"Aren't you gone yet?"
That's Alicia Vaughan (nee Fallacaro), asking me the same question everyone else is asking me. It's enough to make me feel unloved, or at any rate it would be if they weren't asking when I was leaving for England.
Tomorrow.
Contrary to my hopes, we obviously won't be at Victoria before I hop the pond and lose touch with all this for a few weeks. Heck, we're not even to Beagle yet. Now I have to hope they don't get anywhere interesting until I get back.
It almost makes me want to sabotage thisol's sequences, just to give myself some extra margin ....
Heck, yestersol's sequence was nearly sabotaged for me. Yestersol's RAT calibration was undermodeled, so the IDD sequence cut off at the very end. It had taken the final image, but hadn't compressed the IDD data products yet. So we didn't get those. As a result, we don't have detailed current data, but we do have a visual OK and initial conditions, and that's good enough for us to proceed. So we'll clear the errors that resulted from the premature sequence cutoff and then continue down Rob's Yellow Brick Road.
We're off to see the wizard -- and I'm off to see some Shakespeare.
[Next post: sol 938 (Opportunity sol 919), August 23.]
2011-07-27
2011-07-25
Opportunity Sol 890 (Spirit Sol 910)
The plan for the day is to drive on toward Beagle. First, we're going to repeat the unsatisfactory scuff done on sol 885, this time recording motor/IMU data at 8Hz to better characterize the rover's interaction with the terrain. We'll take juicy color PANCAMs of it -- or just get decent-quality HAZCAMs if we can't afford the PANCAMs -- and then we press on.
We're all fired up for driving, too. Tim Parker's "Victoria Goal Map" is showing us so damn close! We're only 85m from Beagle, and 561m from Victoria. I expect we should be able to do an easy 50m or so thisol, which would put us one drive away from Beagle and cut our distance to Victoria by about 10%. I am totally jazzed about this. We've got it all worked out, and we're raring to go.
That's why I'm so disappointed when the drive is cancelled. During the SOWG meeting, the science team decides the IDD data they've gotten at this location isn't quite high enough quality, and they need one more sol before driving on.
Bummer. But at least I get a good laugh out of Rob Sullivan's description of the now-irrelevant work we did on the scuff: "a fabulous exercise in futility."
[Next post: sol 912, July 27.]
We're all fired up for driving, too. Tim Parker's "Victoria Goal Map" is showing us so damn close! We're only 85m from Beagle, and 561m from Victoria. I expect we should be able to do an easy 50m or so thisol, which would put us one drive away from Beagle and cut our distance to Victoria by about 10%. I am totally jazzed about this. We've got it all worked out, and we're raring to go.
That's why I'm so disappointed when the drive is cancelled. During the SOWG meeting, the science team decides the IDD data they've gotten at this location isn't quite high enough quality, and they need one more sol before driving on.
Bummer. But at least I get a good laugh out of Rob Sullivan's description of the now-irrelevant work we did on the scuff: "a fabulous exercise in futility."
[Next post: sol 912, July 27.]
2011-07-23
Spirit Sol 908
The plan for the day starts with two 7-deep MI stacks of ripples Spirit hasn't paid too much attention to yet. The stacks are 7 images deep rather than our usual 5 because they don't want us to disturb the soil by touching it with the MB first. This is the start of a longer campaign to get MI coverage of a strip all the way between the two ripples -- a strip I soon begin to call the "Yellow Brick Road," because Rob Sullivan indicates its position with a yellow line in a planning image. The two 7-stacks are all we can afford today, but there's more in our future.
So I have what I think is a clever idea: since we know where the best focus position is likely to be, why not take a gamble? If we did five 3-stacks along the whole Yellow Brick Road, centered where the best-focus position is likely to be, then one of two things would happen. Either we'd get the best-focus images all the way along, in which case we win big, or we get enough information to work out where the best-focus position definitely is, and we come back and do a single strip of images at that best-focus position later. Either way, it's many fewer images than the planned method, and we might even get done in a single day.
Turns out, though, that this is the wrong time for the creative approach. In this case, Rob actually wants the whole 7-stack, including the out-of-focus images, because the terrain has some relief that he wants to be able to study in detail. Best-focus in one image is out-of-focus in another in a case like this. So that brilliant idea is off the table -- this time. But maybe next time.
