you what it is but I can tell you that we've seen some indications. We haven't gone beyond the MI including the RAT. With the data we're collecting right now, we're going to choose the sites we want to go back to.

Q. You canceled trenching last week. There was a test that failed. How confident are you that you're going to be able to trench on Mars.

Art: I wasn't involved in that test in the testbed. Mission management is confident they've worked out the details for trenching.

Q. Can you talk some more about what you can infer from temperature spikes and have you seen any dust devils? Seen this from orbit before?

Don: Haven't seen any dust devils yet. Thermals aren't surprising. Interesting to see them on Mars. Will be able to better understand the winds on Mars. We have TES in orbit which tells us temp looking down but that doesn't do a very good job telling us about the bottom 5 kilometers. Mini-TES can do a pretty good job looking up to 5 kilometers so they compliment each other. MGS is going to fly right over Opportunity and we're going to put a sequence on Opportunity to look up to the spacecraft in orbit so we'll be studying the same patch of air from surface and from orbit.

Mark: Pathfinder told a similar story.

Q. Do you see any signs of fossil life or water formation in those little round blueberries? How long will you study this?

Mark: nothing that leads us to conclude that water had to be involved.

Wendy: we've seen nothing in microbiology. I'm stumped. We'll be looking at data from this mission for at least the next decade.

Q. Can you go into more detail on the Opportunity glitch? Terribly unusual?

Art: we have a ground tool that models all of our actuations. We do a detailed analysis. The wrist can rotate just like your hand. We were trying to approach the target underhanded and we hit a hard stop. We should have rotated over and approached it from above. It was a ground tool modeling we didn't catch. No damage. Had to spend another day there. Understanding the positioning of the IDD and where the target is and which face we want to hit, we have a group that's spent years practicing this but we missed this one.

Q. Can you talk more about Sand Patch and El Capitan?

Wendy: El Capitan seems to have two distinct colors and some interesting morphology. Sand Patch has higher hematite abundance and hoping to trench through there and do IDD work, x-ray and Mossbauer on it.

Q. Sounds miraculous what you can do with this mini-TES data. Can you explain more about how that's done. Could you give a specific example or two of the kinds of work these students are doing.

Don: It's not easy. Magic that Mike Smith has put together. Mars atmosphere is CO2. CO2 has an absorption feature at a particular wavelength, 15 microns, very red, infra-red light and around that wavelength the atmosphere is very opaque. As you go shortward or longward of that the atmosphere is less opaque. So if you look at the emission temperature at the middle of this absorption feature, you're seeing the temperature very close to the rover, down at like 30 meters above the rover. If you look at colors either side of this strong absorption feature, you're seeing higher and higher up into the atmosphere. So the idea is you translate the spectrum of temperature as a function of wavelength into temperature as a function of altitude.

Sheri: One group of students given a unique set of tasks. Trying to predict temperature, overflights and looking at THEMIS morphology. They had to design the experiments on their on. 54 teams around the country, communicating through electronic bulletin boards, an amazing collaboration.

Natalie: next briefing Tuesday at 10:00 am.

via Bill Rupert in the comments, Steve Squyres has updated the Mars Mission News blog. He covers the same ground he did in the Monday press briefing, but it's quick and to the point. Give it a read.

These guys are C U T E!

(Photo credit: Rod's Critter Photos)

And there are so many great photos of them on the web. See this little guy, this one, these two, and is it even possible to look at this one without smiling!

Spirit's record-setting drive:

On its 37th sol on Mars, which ended at 6 a.m. Tuesday, PST, Spirit broke the record for the farthest distance driven in one sol on Mars, traveling 21.2 meters (69.6 feet). Today's distance traveled shattered the Sojourner rover�s previous record of 7 meters (23 feet) in one sol.

She's got her eyes on the prize of Bonneville crater.

Wow. For the second week in a row, we had a really good turnout for BugDay. Several new people learned their way around Bugzilla and worked with a strong group of regular contributors to resolve more than 295 bugs as Worksforme, Invalid, and Duplicate. That's amost 5 times the normal daily volume of (invalid/dupe/wfm) bug resolving.

We need to continue this effort if we're going to turn the tide in Bugzilla. In this last week, with the strong BugDay, there were 939 bugs resolved. In that same period, there were 766 new bugs reported. This roughly parallels the week before (963 resolved, 631 new reported) which also had a great BugDay. As you can see, we're really putting a dent in it, cutting the overall number of bugs by an average of about 250 bugs per week. But the last two weeks are in stark contrast to normal no-BugDay weeks where we average about 725 new bugs and only about 625 resolutions so the database grows by about 100 bugs per week.

With these great clean-up days, we're turning the tide, and pushing that bug curve down. I'd really like to see this continue, but we need your help. Whether you're new to Mozilla (or Firefox) and would like to take your involvement to the next level, or you're an old hand and want to help bring some sanity to the bug system, stop in to #mozillazine on the server irc.mozilla.org any Tuesday. We'll have experienced quality assurance and testing team members on hand and we'll be working on lots of great activities for all ranges of contributors.

Remember, if it's Tuesday, it's BugDay!

Mozillazine has been straining under the weight of the major Firefox 0.8 namechance and release so I didn't post press briefing notes this morning. Here they are. Interesting stuff, and my guesses about these odd rocks are looking suspect :-)

Natalie Godwin: Both rovers are on the move on Mars. 3:30am at Gusev, 12 hours later on the other side of Mars.

Tim McElrath: As you saw with Spirit, a variety of ways to perform localization on the surface. I'm going to talk about radio data. We'll also hear about descent images and IMU propagation, then post landing MOC images. First graphic shows THEMIS imagery. Blue ellipse is based on tracking during approach. 44 miles long, 5 miles across. When we got to Mars we were fortunate and had two DSN complexes in view. So we had tracking data from Canberra and Goldstone so that gave us differenced one-way doppler data. 5 minutes after EDL we got the tracking data all the way down to parachute deploy. That's the black ellipse which we were able to come out with about 35 minutes after landing. That's about 5.3 miles by 1.4 miles. That confirmed several things we'd seen with relatively late parachute deploy and narrow descend. Needed to wait 'till we were on the surface to get a much closer tie on where we were. On the surface we have 2-way doppler tracking DTE and we also have UHF 2-way doppler tracking to Odyssey which comes over twice a day. That little white ellipse is 145 ft. by 3 ft. from two Odyssey passes and 6 DTE communications spread over 3 sols and that pins us down quite well in an inertial frame but problem is that the map is not tied in well with the inertial frame, could be off as much as a quarter mile but turns out much better at only about 500 feet. Since we've got the map tie solved for this location, we can get the same type of location resolution if we need it.

Andrew Johnson: I'm gonna talk about the second way we determine position. This is using EDL telemetry. This is a mosaic of the three DIMES descent images and a line showing the path that Opportunity took. Over to the left is the direction we're coming in from, going basically East but near the end start moving to North and when we cut bridle we are actually moving North. Another view of the same scene what it shows is the descent trajectory coming down and bouncing along the surface. Final graphic is another blowup of the bouncing across the surface. 26 bounces official number of bounces. We bounced along and some how ended up in this crater :D We rolled 200 meters, about 1/8th of a mile for more than 1 minute. Velocity when we cut loose of the bridle was 9m/s N 2m/s W which is 20mph N 4.5mph W.

Tim Parker: How many golfers out there ;-) First graphic is to look at the horizon views from lander and compare to features seen from orbit. Mosaic of 3 images, far right is 18-20 m/px THEMIS vis image. The next image covers most is a MOC image and the final image canted at an angle there is one of the DIMES images. Here is the reconstruction based on triangulation to three craters visible on the horizon. One was visible pre-standup mission success pano. The other two were seen in post-standup pan. The large crater to the east was obstructed by the rim of the crater we're in. This was difficult because the crater we're at was so small that we can't identify features in it's rim to compare to orbiter views. We've zoomed in here on the last prediction from DIMES team on where the first bounce would have occurred in green and the blue diamond is the last nav solution for where we wound up. That is a remarkably close match to where we actually are with respect to the surface. It's only 120-130 m from the center of the crater. That's far down in the noise with respect to our precision of tying the Mars surface to the geodetic grid.

