Spirit Sol 213

But of course I didn't go. Too much moving to do.

"You should have gone," says Chris. He's nursing a hangover, and he's not the only one. Sounds like it was a wild time. Well, having fun isn't really my thing anyway.

This is, of course, all related to the sad fact that the science teams are, for the most part, leaving us. At least they're going out with a bang: Spirit's findings at Gusev are the focus of a special issue of Science magazine, one of the two preeminent science magazines in the world.

So that's cool.

JPL has access to Science online, so Art's flipping through the images. One of the scientists asks what he's doing, and Art says, "Reliving past glory."

Heck with that, I think; we've got plenty of future glory to achieve. Thisol's little chunk of glory will be to finish up yestersol's MB integration on the outcrop, then calibrate the MB and APXS before starting an APXS integration on the rock. It's not terribly complicated, modulo some confusion about how many times we're supposed to calibrate the APXS and whether we can calibrate the two instruments in parallel, and the day goes relatively smoothly.

So smoothly, indeed, that I have some time to entertain a visitor brought in by Justin Wick, one of the SAP developers. The visitor's name is Rupert Scammell; he's an Aussie who ported SAP to Irix -- he's not a JPLer, so this was just for the fun of it, as far as I can tell -- and who is, obviously, a huge fan of the mission. Justin wants me to show Rupert RSVP, so I do, and I talk to him about being a rover driver, and he gives the impression of being suitably impressed.

It's a supremely geeky experience, of course, and at some point I start to feel self-conscious about this. Then I remember that if I weren't a geek, I wouldn't be here. And I shrug it off. It's cool.