So we get started down the Yellow Brick Road. (In keeping with the theme, I naturally push for calling our intermediate targets "Dorothy" and "Tin Man." Whee, the fun we have!) As we go along, we keep in touch with Rob, who requested this observation and is now calling in from the road on the way to a family reunion. We get to reminiscing about the nominal mission, when Rob -- one of the few who was even more hard-core than I -- practically tried to stay up 24 hours a day for the whole thing. "I used to roll from rover to rover and just pass out on the floor in the MI room," he laughs. "Hey, we should gather pictures of everyone sleeping!"
Sometimes I kind of feel sorry for the new kids -- such as Antonio, who's shadowing today -- who missed out on the overwhelming fun and excitement of the nominal mission. But at the end of the day, I overhear him on his cell phone, excitedly telling his wife that today he wrote his first sequence for the rover. The bloom isn't off the rose yet.
[Next post: sol 910 (Opportunity sol 890), July 25.]
So I have what I think is a clever idea: since we know where the best focus position is likely to be, why not take a gamble? If we did five 3-stacks along the whole Yellow Brick Road, centered where the best-focus position is likely to be, then one of two things would happen. Either we'd get the best-focus images all the way along, in which case we win big, or we get enough information to work out where the best-focus position definitely is, and we come back and do a single strip of images at that best-focus position later. Either way, it's many fewer images than the planned method, and we might even get done in a single day.
Turns out, though, that this is the wrong time for the creative approach. In this case, Rob actually wants the whole 7-stack, including the out-of-focus images, because the terrain has some relief that he wants to be able to study in detail. Best-focus in one image is out-of-focus in another in a case like this. So that brilliant idea is off the table -- this time. But maybe next time.
So we get started down the Yellow Brick Road. (In keeping with the theme, I naturally push for calling our intermediate targets "Dorothy" and "Tin Man." Whee, the fun we have!) As we go along, we keep in touch with Rob, who requested this observation and is now calling in from the road on the way to a family reunion. We get to reminiscing about the nominal mission, when Rob -- one of the few who was even more hard-core than I -- practically tried to stay up 24 hours a day for the whole thing. "I used to roll from rover to rover and just pass out on the floor in the MI room," he laughs. "Hey, we should gather pictures of everyone sleeping!"
Sometimes I kind of feel sorry for the new kids -- such as Antonio, who's shadowing today -- who missed out on the overwhelming fun and excitement of the nominal mission. But at the end of the day, I overhear him on his cell phone, excitedly telling his wife that today he wrote his first sequence for the rover. The bloom isn't off the rose yet.
[Next post: sol 910 (Opportunity sol 890), July 25.]
2011-07-11
Opportunity Sol 875 (Spirit Sol 896)
So close, oh, so close to Beagle. Less than a hundred meters now. But Mars isn't making it easy for us. Around Beagle, there seems to be an earthen (marsen?) rampart, a huge wall of impenetrable ripples. As far as we can see, north to south, the darn thing is just too tall to get over.
And if we just got over this one ripple, we'd have pretty smooth sailing all the way. On the other side lies the Beagle Highway, a sizable stretch of outcrop we could follow all the way in.
Yestersol, they tried the obvious approach: just power over this damn thing. It was risky, but they were careful -- still smarting from our recent experience in Jammerbugt, very careful -- and therefore sequenced quite conservatively.
And it was a good thing they did. We ended up getting partially buried in the ripple, almost as soon as we got fully onto it. But, because of the previous RPs' conservatism, we're not so badly buried that we can't simply back downslope.
Which is our plan for the day: just back away slowly. It's a short drive, but not a short day: as someone points out, discussion = 1/distance.
Before we go too far down, though, we're going to take advantage of the fact that we're about as high up as we're going to be for a bit: we'll snap some pictures of possible alternate routes to Beagle from this relatively high vantage point. We hope they show us something good, because we haven't got a whole lot of promising routes at this point.
By which I mean, obviously: we haven't got any. We're hoping the images will show us at least one.
Of course, there's always this option: just bypass Beagle altogether, get onto the sand sheet where we can move freely, then loop around and come at Beagle from the south instead. Rampart, schmampart: treat the giant ripple as a Maginot Line.
After we're pretty much done for the day, our old pal Jim Erickson stops by for a provocative discussion. "What tools would you want to have to drive the next generation of rovers?" he asks. I think he's just giving me an opportunity to plump for using RSVP on MSL, but he's after more than that.