Mike Malin: As you know, I have a camera in orbit of Mars and it flies over the landing site twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon and we've attempted to take pictures of the landers from this camera which has a nominal 1.5m/px resolution but we can use the spacecraft to assist us in getting "super-resolution" of about 0.5m/px and I'm going to show a combination of both resolutions. This is a picture that shows the overall area, the large crater to the right was in the right side of Tim's picture. If your eyes are really good then you can see that crater that had the lines coming from it in Tim's picture has a little dot in it. That dot is the lander. There are other things on the picture as there were with Spirit. We see going from right to left where the heat shield hit. We see a plume pattern where the retro-rockets fired and where the first bounces occurred. We also have a track of all the bounces. At the far left is where the back shell and parachute hit. This is a picture of the vehicle. One of the things to note is how bit it is relative to the crater. The lander fills a fairly sizable portion of the crater. If you'll go to the next picture, I _believe_ :D that we are actually seeing the rover. The rover will not be right because it has dark solar panels. Not at the right angle to see them glint. Won't know for sure until I take another picture after the rover has moved. One of the fun things is that I knew where everything was and about the same hour, a picture we had taken with the Navcam a couple of days earlier had finally came in and it included in the upper corner a view of the back shell and the parachute from the lander, in the direction you'd expect and the right distance. Justin Mackey first saw it. Pancam team took a special picture of it. Really evocative. At the very bottom just off the edge is the crater rim. Outside the crater showing you the parachute and the back shell. That's a view out over the rim of the crater looking out across this vast flat surface and there is the hardware that we've littered the surface with. A nice view. Steve's gonna tell you about some really neat science.

Steve Squyres: OK. Let's see. Where to begin. We had a big weekend, probably the biggest three days of science since we landed. I've got a lot of stuff to show you. Start at Meridiani where the really crazy stuff is. The deeper we get in, the more it reminds me of a mystery novel. You get clues, kinda one at a time. Some of them mean something, some are probably red herrings, you don't know which is which. We're working our way through the clues here. So what I've got is a few more, some pretty tantalizing ones of what we're seeing here at Meridiani. Video shows the familiar outcrop that we've named Opportunity Ledge after the spacecraft that found it. At the far right is this rock we originally named Snout, now named Stone Mountain - we tend to pick quick names sort of in the heat of battle and then we come back with something better later. You'll see a Pancam image as we zoom in. This is a color Pancam that shows this outcrop in detail for the first time. This pretty close to true-color. It is buff colored, or tan, finely laminated, thickness of layers a few mm at most. And then, embedded in it, like blueberries in a muffin, are these little spherical grains I'm calling spherules, spherical granules, because we don't know what they are yet, though I'm gonna run through the theories. They are different in color. The spherules are very, very gray - much, much different from the matrix they're embedded in. This next image is false color generated using infrared bands processed to really bring out those bright dots in the outcrop. Those are the spherules and this emphasizes the point that they are different in color and that's a hint that they may be different in composition which could be a very important piece of information. We drove up to this guy and slapped our instruments down on it. I'm going to show you some Microscopic Imager pictures and what you will see is wild looking stuff. You can see the layers, inherently very, very fine-grained sitting there for millions of years being sandblasted. This stuff sits there, the wind blows, these grains are striking and eroding the softer portions developing this intricate texture telling you how well indurated the rock is. Then embedded in the stuff are the little spherules. Those seem to be pretty tough. So what happens is that the rock erodes away as it gets sandblasted and the little blueberries drop out and roll down the slope where we take pictures of them. There's one in the process of being eroded out. Look at this next MI image. Look at this guy. One of the spherules broken in half. it's hanging out there. If you look carefully and follow the crack that runs upward from that running diagonally. Follow that crack and there's another one, and another one, strung like beads along that crack. I think there are 4 of them. This rock is being eroded away and the spherical grains are dropping out. Now, there are some things here that we know and some things that we don't know. I'm going to take you through the hypothesis still standing. There are several still standing. For the matrix, there's really only two ideas still holding up, that it's volcanic ash or wind-blown dust compacted into a sedimentary rock. This is so fine grained. It ain't a sandstone. Either some kind of ash or stuck together indurated dust. As for the spherules, there are three hypothesis still open but one fading fast. The idea that it's lapilli is fading fast. I wouldn't rule it out yet, we go back and forth. Remember, lapilli form when you have suspended ash above a volcano and the ash agglomerates forming spherical balls that fall out of the sky. The thing is that they tend to be made of the same stuff in which they're embedded. Now we don't yet have, say separate Mossbauer on the matrix and the spherules. We're gonna do that and I think that'll really nail it down but the fact that their spectra are so different suggest to me that they're made of different stuff. So that's one hypotheses but running in 3rd place. Other is that it's some kind of spherical grains formed when molten rock is sprayed into the air, freezes in air, and these droplets of rock, made in impacts, a high energy volcano, fall down on the surface. Third possibility is that they're what geologists call concretions. Concretions form when fluids carrying dissolved stuff diffuses through a rock and precipitates around a nucleus and it grows little spherical granules within the rock. We think we should be able to test all of those. What we're planning over the next few sols is a thorough survey of this outcrop, what we're calling a shoot and scoot where we shoot a bunch of pictures, scoot over about 3m and shoot some more, getting Pancam and mini-TES shots and then we'll find a couple of the best places and go hit 'em with everything we've got. What do I mean by best? For example where the matrix is really well exposed and we can go in with the RAT and see what those layers are like. What I'd really like to find is a place with a bunch of these spherules, RAT across those and see what they look like in cross-section then stick the Mossbauer up against them and see what they're made of, see if they're different from the matrix. One other teaser, a clue that just popped up, not gonna quote any numbers yet, but we have now completed an APXS measurement on the outcrop and it has got a lot of sulfur in it, maybe a few times more sulfur than we've seen at any other location on Mars. So that's what's new on Meridiani so let's go on to Gusev. This is the RAT and our old friend Adirondack. Adirondack looking a bit different thanks to Steve Gorvan and honeybee robotics team have had their way with this rock. It has really opened up a window into the interior that we can use to understand it very well. Pancam image where RAT has ground a hole 2-3mm deep. Next image shows before and the next image shows brushed off and next image shows cut away. Beautiful cut, polished rock surface. Looks like a basalt and Mossbauer and APXS confirm that it is indeed a volcanic basaltic rock. We know what it is. Time to move on.

Mark Maimone: We've had a very busy day. Both rovers drove on the surface of Mars. Opportunity in the last few hours drove another 4 meters on the surface. Earlier than that the Spirit drover drove a long drive of about 6.4 meters. We have an image to show you the trail behind the Spirit rover. See the tracks. Lander out of view. See the back face of Adirondack. It may have looked really big but we drove right over it. Another interesting thing is that this was a drive to get to White Boat, a small white rock but also the first test on Mars of the rovers Autonomous Navigation System. That means the rover was in charge of its drive. The people on the ground tell it where we want it to go but it decides how to get there. That opens up new opportunities and distances. We can only plan so far in the images we see. What's gonna happen now is we start to let the rover make its own decisions. It takes a look in front of it, builds a map, avoids the red, goes on green and yellow. This animation shows the process inside the rover's brain as it drives on the surface of Mars. This will continue. What's nice is that until yesterday, the Opportunity rover was leading the game but Spirit tore out ahead with a total distance of about 12.5 meters. Though I just learned that Opportunity moved another 4 meters so it's up to 13 :) Not that anybody's counting. The race is on. Our plans are to explore the crater at Meridiani and at Gusev going for very long drives. Not sure exactly how far they'll be because it's up to the rover to decide how safe. We're going to let it choose its path for some of the way.

Q. Can you elaborate on the concretion model for the spherules and do any of those, how those form, exclude the theories about how the rock layers form?

Steve: I think the idea that they're lapilli would only work with the matrix being volcanic ash. Those two are tied together. With respect to concretions, if you have fluid, water with dissolved stuff in it flowing through a sediment, it can precipitate minerals, stuff that's dissolved in the water, and commonly will nucleate in a spot and this concretion will grow and grow in a spherical fashion. These are found in a variety of settings on the earth. By making observations about how these round things are related to the layers, we can test distinguish between the various hypothesis. For example, if you have a nice layer in the sediment, and then you grow one of these concretions you might see the layering preserved within the concretion. So if we see one of these spherical guys in place with a layer running through it, that would favor the concretion idea. If, on the other hand, you've got layers forming and you've got these things falling in from above, as would be the case for the droplets of glass, it might deform soft layers so by taking many MI images and looking at the relationships I think there's a good chance we'll be able to distinguish on just the shape of this stuff. Then of course the composition will be revealing.

Q. Steve, you mentioned that several hypothesis standing earlier have been ruled out. Can you go through what's been ruled out? Oolites no longer in the running?

