Spirit Sol 82

Ah, a short day. I needed one of those. I have another interview with WBBB, the Raleigh station, and it goes really well. Interviewing with morning shows is strange in one respect: because they're trying to keep the show's energy level high and make their listeners feel good about being awake so godawful early, they laugh at everything you say that's even remotely funny. Even though they're doing it for show reasons and not for me, it helps me see a little of how it is to be famous or powerful. It's like a little taste of that insular world that you always hear that famous people live in. This helps explain famous people. I kind of feel sorry for them.

Yestersol's RAT operation was incomplete. It didn't drill as deep as they wanted, but even more oddly, the left half of the resulting circle is white, and the right half is dark -- a little like the yin-yang symbol. They don't know why this happened, but they're going to do it over.

And in passing, Atmospheres[1] says that we're getting into a time of the Martian year where we may be able to see clouds. Those will be some damn cool images.

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Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Curiously bi-colored RAT spot.


Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Confirming that Spirit's APXS dust doors are closed.

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Footnotes:

[1] That is, the subset of the science team that studies the Martian atmosphere.