So far, he points out, we've basically kept single drives within a known range of terrain types. When terrain types change significantly -- e.g., when Opportunity went from flat plains to the ripple terrain -- we've been able to adapt slowly, even to the point of uplinking new flight software to deal with the terrain changes. What he wants to know now is, how can we go beyond that? How would we have to go about driving a rover if a single drive might carry it across multiple terrain types, some of which we hadn't seen yet?
Hmmm ... now that's thinking big. I think we'd want some way to recognize and categorize terrain types, then have the rover switch to different strategies based on what type of terrain it thought it was in. We'd have a collection of strategies for known terrain types; for truly novel terrain types, it might have to go around or wait for help.
That implies a lot of changes to RSVP. Time to get to work.
[Next post: sol 908, July 23.]
And if we just got over this one ripple, we'd have pretty smooth sailing all the way. On the other side lies the Beagle Highway, a sizable stretch of outcrop we could follow all the way in.
Yestersol, they tried the obvious approach: just power over this damn thing. It was risky, but they were careful -- still smarting from our recent experience in Jammerbugt, very careful -- and therefore sequenced quite conservatively.
And it was a good thing they did. We ended up getting partially buried in the ripple, almost as soon as we got fully onto it. But, because of the previous RPs' conservatism, we're not so badly buried that we can't simply back downslope.
Which is our plan for the day: just back away slowly. It's a short drive, but not a short day: as someone points out, discussion = 1/distance.
Before we go too far down, though, we're going to take advantage of the fact that we're about as high up as we're going to be for a bit: we'll snap some pictures of possible alternate routes to Beagle from this relatively high vantage point. We hope they show us something good, because we haven't got a whole lot of promising routes at this point.
By which I mean, obviously: we haven't got any. We're hoping the images will show us at least one.
Of course, there's always this option: just bypass Beagle altogether, get onto the sand sheet where we can move freely, then loop around and come at Beagle from the south instead. Rampart, schmampart: treat the giant ripple as a Maginot Line.
After we're pretty much done for the day, our old pal Jim Erickson stops by for a provocative discussion. "What tools would you want to have to drive the next generation of rovers?" he asks. I think he's just giving me an opportunity to plump for using RSVP on MSL, but he's after more than that.
So far, he points out, we've basically kept single drives within a known range of terrain types. When terrain types change significantly -- e.g., when Opportunity went from flat plains to the ripple terrain -- we've been able to adapt slowly, even to the point of uplinking new flight software to deal with the terrain changes. What he wants to know now is, how can we go beyond that? How would we have to go about driving a rover if a single drive might carry it across multiple terrain types, some of which we hadn't seen yet?
Hmmm ... now that's thinking big. I think we'd want some way to recognize and categorize terrain types, then have the rover switch to different strategies based on what type of terrain it thought it was in. We'd have a collection of strategies for known terrain types; for truly novel terrain types, it might have to go around or wait for help.
That implies a lot of changes to RSVP. Time to get to work.
[Next post: sol 908, July 23.]
2011-07-08
Spirit Sol 893
It's a fairly slow day. We're just carrying out some RAT diagnostics on Spirit, picking up the IDD and posing it for a few images of the RAT before putting the MB back where we found it.
Yawn.
The IDD work we're doing will take place on sol 893 -- the second sol of a two-sol plan. On sol 892, Spirit will simply nap pretty much all day. And it'll keep getting worse for another three weeks or so, until the winter solstice. Meanwhile, we don't seem to be putting as much data into flash as we can downlink. We can't afford to -- the science observations that would fill up flash are just too costly in terms of energy.
Spirit is a sleepy basset hound, snoozing on the front porch while flies buzz around her head. I plan to work her as hard as possible when we can. But for now, we'll let her get her rest. I hope she enjoys it.
[Next post: sol 896 (Opportunity sol 875), July 11.]
Yawn.
The IDD work we're doing will take place on sol 893 -- the second sol of a two-sol plan. On sol 892, Spirit will simply nap pretty much all day. And it'll keep getting worse for another three weeks or so, until the winter solstice. Meanwhile, we don't seem to be putting as much data into flash as we can downlink. We can't afford to -- the science observations that would fill up flash are just too costly in terms of energy.