Steve: When we first say these layered rocks from a distance there were a bunch of possibilities. Reasonably fine layers could even have been some kind of lava flows. That was ruled out when we saw how thin these layers were. I think that the idea that this was some kind of course-grained sedimentary rock, a sandstone or something like that is ruled out by the high-res MI pictures. These look the way they're weathering like a very fine-grained ash or sediment. Spherical grains. One way to make round things is to tumble them. That's ruled out by the fact that they're round while still embedded in the matrix. Lapilli, I'm still clinging to that one but compositional evidence not in favor. Another thing you might think about are something called ooids, grains that are rounded and created in a wave environment. I didn't list it with the theories because I don't think any of us consider it to be particularly likely.

Tim Parker: I think that if it were oolitic, we'd have layers that were predominantly oolitic.

Steve: Yes. When you see this, they tend to be really clustered together and not just sprinkled a few here and there.

Q. To go back to the hematite, where does it lie and looking outside,

Steve: When we look at the outcrop from a distance with Mini-TES we don't detect hematite. The matrix itself does not appear to be hematite bearing. That does not rule out that the spherules might contain the hematite. Can't tell with mini-TES because the mini-TES spot on the outcrop is maybe 8 inches and so it's seeing maybe 99% rock and 1% spherules. The key to answering that is gonna be to use the Pancam to find a place with a lot of these spherules, RAT it, and look at it with the Mossbauer. There's no question though that the highest concentration of hematite is actually above the outcrop and we don't know what's up there. Everything we're seeing so far is either the outcrop itself and some of the stuff that's fallen down. Some that's fallen has fallen from the outcrop and some maybe from above. We can't tell with the granules in the crater in front of us, their pedigree is unknown. That's the nice thing about the spherules in the outcrop. You know where they come from. The evidence suggests that the highest concentration of hematite comes from up above the outcrop layer that we're not gonna see until we start to climb out of this crater. I would be very interesting to see if there is hematite in the spherules.

Next news briefing on Thursday at 10am PST.

It sounds like we're going to be partially down at the notblog on Monday so I probably won't be able to post. If I regain access before the end of the day, I'll push the notes from the JPL press briefing.

I've laid out the various things that I think could explain the spherical pebbles. Now I'm going to try to make some guesses to put it all together into a semi-coherent picture. I'm 99% likely to be completely wrong but guessing is fun and I suspect we'll know (more of) the truth in the morning when the experts come out to brief the press.

First, load the mini-TES mineral map because that's my big picture reference here. Here's what I think (wild ass speculation):

We're dealing with three primary materials here. The first is what's thought to be coarse gray crystalline hematite and it's greatest concentration is shown in the mineral map as the brightest red. The second material is the bedrock outcropping and I'm guessing that is basalt. The third material is the small spheroid pebbles scattered across the crater floor, walls, and embedded in the bedrock outcropping. I'm guessing those are amygdules, maybe calcite, or quartz (isn't this a great match with this?).

So, how does that explain the colors on the mineral map? Well, the red is densest concentration of the iron-bearing mineral an the blue is the least dense. The bedrock appears least red and I I'm guessing that would match up with it being a high-silica, low-iron basalt.

The bounce marks from the airbags in the crater floor are also void of iron-rich material while just next to them, there is moderate levels of the iron-bearing material. I suspect that this means there is a layer of hematite pebbles that partially cover the crater floor and those have been pressed underneath the fine-grained, iron-free sand (probably the eroded remnants of basaltic bedrock).

But why then is the crater floor not bright red like the areas above and below the bedrock and outside of the crater? I suspect that is the result of the crater floor having some of all three materials, the basalt (sand), the calcite or quartz amygdules, and the hematite. The amygdules and the hematite are in large enough pebbles to be pushed underneath the fine-grained basaltic sand.

So, that's my guess.

My second favorite explanation is that the spheroids aren't amygdules at all, but rather they are accretion lapilli and the bedrock is a tuff and not a basalt. (coimpare with these wonderful lapilli sitting on tuff.) If it was a tuff that consisted of several layers of ash, that would help to explain what looks like stratification in that bedrock.

My least favored explanations are oolites and spherulites. I think oolites would be a lot more dense-packed than what we're seeing here and I think that spherulites would have formed in a much more glassy igneous rock than the rough stratified-looking bedrock we see in the Pancam and MI pictures.

I'm hopeful that we'll get some more data or, even better, some good science evaluation tomorrow at the morning JPL press brief. I expect to be as wrong in my predictions as is possible ;-)

What's your guess?

I'm just fascinated with these latest Pancam and MI pictures. What are these spherical pebbles and what is that bedrock that they seem to be pouring out of? Are they oolites? Lapilli? Spherulites? Amygdules?

I'm not a geologist so this is all completely amateur speculation but I'm starting to think that it's unlikely that they're oolites. Oolites would be interesting because they would signal tidally active bodies of water. Oolites form when a small particle accretes layers as it washes around in mineral-rich waters. Here on Earth, oolite rocks like oolitic limestone seem to form from densely packed beds or "sand bars" of these oolites. Looking at the MI pictures, it doesn't look at all like the dense packed oolites that I can find pictured and explained online. Oolites range in size from sugar-grain sized to several millimeters.

What about accretionary lapilli? Accretionary lapilli are like volcanic hailstones that form by the addition of concentric layers of moist ash around a central nucleus. They form in the ash clouds or columns from a violent volcanic eruption. On Earth, accretionary lapilli range in size from about 2 mm to as large as 6 or 7 cm. That matches up pretty well with the sizes seen in the Microscopic Imager where the granules are between 1 mm and 4 mm.

There's another kind of volcanic lapilli that are spheroid, teardrop, dumbbell, or button shaped. These granules are not accretionary, but are the direct result of liquid rock cooling as it travels through the air. This type of pyroclastic debris ranges in size from a few millimeters to several centimeters. On Mars, they would likely result from both volcanic activity and from meteor impact. I don't think it's likely that's what we're dealing with here because so many of these pebbles are so uniformly spherical. Could Mars' thinner atmosphere have sufficiently less drag on these liquid ejecta as to allow them to form more consistently into spheres? I don't know.

Or are these spheroids some kind of spherulites? Spherulites form mostly in glassy igneous rocks like obsidian (this bedrock looks anything but glassy to me). Some of the pictures I've found on the web do seem reasonably close, however, to what we're seeing at Meridiani.

What about amygdules? Amygdules form when the vesicular cavities (created by expanding gas bubbles in igneous rock) are filled with a secondary mineral. If this bedrock is a basalt, then amygdules seem like a distinct possibility to me. This picture of an amygdule here on Earth, looks like it could be a close match for that bedrock at Meridiani.

Now, I have to remind any of my geology knowledgeable readers that I'm not a geologist and I know very little about geology, so if I've suggested impossible hypotheses here, it's because I'm just making uneducated guesses. If you can help evaluate any of these possibilities, please share your knowledge (or guesses) with us in the comments. It really is curious and I suspect the real scientists will have some answers for us starting with tomorrow morning's press briefing. What a great mystery :)

We're getting darned close. If you'd like to help us test the (hopefully) final release candidate for the upcoming 0.8 release, grab a build from the nightly build directory and give it a spin. If you find anything that you think we don't already know about, be sure to let me know. You can see more about what's upcoming in this release in my previous 0.8 blog post.

And, I almost forgot to mention, Thunderbird 0.5 is coming soon too. You read about the latest Thunderbird email client builds at mozillazine.org.

Spirit has completed the first ever rock grinding on another planet. Spirt used one of her tools, called the Rock Abrasion Tool, or RAT, to grind a 2.6 mm hole into the rock, Adirondack. Needless to say, the team is thrilled and I'm certainly looking forward to the next set of Spirit MI pictures.

And, wow! Check out some of the latest from the Opportunity Pancam and Microscopic Imager:

Pancam showing "Snout" and a lot of those small spherical rocks.

MI close-up of the spherical pebbles (large ones are about 3.5mm).

another MI close-up with better lighting.

Jennifer Trosper: Spirit status, on Wednesday we spent 3 hours to erase the flash, and 1 hour later in the day to reformat and restart the vehicle. Nerve-racking but the craft did exactly what we needed it to do and is up and running in great health. After that we moved quickly to science. On Thursday, Spirit woke up at 9am, we got data down fist thing and then we commanded craft to use the RAT to brush the rock. We and placed Mossbauer and APXS on the rock overnight. Today we'll place the RAT on the rock and actually grind. Thanks to the people that have been in crisis mode. (listed team members). I want to show an image (image of the instrument cluster on the IDD). It took us a few days to get the testbed testing done and in those two days we downlinked several images that were in flash and for this image we actually posed the arm to get the flag (on the side of the RAT) in the image. Yesterday morning right after we played the Spirit wake-up song, "back in the saddle again" we played a second song, "the star spangled banner", and it reminded me that it's not just about this team of people, it's about every person out there across the country that has contributed, so we'd like to dedicate this image to the American people.

