Of course, when the data arrives, it transpires that Khaled has done a perfect job; the rover's right where we wanted it.
We're ready to reapproach. But in the middle of the discussion, the science team decides to completely change the plan. Again.
The issue is the long MLK holiday weekend: if we start the heat shield work now, we'll have one sol of IDD work and mostly waste the vehicle's time over the weekend. But if we drive to SpongeBob now, we'll have a ton of IDD work to do there throughout the weekend, using the vehicle much better. So we're going to just drive to SpongeBob thisol, and return to the heat shield on a future sol.
Despite Khaled's success on his first drive, Frank and I decide to sequence this one. Frank slaps together a candidate drive, then goes off to hack RSVP while I modify and refine it. And a nice job I do of it, too: we reapproach part of the way to the heat shield, taking PANCAM images of the part we'll eventually want to come back and IDD, then we're off to SpongeBob in a long, lazy "Z"-drive that avoids nearby debris scraps.
The scientists' interest in SpongeBob is easy to understand: remote sensing suggests it's an iron meteorite! Like our own spacecraft, it likely fell from outer space to the surface of Mars. The weird part is that it's so damn close to our heat shield, just meters away. Either these meteorites are all over Mars, or this is one damn freaky coincidence.
Or, as I jokingly suggest, we hit it during the cruise stage and knocked it into Mars ourself. If that had really happened, of course, there'd be a more recent, hence more prominent, crater around it. The idea might be highly implausible, but it's fun.
I enjoy working on thisol's drive, despite having the usual RP-1 experience of continual interruptions and plan changes. "You sure you want this job?" I tease Khaled.
He answers wryly, "You haven't done data management."
[Next post: sol 374 (Opportunity sol 355), January 21.]
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Our next destination, SpongeBob, is in the upper left of this image. The science team called "SpongeBob" by another name, "Heat Shield Rock," apparently because they couldn't think of anything more boring. But it'll always be "SpongeBob" (or sometimes "SpongeRock") to me.
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2 comments:
I have been following the Spirit saga and have an idea that might be useful.
I have a friend who is a heavy equipment operator and numerous times he has been called upon to extricate backhoes and other pieces of heavy equipment that less experienced operators have gotten stuck or into precarious positions. He has explained to me that he usually uses the back hoe arm or bucket/blade itself to lift the the machine's wheels that are sunk into the muck up and often to shift the wheels into a better position by using a lateral movement of the bucket arm. He also sometimes uses the bucket arm to move rock or other more traction-able material around the wheels. I have the impression that the RAT arm could possibly be used in this manner.
I imagine you have already thought of this but just in case you haven't I thought I would suggest that you consider using the RAT arm to move rocks near the most advantageous wheel or wheels, and then lift the rover enough, and turn on the wheels in such a way, as to get the more traction-able materials into an advantageous position. Though you have two wheels that aren't spinning, they can still lift, right? If the RAT arm can't lift and shit maybe the dead wheels can raise the good wheels and the rat arm could push small rocks under them, or even just push dirt under them, to the point of being able to gain a favorable tilt so you can obtain the solar angle you need to keep Spirit from dying over the coming winter.
If any of this helps I would love to hear back about it.
Thanks for thinking about Spirit's predicament and taking the time to try to help; you're in very good company. May I refer you to my reply to a related comment?
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