Spirit is a sleepy basset hound, snoozing on the front porch while flies buzz around her head. I plan to work her as hard as possible when we can. But for now, we'll let her get her rest. I hope she enjoys it.
[Next post: sol 896 (Opportunity sol 875), July 11.]
2011-06-27
Opportunity Sol 863 (Spirit Sol 882)
I'm in a little early and run into Oded Aharonson, whom I haven't seen in -- well, it's been a while. He's been off in Greenland or Iceland or Norway or something, working on Cryobot, some kind of prototype ice driller they might send to Mars someday.
Which is why I haven't seen him around, of course. Being away from MER seems to have given him a certain perspective on what we're doing -- "shepherding the rovers to their death" is how he puts it. He doesn't mean it in a bad way, and I know exactly what he means, but I have to confess I'm still in denial about that. They're gonna live forever, ya know? Just a few aches and pains, is all. They're fine.
Speaking of those aches and pains ... "How are we at five-wheeled driving?" he asks. "Can we get back up onto Home Plate?"
"I doubt it."[X]
"Circumnavigate Home Plate?"
"That's more likely. Since you bring it up, what's the obsession with Home Plate, anyhow?"
Oded's always animated, but a question like that always stirs the pot. "Home Plate," he explains excitedly, "is the first time we've seen a geological feature we have a chance of explaining, a chance of forming testable hypotheses about. It's not water, but it's still interesting." Ah-hah ... looks like even Oded thinks there might be a little life left in this mission.
Though you might not know it so much by today's plan. We didn't receive sol 860's PCAMs, so we're stuck planning a drive in the NCAMs, and that limits us to about 20m. We don't have any significant IDD work, either, though we do have a bit of IDD checkout at -- oddly enough -- the end of the drive. This being Opportunity, we have our normal post-drive unstow. And after that, we stretch the IDD out a little further to check out a problem with the MB's reference channel.
This is a data stream that feeds calibration data from the MB's internal calibration target into the flight software, so that we have calibrated measurements from that instrument. For some reason, we seem to have lost that data entirely -- possibly some kind of cabling problem. All hope is not lost for that instrument, since we still can place the MB on the rover's external calibration target (just above where the IDD is stowed). But it's one more of those little aches and pains.
The rovers are fine, you know. Just fine. And they're going to stay that way, forever.
[Next post: sol 893, July 8.]
Footnotes:
[1] Wrong, of course. Didn't I know better than to bet against Spirit? The next driving season came around, and up onto Home Plate she went.
Which is why I haven't seen him around, of course. Being away from MER seems to have given him a certain perspective on what we're doing -- "shepherding the rovers to their death" is how he puts it. He doesn't mean it in a bad way, and I know exactly what he means, but I have to confess I'm still in denial about that. They're gonna live forever, ya know? Just a few aches and pains, is all. They're fine.
Speaking of those aches and pains ... "How are we at five-wheeled driving?" he asks. "Can we get back up onto Home Plate?"
"I doubt it."[X]
"Circumnavigate Home Plate?"
"That's more likely. Since you bring it up, what's the obsession with Home Plate, anyhow?"
Oded's always animated, but a question like that always stirs the pot. "Home Plate," he explains excitedly, "is the first time we've seen a geological feature we have a chance of explaining, a chance of forming testable hypotheses about. It's not water, but it's still interesting." Ah-hah ... looks like even Oded thinks there might be a little life left in this mission.
Though you might not know it so much by today's plan. We didn't receive sol 860's PCAMs, so we're stuck planning a drive in the NCAMs, and that limits us to about 20m. We don't have any significant IDD work, either, though we do have a bit of IDD checkout at -- oddly enough -- the end of the drive. This being Opportunity, we have our normal post-drive unstow. And after that, we stretch the IDD out a little further to check out a problem with the MB's reference channel.
This is a data stream that feeds calibration data from the MB's internal calibration target into the flight software, so that we have calibrated measurements from that instrument. For some reason, we seem to have lost that data entirely -- possibly some kind of cabling problem. All hope is not lost for that instrument, since we still can place the MB on the rover's external calibration target (just above where the IDD is stowed). But it's one more of those little aches and pains.
The rovers are fine, you know. Just fine. And they're going to stay that way, forever.
[Next post: sol 893, July 8.]