Glen (Reeves?): I actually had a day off yesterday, not in crisis mode and I'm proud of that :D The story of how we got from crisis to relief is the story of a lot of people. First I want to talk about what went wrong and how we fixed it, then I'll turn it over to science team. The first part of the problem was that as we accumulated more files, we consumed more memory and we eventually ran out. Problem 2 was that our reaction to that was rather severe, we corrupted the file system. To get out we needed to pull as much data out of the flash as possible and then reformat. Consuming all the memory is a severe error. The craft did what it was supposed to do and reset itself. The number of files caused us to again, on each initialization, consume the same amount of memory, hitting the problem, and again resetting. It was sol 18 when we first got an idea of what was going on. It took us a couple of days to begin to get data because of communications problems. Over about 3 days we concluded that the system was in this reset loop. We had fortunately built into the system a mode called cripple mode that allowed us to boot without the flash. We thought if we could get into that mode we could stabilize the vehicle. On sol 21 we got into cripple mode and we got communications control back so we could go in and debug. Drawback about debugging a system that far away, if you can imagine the slowest ISP, compared to communications with the rover, I love my ISP :-) During this time, the throughput is fairly low and the most critical part of our activity was to capitalize on every single time we talked to the vehicle. We extracted the absolute most information we could get every time we talked to it. Once we concluded we could keep the vehicle stable in cripple mode, we got to debugging. Our theories proved out and we established that the filesystem onboard was for the most part intact. On the 27th we actually started to use the filesystem again and started downlinking as much data as possible. The file system, though, appeared to be corrupted. This meant that the manner for resetting was going to be to erase all the flash and reformat. We've done that. We're back to the beginning, we've established the state of the system like this many times before. We have a fresh system and we have a procedure in place to work around this problem indefinitely. There are some suggestions to make changes to the flight software to identify the problem more quickly.

Stephen Gorevan: My expectation was to report on the first use of the RAT as a grinding too. Instead, the first time use of the RAT was to brush. In the science discussions over the last few sols it became clear that this capability was available to us. Adirondack looked to be clean but in case there was a cemented coating, we decided to take the brush to remove loose material and to preserve a cemented coating which could tell us something about the history of the rock. This image shows the RAT's stainless steel bristles called the rock brush. It's primary purpose was to remove the grindings from the hole after a RATting. Many of us didn't expect to see a difference. Here is Adirondack before the brushing. Here is the part we brushed. This is a big surprise. All I could think to say, like Mohamad Ali, "This is the greatest interplanetary brushing of all time" ;-) 5 minutes of brushing and we think we have preserved any cemented coating that existed below the dust.

Ken Herkenhoff: Happy to be back up here talking about Spirit science activities and thanks to the engineering team who never stops surprising me. This photo is an MI picture before the target was brushed. It's in full sunlight, lighting from upper right. This is the post brushed image of the same area, same lighting. To my surprise there was a lot of dust there. You'll remember, that we chose this rock because in Pancam images we thought Adirondack was relatively dust free. You can see as we zoom out that some dust remains around the edge and a crack running diagonally from top left to bottom right is still filled with dust. We're seeing mineral crystals on the rock surface and we're very excited to see what continued RAT abrasion will tell us. Looks like a basalt and we're anticipating more data soon.

Matt Wallace: Opportunity is continuing to turn the crank and move forward. We've had a number of very productive days. We completed exercising the arm and the Mossbauer and APXS instruments. Yesterday we completed a 3.5 meter drive with several arcturns to the left, a turn to the right, a turn in place, and a drive forward. Today we sequenced a drive to approach the right-hand side of the outcrop and a target named "Snout". That was a 1.6 meter drive. We came up a little bit short on Snout and so we'll complete that approach tomorrow. Here are some front Hazcam images. (Animation of images moving us to the right side of the outcrop.) This last image shows the target, Snout. We're within half a meter of the target. The second set of images are some of my favorites, pointing in the other direction, rear Hazcam looking back at lander and its y-petal and progressing away from the lander. You can clearly see the tread marks from 6 wheels, the bounce marks, the other side of the outcrop that extends about halfway around the crater. Those are some framable shots, some good ones :) The plan for tomorrow is to move forward 30 or 40 cm. Prior to that we're going to do a "touch" before the "go" -- we'll deploy the IDD and take several of these MI pictures of the soil to continue to catalog the soil in this crater, then we'll re-stow the arm and drive forward to prepare for a full suite of instrument arm activities on Snout, the MI, the APXS and the Mossbauer. Then we'll start an arc along the bottom of the outcrop stopping at choice viewing areas and taking pictures plus dropping the arm down at a few places and taking additional data. Opportunity's in good shape. She's healthy and happy and continuing to do the job she was sent to do.

Q. Software problem similar in a way to what plagued Polar Lander in that you didn't test long enough to reveal problems? Other things lurking?

Glen: I've concluded a couple of things during this process. There was in some of our later tests an inkling of what was out there. During testing, we ran the system right up against the limit and here, the system was asked to perform above what it was capable of. The recovery possible because of what we put in place to be able to analyze and recover. So in that, it's not like Polar Lander.

Q. Can you draw any conclusions about the weather from this dust you're seeing on Adirondack?

Steve: The dust offered no resistance.

Ken: There's actually very little dust, maybe just a few microns. Almost completely removed except for little hollows. Little clumps of dust around the edges. It does look like it's sticking together but not strong enough to keep it from being brushed away rather easily.

Q. Big picture? will you be able to get into the ejecta blanket and get to Bonneville?

Jennifer: We finish RATting today and start driving tomorrow, best case. We're on west southwest side of the lander so we're gonna drive around the lander and head northeast. We do believe we can get there. Strategizing now and initial thinking is we'll start designating the traversebased on imaging, where we design the movement but at the end of each drive we'll turn on auto-navigation for the rover for a couple of meters. We'll extend that auto-navigation each day. Baby steps. Also, we've talked about 4 or 5 places we might stop.

Q. From MGS does it look like there's a rout you might actually get up to the edge and look in?

Jennifer: It does look like there's a path to get to the crater. We'll know better as we get closer. Unrelated but important, we did a demonstration with Mars Express for forward link commanding and return telemetry and it worked very well. International interplanetary communications network in place and functioning well.

Q. For Jennifer or Glen, you're keeping an eye on Spirit, what about Opportunity. For Matt, why did you fall short on getting to Snout?

Glenn: We believe that the issue on Spirit potentially exists on Opportunity so we put in place RAM monitoring and procedures to limit our activities if that amount of space gets low.
Matt: We're not entirely sure why we fell short but pretty sure it's soil slippage. The rover is pitched up or back by almost 13° and if you look at some of the testing we've done relative to soil mechanics and capability, you get to 10 ° or so of pitch and you start to get some slip. Based on our ranging and correlating that to wheel tracks in the last couple of hours since we got the data, we're getting 10 to 20% of slip during these traverses. Once we better understand this we'll be able to accommodate that efficiently.

Q. Glenn, you mentioned there might be some kind of software patching to flight software, can you address that?

Glenn: The problem itself is actually that in the configuration of the vehicle we allowed it to consume more memory that it has. We could set a single configuration value to limit that. We're anticipating one to two days to get the information to the vehicle and the actual change would probably take an afternoon, if we did it. If we decide to do it we'll definitely do it for both vehicles but right now we have a good way to avoid the problem and I'm not sure we'll make the change.

Q. This dust seems to have a very sticky property. Stuck to rock and airbags. Electrostatic properties or chemical bonding?

Stephen: Not sure.
Ken: Not sure. Certain minerals tend to aggregate better than others without electrostatic being involved. There may be a clay component that allows it to adhere more easily. We can't tell yet.

Q. Given that this rock was dirty when you thought it was clean does this skew things in terms of your ability to do mineral characterization from orbit.

Ken: We'll be taking into account this new data. We're going to continue with remote sensing for dust-free areas but it's looking like they will be difficult to find.

Q. On location of Opportunity, are you close to being found?

Matt: We know we're on Mars at a pretty cool site in a cool crater ;-) A lot of good work in the last 3-5 days, gathering a good amount of information and rather than me give you my interpretation, let's wait on the experts to get up here and give you the scoop. It's exciting and fun and it's coming.

