Opportunity Sol 660 (Spirit Sol 682)

I'm not needed to cover Ashitey's shift thisol, so I'm back on Opportunity, where things are not looking up. The day starts with a meeting in which the usual suspects are gathered around the table (or on the phone line) for a review of the spacecraft's state, and to try to figure out where we go from here.

In short: no joy. The IDD is showing small or no motion. To make matters worse, since it's in the stowed configuration, where there's very little room for it to move, we can't command large enough motions to get a lot of data. So there are few new facts to argue about, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it. Mostly bad.

Thisol will be more of the same: a couple of short motions designed to rotate the arm slightly -- just a couple of degrees -- forward, the usual next step in the unstow process. We're going to be a little more liberal in what we allow, permitting the startup current to be high for a little longer, in the hope that this will get it over whatever hump it needs to get over in order to move. And we're taking a bunch of pictures. And keeping our fingers crossed.

[Next post: sol 685, December 6.]