Footnotes:
[1] Wrong, of course. Didn't I know better than to bet against Spirit? The next driving season came around, and up onto Home Plate she went.
2011-06-23
Opportunity Sol 857 (Spirit Sol 878)
Sure enough, we got about 40m out of the previous drive -- not yestersol, but the sol before, since we're in restricted sols. We're now about 776m to Victoria, and only 304m to Beagle. Thisol, we're gonna step on the gas a little, and shoot for about 50m.
We've got a guest driver helping us. His name is Kelly Wills. He's spending the summer at JPL, working on an MSL task -- trying to reduce the power requirements of one of their instruments. He's from Ohio, he just graduated from high school, and he's blind.
I try to remember what I was doing the summer after I graduated from high school. I'm pretty sure it wasn't anything like that, though. And I'm not even blind.
Man, do I suck.
This somehow gets Paolo and me talking about our other, non-MER tasks. I remind him that he's not allowed to leave MER, and he assures me there's no danger of that. "There will be four people here to switch off the last workstation," he says. "Mark Maimone, Steve Squyres, you, and me."
I can't speak for the other three, but he's right about me, at least.
Speaking of Steve Squyres ... he's our friendly SOWG chair today, and something happens today that makes me suspect I'm not a complete waste of water and trace chemicals. During the B-833 anomaly investigation, it came to my attention that several of the RPs, particularly newer ones such as Paolo, had trouble standing up to pressure from the science team, particularly Steve. In my new role as the RP team lead, I urged them to stand up to this pressure, pointing out, among other things, that Steve pushes and expects you to push back when he's pushed too far -- and you shouldn't disappoint him.
So, at the APAM, Steve, smelling a long drive, says something about "putting in as many slip checks as duration allows." And Paolo says simply, "I think I will use a different philosophy: we'll use as many slip checks as we need to be safe, and we'll let the distance be what it is."
I coulda kissed him!
Oh, and speaking of water and trace chemicals .... (I really am the King of the Segues!) Steve also relates a recent science find. Concentrated calcium salts, plus zinc, plus hematite, all in one location -- the implication being, maybe, hydrothermal hot springs.
Cooool.
The other news is not so good. Opportunity's MB has lost its reference channel, which carries internal calibration data. That doesn't make the instrument useless, as we can still calibrate it against the external calibration target mounted above the IDD's stowed position. But it raises a disturbing possibility, one that Matt Heverly points out: combined with the recent transient failures we've seen when commanding the MI, it might be that we're seeing a degradation of the flex cabling that carries power and data along the IDD. If that failed, we might lose the IDD a whole lot sooner.
Fortunately, Matt came to JPL from ASI -- the company that built the IDD. And he knows the guy who was in charge of the flex cabling. "I'll shoot him an email," Matt says.
I love that. If you heard a knock coming from under the hood of your car, wouldn't you love to be able to just email the guy who built the engine?
[Next post: sol 882 (Opportunity sol 863), June 27.]
We've got a guest driver helping us. His name is Kelly Wills. He's spending the summer at JPL, working on an MSL task -- trying to reduce the power requirements of one of their instruments. He's from Ohio, he just graduated from high school, and he's blind.
I try to remember what I was doing the summer after I graduated from high school. I'm pretty sure it wasn't anything like that, though. And I'm not even blind.
Man, do I suck.
This somehow gets Paolo and me talking about our other, non-MER tasks. I remind him that he's not allowed to leave MER, and he assures me there's no danger of that. "There will be four people here to switch off the last workstation," he says. "Mark Maimone, Steve Squyres, you, and me."
I can't speak for the other three, but he's right about me, at least.
Speaking of Steve Squyres ... he's our friendly SOWG chair today, and something happens today that makes me suspect I'm not a complete waste of water and trace chemicals. During the B-833 anomaly investigation, it came to my attention that several of the RPs, particularly newer ones such as Paolo, had trouble standing up to pressure from the science team, particularly Steve. In my new role as the RP team lead, I urged them to stand up to this pressure, pointing out, among other things, that Steve pushes and expects you to push back when he's pushed too far -- and you shouldn't disappoint him.
So, at the APAM, Steve, smelling a long drive, says something about "putting in as many slip checks as duration allows." And Paolo says simply, "I think I will use a different philosophy: we'll use as many slip checks as we need to be safe, and we'll let the distance be what it is."
I coulda kissed him!