Q. Question from a reader, one of the Opportunity photos, close to the lander, seemed to show some whitish streaks on the soil. Any chance it's frost?

Ken: Temperatures from mini-TES too high for frost, brighter streaks are not white, just brighter and redder, probably a little bit of dust.

Next news briefing will be Monday at 9am.

This weekend, if I can make some time, I'm going to put together a follow-up on my previous hematite post. Since writing that, I've learned a lot more about the various processes involved in the formations of hematite and what that might mean in the hunt for water and life on Mars. In that post, also, I left out some key factors that certainly matter and I hope to be able to correct that without getting even more wrong this time around :-)

We've also learned a great deal from Opportunity's mini-TES mineral mapping of her crater and surface surroundings. The time is ripe for further speculation :-)

So, if tomorrow's press conference doesn't spoil all of the fun of this great mystery, expect to see more hematite information and speculation over the weekend.

Get your Martian status updates while they're hot.

We're only a few days from the 0.8 release and this one is going to kick some serious ass. There's just no other way to put it. We've got all kinds of cross-platform improvements, including a brand new download manager that also handles extension installs, much faster web page rendering, NTLM authentications support, new and improved bookmarks functionality, major stability improvements, -- the list goes on.

I'm convinced that this is going to be our single biggest milestone leap forward since the project began. This release has something for everyone and with 0.8, there simply aren't any excuses left for using IE.

In addition to all of the awesome cross-platform improvements, there are some wonderful platform-specific changes too. For Mac, 0.8 will be the milestone debut of the drool-on-your-keyboard-sexy new OS X front end that, if you haven't seen it, is gonna just knock your socks off. Not only is it super slick, but it feels "right at home" on both Jaguar and Panther.

With 0.8 on Windows, we get a brand new installer that makes installation painless and easy, as well as providing all the standard shortcuts/registry/program group/start menu/etc. integration that Windows users have come to expect. With the installer also comes uninstall capability, but you won't want or need that!

This is the fastest, most featureful, most stable, most fun release yet. It's going to take the world by storm. If you thought there was buzz around 0.6 and 0.7, just you wait.

The press briefing is about to begin; notes when it's concluded.

Steve Squyres: Good morning. We've got some really nice stuff for you today. We've taken our first good look at soil in our crater, our home here at Meridiani. There's some really interesting things. Features we've never seen before. I said it was like a cool geologic fieldtrip. Welcome to our first stop. Here you see the Navcam image of the soil in front of the rover and we're zooming in to Pancam image. This caught our eye a couple of days ago. We knew, even from the Navcam images, that we're looking at soil with at least 2 components, at least. We saw a bunch offine grained soil with coarser material on top. The coarser material looked like gravel but when we looked closer, they looked darned round. The nice thing about distinctive characteristics is that every characteristic, a shape, a color, a texture, has a story to tell about how it formed. Only so many ways to make something round. Sort of round could be from tumbling. If they're really round, that narrows down the range of possibilities. Blobs of molten lava thrown in the air, an object accretes layers, ways you can do it. We were very interested to see just how round these stones in Pancam image were. So we stuck out our arm and took a look. We have this robotic arm with a number of instruments, one of which is a Microscopic Imager. MI on the end of the arm. See Hazcam images of arm going through motion of taking image of soil.

Ken Herkenhoff: You've seen pictures from all of Spirit's 10 cameras. Opportunity so far, just 9. Here's the 10th, the Microscopic Imager. Designed to emulate a geologist's 10x handlense. This graphic starts with Pancam view. Zooming in to MI frame. Full field of view is about 3cm across, a little more than an inch. Smallest particles we can resolve are about 1/10th mm across. The larger one is about 3 mm across. MI dust cover has an orange tinted window that can give us crude color information. This is an example of a merge of those two color frames. Zooming in on some particles. Sand grains about 1/10th mm. Various shapes and sizes from 1mm up to a few mm across. The entire image is in full shadow so no sunlight. There's a variety of shapes from spherical to angular. Next image will show an enhanced color version that emphasizes variation in color across these grains. Just right of upper center there's a rather red grain . Those are relatively rare here. Most gains are less red. The variety of particles and shapes here indicates a variety of sources. There are some holes probably from gas bubbles either by volcanic or impact processes that Steve mentioned.

Hap McSween: All of these features are interesting but the really intriguing ones are the round ones. There are a number of geologic process that can yield really round objects. First Pancam suggested little balls, little spheres. MI shows very few are actually spherical, many are flatter or broken and could be derived from the round ones. One process we considered is that grains on a seafloor or in moving water roll around and accrete or grow by adding layers of material. These are called oolites. And we got excited about the possibility that we might have found oolites. The problem is that very few of these objects are spherical balls, they have other shapes, and so they're unlikely to be oolites. Also oolites shouldn't have bubbles, holes we see. Other possibilities is that large meteors when they impact the planet melt some of the target materials and this rock is sprayed out as a fine jet of droplets of liquid, and as they fly through the air they make shapes like dumbbells, teardrops, sometimes buttons. I think I've seen all of those shapes looking at these MI images. They cool quickly into a glass but if a target rock had water, that could cause the gas bubble holes that we see. Volcanoes spew out liquid droplets. But more likely, with violent eruptions have ashes that are buoyed by hot gasses and as they are suspended they begin to coagulate together into rounded pellets we call lapilli. I think it's possible that these things may be lapilli. Also intriguing that many of these things may relate to the outcrop. If this is an ashbed we might be able to find some connections between that, maybe it's weathering and shedding the things that Ken has given us.

Steve: we don't quite know what these things are yet but we've made significant progress in narrowing down the possibilities. The good news is that with the plans we have ahead, in the coming sols we think we can unravel these mysteries. I want to step back for a minute and refresh everybody on the big picture. Recall that the thing that brought us here was the hematite, a mineral that is closely associated with liquid water. Recall also that we're trying to do is to read the geologic record, look at all the different terrain types, look at the different materials, and try to put together using all our tools we have at our disposal, a comprehensive picture of what happened here long ago and whether or not water was involved and whether it was a habitable place. Somewhat cliche, but I've likened this process to the parable of the blind man and the elephant. What we've seen is one small part of the story. We've got to fold that in with other patches of soil, the outcrop, what's above the outcrop, all the other pieces. We have gotten another interesting clue. We're getting more information about composition. This is mini-TES data. Very nice instrument that has provided us some great data. This is one of our images overlayed in color with the concentration of hematite. First mineral map from the surface of another planet. The blue stuff is low in hematite. The red is height in hematite. Tremendous variation. Hematite is fairly low in that rock outcrop. Very high in the material above the outcrop and the material below it. As you get closer to where we sit, you see less and less, particularly at our airbag bounce marks. The place that we have taken the soil measurement is not in this image, it's over way to the right side in the very low-hematite stuff. We've looked at this soil with MI, Mossbauer and we're looking right now as we speak with APXS. We know that from this hematite concentration map that we're looking at a place where we don't expect to see much hematite. In order to see the hematite we're gonna have to move. That's next. The next thing we're gonna do with this rover is to start to head to that outcrop. As we work from right to left across the face of that outcrop initially into an area that is relatively hematite poor but as we head across that outcrop, we're going to be moving into materials that are progressively more and more rich in hematite, we're going to be seeing other pieces of this very complicated scientific elephant. Over to Franz Renz who will be presenting the findings of the Mossbauer spectrometer.

Franz Renz: O have good news. We see a magnetic compound but the bad news is that we don't know which one it is. It will take us a few days to see which one it is. Not as easy because concentration is quite low. The image: Here you see Mossbauer spectra. You see the magnetic phase. You see the signal to noise is very low. That's why we can't identify it yet. It will take us a few days. In the middle you see a feature we've actually seen before on the other side of the planet, a basaltic structure with olivine inside. Olivine has some iron which has lost two electrons. If you're not familiar with this, look at a green wine bottle there the iron which has lost two electrons gives it the green color. The Olivine is green as well. If it grows nicely in color you'll actually get a gemstone called peridot which was the favorite gem of Cleopatra the queen of Egypt who was actually of Greek descendence, but that's a different story (laughter). And besides that we have one iron that's lost three electrons. If you look at a beer bottle, the brown color comes from an iron that's lost 3 electrons with silicates around. It's a basaltic structure as we've seen before and we're happy with this.

