Spirit Sol 865

We're done. Or as near as damn it, anyway. We pretty much just have to pick up the sol A-857 sequence -- the one that did the last brush on our soil target, Progress -- and resend it. As usual, it turns out not to be quite that simple, but it's not much more complex, either. All around, an unusually easy sol.

So when Nicole Spanovich alerts me, I'm able to find time to remotely tell my TiVo to record Steve Squyres on the Stephen Colbert show tonight. (Gotta love that online scheduling. Magic!)

And Matt has started exploring RoSE macros.[1] He cranks out one to do the IDD safety-deactivate sequences, progressively making it more and more elaborate.

Ashley looks at him with mock pity. "He's got macro fever," she mourns.

Good. Our macros are getting a bit long in the tooth, and someone needs to work on 'em. Matt would be a great choice.

If I'm really lucky, macro fever will turn out to be contagious.

[Next post: sol 871, June 15.]

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Footnotes:

[1] RoSE -- the Rover Sequence Editor, the part of our rover-commanding toolkit (RSVP) that I wrote -- has a feature called "macros," which let you kick out lots of commands for the rover with just a few clicks. I almost didn't think anyone was going to use this feature, but it turned out to be extraordinarily useful for the rover drivers in particular. Huge swaths of our IDD sequences were semi-automated through the use of macros, and later our drive sequences would be as well.