Oh, and speaking of water and trace chemicals .... (I really am the King of the Segues!) Steve also relates a recent science find. Concentrated calcium salts, plus zinc, plus hematite, all in one location -- the implication being, maybe, hydrothermal hot springs.
Cooool.
The other news is not so good. Opportunity's MB has lost its reference channel, which carries internal calibration data. That doesn't make the instrument useless, as we can still calibrate it against the external calibration target mounted above the IDD's stowed position. But it raises a disturbing possibility, one that Matt Heverly points out: combined with the recent transient failures we've seen when commanding the MI, it might be that we're seeing a degradation of the flex cabling that carries power and data along the IDD. If that failed, we might lose the IDD a whole lot sooner.
Fortunately, Matt came to JPL from ASI -- the company that built the IDD. And he knows the guy who was in charge of the flex cabling. "I'll shoot him an email," Matt says.
I love that. If you heard a knock coming from under the hood of your car, wouldn't you love to be able to just email the guy who built the engine?
[Next post: sol 882 (Opportunity sol 863), June 27.]
2011-06-20
Opportunity Sol 855 (Spirit Sol 876)
We're continuing to make good progress toward Victoria. Close enough to taste it, or anyway smell it. Or maybe just hear it.
Anyway, we did 40m yestersol, and we'll do 40m again thisol. This one's a little weird; we're driving up onto a sort of curb. We see these once in a while -- abrupt little steps in the terrain, usually, as here, associated with rock.
Why do they happen? I don't know, I just drive over 'em.
But not without some paranoia. The curb is at the limit of our ability to precisely measure, so after some discussion, we end up loosening the suspension limits considerably for driving over the thing. It's not implausible that we'd pop a wheelie going over it -- this happens when one of the bogie wheels (usually the leading wheel) loses purchase but its partner keeps going, as can happen when you're driving over a feature like this. The suspension auto-corrects within a meter or two, and no harm done. We wouldn't want to cut the drive in half if that happened, so we effectively tell Opportunity to just ignore it if it does.
And once again, we're plodding toward Victoria.
[Next post: sol 878 (Opportunity sol 857), June 23.]
Anyway, we did 40m yestersol, and we'll do 40m again thisol. This one's a little weird; we're driving up onto a sort of curb. We see these once in a while -- abrupt little steps in the terrain, usually, as here, associated with rock.
Why do they happen? I don't know, I just drive over 'em.
But not without some paranoia. The curb is at the limit of our ability to precisely measure, so after some discussion, we end up loosening the suspension limits considerably for driving over the thing. It's not implausible that we'd pop a wheelie going over it -- this happens when one of the bogie wheels (usually the leading wheel) loses purchase but its partner keeps going, as can happen when you're driving over a feature like this. The suspension auto-corrects within a meter or two, and no harm done. We wouldn't want to cut the drive in half if that happened, so we effectively tell Opportunity to just ignore it if it does.
And once again, we're plodding toward Victoria.
[Next post: sol 878 (Opportunity sol 857), June 23.]
2011-06-17
Opportunity Sol 852 (Spirit Sol 873)
Opportunity's entering restricted sols -- "a good thing, for once," as somebody points out, "since we don't have enough power to drive every sol any more anyhow."
We're losing energy, and worse, we're losing Eric Baumgartner. (I am the King of the Segues.) He's heading off to become the Dean of Engineering at Ohio Northern University. I hand him a poster we all signed for him, and shake his hand.
Eric is the kind of genius I can only wish I were. Smarter than hell, a fantastic engineer, but also great with people -- terrific social skills, a top-notch manager. And somehow he finds time to coach his kid's soccer team. It's a real loss to the Lab.
Depressed, I head downstairs to plan thisol's drive, which is a challenge. The trough before us ends in sort of a cul-de-sac about 20m away. Lying across the trough is a sort of "pitcher's mound" -- likely soft material we don't want to drive over -- and a few meters behind that is another one. Paolo wants to stop short of the first pitcher's mound, but I think we can take it, and I manage to convince him of it. Instead, we're going to drive up onto the ripple beside it, nestle in the hollow between mounds, and then scoot off into the next trough to the east. If we make it that far, we'll turn south again and back across a big patch of outcrop.
I'm either insane, or a genius. I mean, not an Eric Baumgartner genius. But a genius, anyway.
Or insane.