Mark Adler: Opportunity has had a very, very productive couple of days. On sol 10 mini-TES checked out and is working well and we've taken a quite a few spectra with that as you can see from the wonderful mineral map of the hematite taken at the Opportunity site. The Mossbaur began its 24 hr integration on sol 10 and completed it on sol 11. That data was collected on sol 11. And we put the APXS down for a 14 hour integration overnight and so that's ongoing right now. It's about 8PM at the Opportunity site right now and it's about 8am at the Sprit site. At Spirit, we're engaged right now on the formatting operation. On sol 30 we attempted to do some science operations. We had a day where we were testing format operation in the testbed so we were going to continue our arm operations on Adirondack, take some MI images and a spectra. Unfortunately at the beginning of that day we tried a sunfind. Didn't succeed, wasn't able to complete the sunfind operation and so activities not allowed to continue because vehicle was not certain of its attitude. So we had to recover from that and later in the day we got a sunfind to succeed. Failure related either to activities ongoing at the spacecraft at the time or a file in the flash corrupted. Bolsters our desire to format flash filesystem and get ourselves back into a clean state. On sol 31 we did preparation for the format operation. Go to sleep early, skip overnight comm passes, get the cold as possible with as much power in batteries as possible. Poor rover woken up early at 6am. Rebooted into cripple mode which does not use flash memory. Flash operations underway. A 4 hour process started about 20 minutes ago that will erase all contents of flash and check hardware, check all the chips. We don't think hardware, but being safe so checking it all. Going through all the 224 (?) megabytes of the flash memory system and erasing it over the next couple of hours. Next we'll reboot and reformat the flash file system. After that we should be in normal operation and we will reintroduce Odyssey pass overnight and tomorrow morning we'll go back to science operation.

Q. Segregation of materials in mini-TES suggests that unlike Gusev, there's very little mixing of fine material. What does that tell you about surface.

Steve: We're still looking. Story we're putting together is that we have a number of different components. We've got the big grains. Starting to narrowing it down what those might be. That they're so strikingly spherical points in very specific directions. We have something that's very red and very fine grained exposed in bounce marks and doesn't seem to have much hematite. Then we've got this sand. Based on Mossbauer and mini-TES and MI, that looks like some finely ground up basaltic sand. That's at least 3 different components there and they're mixed in different ratios in different places. Looking for correlations there. No complete story yet. I'm interested in finding a place with as high as possible concentration of little pebbles and slapping the Mossbauer, APXS, and MI down on those. Find out what just those pebbles are made of. That's going to be interesting. And we're going to dig a hole, in the next few sols, drive to a place where there's some of this stuff and dig a hole with the wheels and see what's below the surface. It's going to take us a while to piece this together. The main thing that I'm getting out of this is that there are several components to this soil and they're unevenly distributed around the crater and who knows what's outside of the crater. that could get even more interesting.

Q. Intriguing things is some seemed to be layered, a rich hematite above bedrock, some seems much patchier.

Steve: Fine particles can be blown by the wind. Little round particles can roll. I'm interested in concentration of these little guys as we get closer to the outcrop. Are they coming from the outcrop? Maybe they're weathering and falling out of the outcrop. I don't know but we have the tools to find out. If we work our way through this problem and piece it together clue by clue, we're gonna get it.

Q. How far traverse from current spot then how far will that be from the outcrop.

Steve: I don't have a really good answer because that was being decided in a meeting I wasn't at. I'm actually off duty today. I think... (off-camera: "three meters and three meters".)

Hap: the trench location is three meters from where we are and the outcrop is about another three meters from that. Relatively short distance.

Q. Steve, a day or two ago a colleague was discussing a parallel traverse along the outcrop.

Steve: Yes. We're going to head towards the right hand side of the outcrop stopping part way along to do some soil investigations, and then we're going to go right up to the outcrop and work our way across it from the right to left, shooting down and to the right with Pancam as we go, getting very, very high-res Pancam and Mini-TES. We've been preparing for this. Mark was taking about managing flash. One thing we've been doing for days now is we've been taking fewer pictures than we'd like, taking fewer spectra than we'd like to take, leaving lots and lots of room in flash memory. Because when we get to that outcrop we're going to hammer on this thing with Pancam in a very big way. We're going to take hundreds and hundreds of megabits of data and fill up that flash real quick.

Q. When I do the stuff on my computer that you're doing on Spirit it scares me to death.

Mark: There might be a reason that we spent last 4 days testing that in the testbed. Not an operation we do lightly. We've reconstructed the environment in testbed as accurately as possible and we've verified also that there's not other possible side effects that the operation could have on the vehicle. For example, we store our flight software images in another area of flash that's separate from the flash file system. We've verified in fact that when we erase that there's no way to corrupt the flight software. The sequence we've developed that's running today checks at every step of the way to make sure that doesn't happen. It is an operation you don't do willy nilly and you've got to make sure that it's done right.

Q. Steve, this is first mineral map done on another planet? What about Spirit's map? What's the outlook for water having existed here?

Steve: Sprit mini-TES produced maps of temperature. These are actual maps of mineral composition. That's a first for this mission. Extrapolating from a few grains of sand to water on Mars, a little hard to do at this point. Stuff we're looking with instruments on the arm at this particular point doesn't really tell us much from a mineralogical standpoint, from a chemical standpoint doesn't tell us much about water. Not until we get to the hematite. There's hardly any hematite in Franz' spectrum. We need to use our mobility to get to where there's more hematite. We're going to have to piece this together bit by bit. Still very early in the mission to do that.

Q. Explain what you hope to tease out of data over the next couple of days. How does hematite vanish in bounce marks?

Hap: We're looking for hematite. It has magnetic fingerprint. That's why we're looking in the region. We don't know yet. We have to carefully evaluate the spectra. Hopefully in a couple of days we can give you an answer.

Steve: We haven't looked at a bounce mark up close yet. One hypothesis, an idea is that the hematite is carried in some of the coarser grains, maybe the really round guys, and there's fines beneath it that doesn't have much hematite in it and bouncing pushes the coarse stuff underneath the fines and Phil's instrument can't see them any more. The MI picture is a 3cm/3cm square. Only a fraction of that surface area is covered by bigger grains. Most of it is that basalt sand. Mossbauer doesn't see that whole 3cm square are. It sees a smaller 1.5cm circular region, probably near the center. It's seeing whatever happens to be in its field of view. We're interested to find out where that was. When you push it down, it may leave an actual imprint. We'll take another MI after moving APXS away to see if we can see a Mossbauer nose-print. Possible that it didn't even hit one of those pebbles. We need to piece this together bit by bit.

Q. Adirondack and arm operations status?

Mark: operations did not complete, the RAT checkout and arm move. Position of arm and Mossbauer exactly where it was before the anomaly started. We'll start again after the format.

Q. When you turn a rock over it's sometimes even more interesting sometimes. Any plans for that? Wouldn't that be interesting?

Mark: We are going to do a trenching with Opportunity.

Steve: Best way is by moving wheels. Trenching operations should push small pebbles. We don't have an arm that can pick up a rock and look underneath. If we find a compelling reason to do so, we might find some clever ways to look at it in ways that the hardware was not necessarily designed for and I'm sure that if I was to propose something like that, I'd have to go to my mission manager and have a long heart to heart talk ;-) Oh man, but there are so many things that are interesting here. I could think of a thousand things that are but there are only so many sols in the mission. But I can assure you that if we find a compelling reason to turn a rock over, Mark and I will have that conversation.

Q. Seems to be some uncertainty of shape of these round rocks, spherical or flattened. Could you nudge them with the arm and see the shape?

Steve: We will see these things move as we contact them with instruments. Mossbauer has a plate that goes to contact with the soil. The thing that will help the most is taking pictures of lots and lots of these things. Unlike the APXS and Mossbauer, MI can do quick photos, about 5 minutes. We can do "touch and go" every day, a quick look at the soil and then go about our business. We should be able to take dozens of MI pictures of the soil over the course of this mission so we could get a statistical characterization. In the MI picture we showed you, there's a grand total of only 2 of those spherical rocks. There might be a range, some broken ones. What do you see if you find a broken one. You can have things that freeze in air or that grow up layer by layer. If we find concentric structure in a broken one, than we're headed down that path. We need to sol by sol take lots and lots and lots of pictures and build up a library.

Ken: We can also do stereo with MI. We can use the arm to place the MI in a couple of different places and where they overlap.... (lost connection).
Steve: ....some of the are really, really round.

