Spirit Sol 102

Ashitey and I come in early again, continuing his education as a rover planner. Today he's primary, and I'm shadowing him. I'm still a little nervous for his sake about his doing this alone -- and then I remember that he's probably a lot further along than I was when we started surface ops. I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse.

Frank stops by to say that our Linux Journal article got approved at last, and he should be sending it out in the next couple of days. "Didn't you guys win some kind of award?" Ashitey asks. Yeah, the Space Act award, which was basically a consolation prize for not getting Software of the Year. "We should have applied for Software of the Year this year instead of last year," Frank says, and I have to agree. There's momentum, people would have known more about what the hell we were doing, we'd have had tons of enthusiastic user testimonials, and so on. But we're hosed now: as I understand it, you can apply once and that's it.[1] Oh, well.

Once again, we have to have the sequences built and delivered by 22:00. The data isn't even going to start coming down until 18:00, and because our data is mixed in with Opportunity's data thisol, it might be until 20:30 before it's all down. So thisol will be tight. Ashitey and I start sequencing, but there's very little we can do without data.

Andy Mishkin pops into the room. "Even though they're not talking about your sequences, you might want to come on up to the SOWG," he says. So we go upstairs, and we're there when Andy announces the drive distance.

Seventy-five meters. The excited scientists applaud. To my astonishment, we came very close to the theoretical maximum for this drive; and I'm the record-holder again. (Well, for Spirit; Opportunity still has us beat by a wide margin. And it would be more accurate to say that I and Ashitey and John are the joint record-holders. But still.)

Ashitey shakes his head. "Chris is going to be jealous," he says. "He's going to log in from home, fire up the downlink report, and have a heart attack."

Aw. Poor Chris.

The sequencing is relatively uneventful. There's a bit of a ridge dead ahead and a near-hazard on the left, so we plot a 40m blind drive between them and then autonav 'til the cows come home. In the best case, this coming drive will beat thisol's new record. What a shame.

[Next post: sol 104, April 18.]

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[1] Unless you rename your software, apparently, which is how some people do it. Seems dishonest to me.