[Next post: sol 876 (Opportunity sol 855), June 20.]
We're losing energy, and worse, we're losing Eric Baumgartner. (I am the King of the Segues.) He's heading off to become the Dean of Engineering at Ohio Northern University. I hand him a poster we all signed for him, and shake his hand.
Eric is the kind of genius I can only wish I were. Smarter than hell, a fantastic engineer, but also great with people -- terrific social skills, a top-notch manager. And somehow he finds time to coach his kid's soccer team. It's a real loss to the Lab.
Depressed, I head downstairs to plan thisol's drive, which is a challenge. The trough before us ends in sort of a cul-de-sac about 20m away. Lying across the trough is a sort of "pitcher's mound" -- likely soft material we don't want to drive over -- and a few meters behind that is another one. Paolo wants to stop short of the first pitcher's mound, but I think we can take it, and I manage to convince him of it. Instead, we're going to drive up onto the ripple beside it, nestle in the hollow between mounds, and then scoot off into the next trough to the east. If we make it that far, we'll turn south again and back across a big patch of outcrop.
I'm either insane, or a genius. I mean, not an Eric Baumgartner genius. But a genius, anyway.
Or insane.
[Next post: sol 876 (Opportunity sol 855), June 20.]
2011-06-16
Spirit Sol 872
The bad news is, we're under 300 W-hr for the first time -- 297 is the actual number. 250, of course, is the lower limit of survivability (at least without pulling Opportunity-style Deep Sleep tricks).
The worse news is, they don't need rover drivers today. So I sit down with Tara Estlin, who's had bad luck with missing shadow shifts and stuff lately, and we work through the MI mosaic we sent last time, making sure she knows it like the back of her hand.
I'm going to have her write a simplified version of it herself, when she interrupts me. "I might need to leave a bit later," she says apologetically. "I have a sick cat ...."
Worse than merely sick, as it turns out. Tara's beloved fourteen-year-old Ripley -- the runt of the litter, but as feisty as her namesake from Alien -- is coming to the end of her days. She's got kidney problems, and she's ... she's not well. And Tara's barely keeping it together as the words tumble out of her.
Well, if there's one person around here who's going to understand about that ... I tell her about my own too-recent experiences with Jake and Zenobia, and as gently as I can, I encourage her to go home and spend some time with Ripley. I don't remember much about what I was doing at work the weeks they died, but I remember clearly the time I took off from work to spend with them toward the end. It's like gold in my hand.
"I don't know," she says, "your time is so valuable ...."
"My time is valuable," I agree quietly. "Right now, Ripley's time is even more valuable."
Tara goes home.[1]
[1] This was a hard post to revisit, having just recently lost another cat (Indiana). Life goes on, though, you know: Tara recently got another cat, whom she adores. And I know I will, too. Not yet, though. Not yet.
The worse news is, they don't need rover drivers today. So I sit down with Tara Estlin, who's had bad luck with missing shadow shifts and stuff lately, and we work through the MI mosaic we sent last time, making sure she knows it like the back of her hand.
I'm going to have her write a simplified version of it herself, when she interrupts me. "I might need to leave a bit later," she says apologetically. "I have a sick cat ...."
Worse than merely sick, as it turns out. Tara's beloved fourteen-year-old Ripley -- the runt of the litter, but as feisty as her namesake from Alien -- is coming to the end of her days. She's got kidney problems, and she's ... she's not well. And Tara's barely keeping it together as the words tumble out of her.
Well, if there's one person around here who's going to understand about that ... I tell her about my own too-recent experiences with Jake and Zenobia, and as gently as I can, I encourage her to go home and spend some time with Ripley. I don't remember much about what I was doing at work the weeks they died, but I remember clearly the time I took off from work to spend with them toward the end. It's like gold in my hand.
"I don't know," she says, "your time is so valuable ...."
"My time is valuable," I agree quietly. "Right now, Ripley's time is even more valuable."
Tara goes home.[1]
[1] This was a hard post to revisit, having just recently lost another cat (Indiana). Life goes on, though, you know: Tara recently got another cat, whom she adores. And I know I will, too. Not yet, though. Not yet.
2011-06-15
Spirit Sol 871
We're continuing the extended RAT-brush campaign on Progress, but it hasn't been going well. For one thing, the RAT stalled again, possibly due to a pebble getting jammed in the works.