Q. Mossbauer has narrower field of view. Can you get Mossbauer of specific objects?

Steve: APXS even bigger, 38mm diameter, almost an entire MI field of view. You could try to get really cute, really fancy with positioning. That's hard, man. This is a 5° of freedom robotic manipulator on the surface of another planet that's sort of flexible and has got wheels that can slip in the soil. Right way to do it is to just find a place where there are a whole lot of these things. There are places where there are a bunch of them, much better chance of hitting one.

Q. Trenching 101. Tomorrow, which wheel, how deep, how long?

Steve: Tomorrow is drive, not trench.
Mark: Usually front right or front left turns while the other wheels are positioned to prevent rover from moving. Usually direction that pushes dirt in front of the rover. Then we carefully back the rover out of the hole so as not to disturb it and then we're in a position to get the instruments over the hole as well as being able to look at it with Pancam and Mini-TES. It doesn't take very long, typically rotate wheels a couple of dozen times. We take an image after each rotation. Could take an hour or two.

Steve: Worth pointing out too that there's a dual purpose. One purpose is to expose sub-surface material for science value. Also has engineering value. We're in a whole in the ground, a crater. We've got to climb out. Mobility people want to know more about the soil properties. They will get a lot of data to help plan drives. Serves both purposes.

Q. One of the most striking features are impact craters. Heat shields have impacted. Nay plans to visit these two impact craters?

Mark: we have an idea where heat shield impacted crater at Spirit site. We're headed to south side. Impact is north side. That's not our target. Might have done some digging but not the kind that these folks are looking for.

Q. Schedule over the next few days? When will we see Spirit brushing and RATting. When trenching for Opportunity.

Mark: It's sol 32 on Spirit now. Tomorrow we plan to do arm operations, brush operation and MI, and one or both spectrometers. On the following sol we'll repeat that sequence with a grind operation, MI and spectrometers. That would be sol 34. On sol 35 we'll start our drive out. We'll probably drive to north side of lander and point ourselves in a straight line to Bonneville crater. On Opportunity we expect trenching on sol 14. Tomorrow go 3 meters of 6 to the outcrop and do our trenching. Then do the move to outcrop.

Steve: We'll do the trench, take a sol or two to investigate the trench then drive to outcrop and drive across the face of outcrop, probably slap the arm down and look for a day. We'll spend a couple or three sols driving along the front edge of the outcrop taking pictures. Then we have to figure out how to attack the outcrop. We've got a lot more than the outcrop to do. How long we study outcrop depends on that initial data.

Next briefing at Friday at 10am PST.

It's not a bug, it's user error (or so they say. via 'the wall). Actually, while it may not have been a bug in the operating system, it was certainly a bug somewhere in the mission. That the system depended on a hunk of flash that was being shared between critical system code and stored science data seems like a pretty big flaw in the design. Since when does my PC go into a reset loop because I downloaded one too many images from the Web?

Today is BugDay (and so is every Tuesday). Join us at #mozillazine on server irc.mozilla.org if you're looking to get more involved with Mozilla (or Firebird, Thunderbird, Camino) testing or you're looking for an introduction to that monster called Bugzilla. We've got lots of helpful people on hand to assist new contributors getting their footing in Bugzilla and our other webtools. So stop in today or any Tuesday and help make Mozilla better.

Wow, after several days of no new images over at the NASA/JPL raw images section, the place is really hoppin'. Check out these awesome photos of the dirt from the Microscopic Imager

Also, Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the MER mission, has updated his "weblog" Mission to Mars. Nothing terribly exciting, but he lets us know which site he's most interested in.

Feb 2, 2004 press release

Press briefing about to start; notes when it's concluded. (The Q&A part is kinda sketchy because my connection was falling down. The first part should be pretty accurate, at least.)

Natalie Godwin: Opportunity has sent us the first 360 color image from the Meridiani Site and engineers have extended her robotic arm so that scientists can study the soil around her.

Jeff Johnson (science team): I am very pleased to announce this morning that the full 360° mission success panorama from Pancam acquired and on the ground. You may remember the Pancam mosaic from day one that Jim Bell presented was referred to as a "postcard" because it represented a kind of snapshot. Now we've completed a full mission success pan. (anecdote about tourists taking pano at grand canyon). This wonderful 360° panorama is in stereo and provides a real sense for "you are there" at the site and gives us a real sense of this bowl shaped depression that we're now in. So without further ado, let's go to the image. This image will start off zooming into the left portion of the image, we'll go right into the edge of the outcrop with all those airbag retraction marks in view, with really dark soil -- this is darker region than we saw at the Gusev site. This is the outcrop as it scrolls that we'll be really interested in spending quite a bit of time trying to document and map as field geologists, the whole outcrop. More bounce marks with the wonderful seams of the airbag itself. As we come upon some slightly larger portions of the outcrop, rocks that are perhaps a few feet in height. The entire outcropping itself is actually very tiny and the layering that we see in the outcrop will be very interesting to us. This area of expanse, looks like there may be some variations. And these wonderful airbag marks here are probably the entry point with the volleyball like textural? and the brighter areas that come in on the dunes there. Just an amazing site that we're still trying to figure out. Hopefully over next few weeks as the rover starts to do it's reconnaissance of the outcrop and sample some of its soils, we'll get a better idea of geologic history of this site. As much as we've been in awe of all of these wonderful Pancam pictures, I'd like to talk about Pancam's ability to do spectroscopy in visible and near infrared wavelengths. You'll remember that Pancam is two cameras. Let's go to that image. On each camera there's a filter wheel. The Pancams are the two dark objects on the outside of the camera bar in this image. See the navigation cams there too. Pancams only about the size of your hand. Filter wheel exposed in that lower image. Each Pancam has 7 positions so we have a total of 14 filters that we can use to image. Pancam is sensitive from blue light out into the near infrared, beyond where your eye can see, to about a thousand nanometers or one micron. Compare that to mini-TES that can go from 6-30 microns. What can we get from all these colored filtered images. Simple case is that the dirt on Mars is very red, very bright in red wavelengths and very dark in the blue. We can do more by looking at how the brightness varies looking through these different filters we can get an idea of the geology. Especially if we want to try to unravel the geologic history of the site. Each mineral has a fingerprint in the near infrared visible spectrum. When we put together a spectrum using these 14 filters, we can compare with samples here on Earth to get an idea of what minerals the area is composed of on Mars. So what does Mars look like. This image shows the calibration target, sundial which is approximately truecolor. I'll focus your attention on the color chips in the green, the red, blue, and the yellow. Plot is two types of data. The solid lines where the colors correspond with actual color chips are spectra acquired of color chips in a lab on earth. These dots are the brightness values from each of the filters that we acquired from actual Pancam data. Those dots are lying right along the laboratory Earth measurements and that's what we like to see. The camera is very well calibrated. So the spectra we extract from Mars will give us a very accurate idea of the true spectral characteristics of that surface. Next slide shows Gusev and a bit of the variability we seeing in these 14 color spectra. In the upper left is the magic carpet region. Focusing in on the rock to the left of the airbag retraction marks. Colors in the lower image correspond to spectra on the right. We've extracted spectra from those spots. You can see that the yellow area is the soil in front of the rock which is very bright in the infrared. A little green area is on top of the rock is even brighter. Rock itself, blue spectrum is very dark. Typical for dark basaltic rocks we see here on Earth. What intrigued us was some spots on the rock. Red spectrum looks a lot like the blue spectrum. Interpretation is that those dots are just little bits of dust that have accumulated in the recesses of the rock face. Next slide from Opportunity in Meridiani. Looking out to the north. The yellow box is of the dark sand dune-like material above the outcrop and cyan, the bluish is out toward the horizon and those two are about the same so to the eyes of Pancam those may be the same types of material. The red spot is a dark portion in the outcrop. Slight variations in darkness that we're starting to investigate. That spectrum is intermediate in brightness. The green spectrum is very bright rock. The bumps and wiggles in the spectra are what we focus on to try to determine minerology of the different rocks. The final spectrum was a small blue cobble that was very flat and dark in its spectrum. We'll be investigating that some more as well. May be piece of ejecta from nearby crater. Pancam will allow us to take those very subtle spectral features and allow us to map those into the scene to try to do some remote geology to get a better understanding of the landing site as well.

Joe Melko (arm engineer): Today on Opportunity was all about the IDD and final checks on in situ payload. First we brought the arm out to ready. Telemetry and pictures let us know all was well with the arm. All the pieces were in the same place :) Confirmation to the team that they had done an extraordinary job. Probably the most complex mechanism on the rover. Only possible because of talent and dedication of the team. Bob Bonnets, Laurie Sarishi, Eric Bomgardner, Ashite, Rich Flieshner, and Rice Billings, (phonetic). Given a tremendously difficult task of fitting it into a very tiny space. Next thing we did was we checked out the RAT, ran motors in free space and it checked out. This first image shows us where it was at when we first deployed it. Entire IDD team showed up today. Great adventure, very happy. The RAT's pointed toward us. Later we moved it around pointed upward. Also checked out the RAT magnets. This is a RAT close-up taken by Pancam. Next we moved it around and exposed Microscopic Imager. We also moved the MI cover. With that, we've covered all the motors on both Opportunity and Spirit and they're all working great. Jeff, our motor and flight software engineer can breathe again. Next we checked APSX and the doors are open just where we left 'em. Instrument looks in good shape. Finally, looked at Mossbauer. Later in the evening we're taking MI of the soil. Tomorrow more MI of soil and putting Mossbauer down on surface.

Jennifer Trosper: In addition to great accomplishments on Opportunity that Joe and the team have made over the weekend, Spirit has made incredible progress over weekend and I am extremely happy to tell you that today we are doing science just like we were 10 sols ago. Spirit is back to the state she was in on just about sol one. Over the weekend we downlinked some additional data and essentially confirmed our suspicions about why the first problem had occurred, related to the number of files in the file system and the amount of RAM necessary to allocate in order to manage those files. We believe that suspicion is correct based on the additional data we got. When we entered into that anomaly we may have had side effects that we don't understand. We've gotten the data down so we will erase and reformat the flash memory tomorrow. Today moving forward with science on Adirondack. First pull back the IDD and change to RAT to brush it. Then we'll do MI and APSX overnight. Tomorrow reformat flash. Then RAT the next day. Spirit is the driving mission. Already strategizing how to drive far and fast.

Q. (lost connection for this question and first part of answer)

Jeff: Still looking at orbital images to see where we are. It may be the outcrop goes all the way around and it's just covered up on the other side. May investigate by trenching. Perhaps we can hit some of that bedrock.

Q. What sized object created depression?

Jeff: Meter or two in size. Could have been a secondary impact.

Q. Is the sense that the evidence you're looking for isn't present in the immediate vicinity so have to strike out to find it.

Jennifer: long term plan from science team is to drive towards the crater and working to do that quickly.

Q. Distant part is looking out of the crater and onto the plains? Contradict earlier assumptions that the materials in and out of the crater were different?

Jeff: They're looking the same to Pancam. Thermal emission data we're gathering is more sensitive and that may account for the differences. Mid-mission we want to get out of the crater and look at that. A little difficult to compare distant objects with near, atmosphere interference.

Q. Now that you have full Pancam how many places you can see out beyond crater.

Jeff: geology team looking at that. There may be some very subtle features you may not be able to see from orbit. For the rest of us, we're just trying to get our bearings.

Q. Sense of where you're going to go in outcrop?

Jeff: As of yesterday science team started thinking seriously about how to attack the outcrop. Need to map it completely with all of our tools and so there's debate about how you do the best science the most quickly and with the best results. One suggestion is to go up to the close part, saddle up to it and take a lot of high-res pictures traveling down the length of it.

Q. Is that the left side, would you follow it in parallel?

Jeff: right, how far off we need to be to use both Pancam and mini-TES and to not hit the solar panel. Every day getting new data that can change our perception.

Q. Outside of the crater, you can get a sense that there may be some blocks on the horizon. Artifacts or real?

Jeff: We're still debating ourselves. Once we get to the outcrop or out of the crater may be able to get a better idea of what's beyond.

Q. Are you really ready to go driving? Does it drive autonomously or with a human driver.

Jennifer: 11 minutes 45 seconds one-way light time. We don't completely joystick it. We have a different approach. Rover is programmed to avoid obstacles. We have a low-level of driving where we only go places in the images we can see, and then collect images at the end of the day to see how it did. May have a mid-day go no-go. As we get into more difficult terrain we may turn on more of our hazard avoidance software. We'll be characterizing things over the next few days. We have a Mars yard here to test things.

Q. How much distance a day, a week?

Jennifer: In the early days, 15 meters or so a day and hope to increase that quite a bit.

Q. What's the operational way you suggest you handle Opportunity given spirit encounter. What have you learned?

Jennifer: The specific problem the number of files is not simply, the resource you need to manage for the number of files is not simply flash, it's associated with the amount of RAM you need to manage those files. So we're down linking additional data about how much RAM is being used. We understand the problem well enough to avoid the problem. Keep your file number low, look at additional data and make sure you don't exceed the limits.

Q. For Opportunity, the first thing is Mossbauer? What's the exact sequence?

Joe: First we'll take a few more MI of soil, then put Mossbauer down and integrate for nearly 24 hours. Then next day we'll spend with APSX for the (full?) day. Based on what we're getting from first two instruments we'll decide what's next.

Q. Dust may settle on solar panels and reduce effectiveness, any other weather that may be risky.

Jennifer: dust is something we do understand but when we did the design we made an assumption based on Pathfinder in coming up with planned lifetime. Other factors are cold which requires more survival heating at night and more heating for science instruments during the day, or at night if we're doing science at night. That can cost us more energy for both survival and science. So, dust and temperatures.

Q. Status of Opportunity's heater and status of determining Opportunity's location.

Joe: The heater is still on. There was a second device put on by our thermal people for this type of case. There's a secondary device that turns it off during the day. At night it's on. With some changes in planning, we can still accomplish everything we intended to do. Much later as it gets colder we'll re-evaluate.

Jeff: Where we are is still being researched. Hopefully by end of the week we'll have a final answer.

Natalie: next briefing on Wednesday at 10am.

Clark Boyd at BBC News (via /.) has a very good article called Linux steps into the limelight. This is the kind of press that Linux needs to continue its march to the mainstream. Spread the word.

Daniel Morris, over at From Behind the Wall of Sleep, makes the very good point that many of us have, well, neglected Spirit in our coverage of the MER missions over the last week. He's right.

I certainly haven't been as loud about the terrible flaw or the amazing recovery here at the blog as I have been out in the real world. Maybe that's actually part of it - I've just done enough talking about it outside of the blog that I didn't feel the need to do my talking here.

I've had several long discussions at work and elsewhere about "what went wrong" with Spirit. I work in software development and so the "failure" has been a regular topic of discussion between myself and a couple of my colleagues. Was it poor design? Was it just a lack of testing? If it was either of those, then why? Was the schedule just too compressed? Were there scenarios that were too expensive to test? Or, did the team knowingly push it beyond its capabilities?

For the last 10 days, we've tossed around a lot of speculation and in the end, it's just that, speculation. NASA/JPL haven't provided enough information to know exactly why this happened. From what they have said, I suspect that it happened like most software bugs happen, a combination of all the factors I listed above, schedule pressure leads to inadequate testing, and when the software is pushed into scenarios that haven't been fully tested, it fails.

All complex software has bugs and there are always real-world constraints that prevent 100% test coverage. The good news with the Mars Exploration Rovers is that the entire system was robust enough that the problem was able to be diagnosed, and repaired or worked around. The redundancy (the "safe mode"), and the integrity of the vital communications system have given the rovers the opportunity to continue on after what could have been a fatal bug.

I certainly am pleased (and blogged about it) that Spirit is back on her feet and is expected to fully complete both the nominal and extended missions. I share Daniel's view that "the good folks in Pasadena, of course, under-promised and over-delivered." They all deserve kudos for completing the very difficult simultaneous tasks of getting Spirit up and getting Opportunity down. Go team!

update: Today's press release has all the happy Spirit news.

I just visited this very cool site, Interactive Presentation - Mission to Mars, which prompted me to install a plugin to view some 3-D content. I clicked "OK" and was taken to the Cult3D site where the plugin was seamlessly installed using XPInstall.

Firebird's new XPInstall integration with the download manager made the whole experience even better and for the first time ever, I said to myself, "Wow, that was a pleasant and seamless plugin experience."

Unfortunately, they don't seem to support Linux Mozilla/Firebird. Well, it's a start.

If you installed the plugin and want to see some more "space" content, check out NASA's Space Interferometry Mission demo, 3-D view of a black hole, and extra-solar planet demo, CNN's shuttle model, and Hubble in 3-D, and Reuter's Mir demo.

There is some exciting Mozilla news about:

• Camino 0.8 planned to come from Mozilla 1.7 branch.


• Firebird 0.8: an imminent threat (grave and gathering?). Jesse lists some of what's new for this release.


• Mozilla Developer Day on the way, and in Europe, too.


• As Ben would say, "The magic of RDF!" (new RDF docs at XULPlanet).