At first there's talk of blowing off the IDD work for the sol and just doing remote sensing, but cooler heads prevail. We end up doing an MI of the RAT hole, as much for engineering diagnostics as for science reasons -- if there's a pebble, we want to spot it. Then we'll image the RAT with the PCAM and FHAZ, so that if the putative pebble's lodged in the machinery, we'll have a shot at spotting it.
All in all, reasonably routine. The one thing that makes me nervous about this sequence is how close we're getting to the soil. As the RAT hole gets deeper and deeper, we move the MI in closer and closer. But since the MI mosaic that images the RAT hole also moves the MI over portions of the soil outside the RAT hole, we get closer and closer to the soil there as we go.
Our minimum standoff is normally about 17mm, but thisol it's going to be 9.5mm. Later we get updated numbers and find that it's not quite as bad as that, but it's close, at 9.85mm. That's within our 1cm error budget for the instrument positioning system, and I can't help disliking it. If you'd worked with Angry Bob[1], you wouldn't care for this, either. Imaging from the last time, when we were only about 1.5mm higher, shows that we should have acceptable clearance, so ... well ... it's one thing to be nervous, it's another to be unreasonable. I shrug and send the commands.
Footnotes:
[1] The nickname for original rover driver Bob Bonitz. If you're curious, here's the tale of his nickname (see that post's footnote).
At first there's talk of blowing off the IDD work for the sol and just doing remote sensing, but cooler heads prevail. We end up doing an MI of the RAT hole, as much for engineering diagnostics as for science reasons -- if there's a pebble, we want to spot it. Then we'll image the RAT with the PCAM and FHAZ, so that if the putative pebble's lodged in the machinery, we'll have a shot at spotting it.
All in all, reasonably routine. The one thing that makes me nervous about this sequence is how close we're getting to the soil. As the RAT hole gets deeper and deeper, we move the MI in closer and closer. But since the MI mosaic that images the RAT hole also moves the MI over portions of the soil outside the RAT hole, we get closer and closer to the soil there as we go.
Our minimum standoff is normally about 17mm, but thisol it's going to be 9.5mm. Later we get updated numbers and find that it's not quite as bad as that, but it's close, at 9.85mm. That's within our 1cm error budget for the instrument positioning system, and I can't help disliking it. If you'd worked with Angry Bob[1], you wouldn't care for this, either. Imaging from the last time, when we were only about 1.5mm higher, shows that we should have acceptable clearance, so ... well ... it's one thing to be nervous, it's another to be unreasonable. I shrug and send the commands.
Footnotes:
[1] The nickname for original rover driver Bob Bonitz. If you're curious, here's the tale of his nickname (see that post's footnote).
2011-06-09
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.]
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.
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.]
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.
2011-06-07
Spirit Sol 863
Spirit's easy. No RPs thisol.
Spirit's interesting, too: apparently, a couple of rocks sitting very near us turn out to have a remarkably high iron content. Word on the street is, the most logical explanation is that they're iron meteorites.
Well, Opportunity found the first ever meteorite on another planet -- SpongeBob, back near the heat shield. But it's still a feather in Spirit's cap. One of many.
[Next post: sol 865, June 9.]
Spirit's interesting, too: apparently, a couple of rocks sitting very near us turn out to have a remarkably high iron content. Word on the street is, the most logical explanation is that they're iron meteorites.
Well, Opportunity found the first ever meteorite on another planet -- SpongeBob, back near the heat shield. But it's still a feather in Spirit's cap. One of many.
[Next post: sol 865, June 9.]
2011-06-01
Opportunity Sol 836 (Spirit Sol 857)
Jeng has to leave early for personal reasons. He was RP-1, I was RP-2, and Matt was shadowing, so I step in as RP-1 and Matt as RP-2. It's like a well-oiled machine.
This weekend, we had a little excitement on Opportunity: she got herself embedded in another ripple.[1] It's just like it was back at Purgatory, only not as bad: having learned our lesson from Purgatory, we had a slip check that stopped us before things got too hairy. Nevertheless, we're jammed in there pretty well, and it's going to take a bit of work to get ourselves out.
Today, we're just starting that process, commanding 5m of driving straight ahead. We'll take high-quality before-and-after pictures, along with a whole bunch of lower-res images in between. If we're lucky, we'll make about 1cm of progress. But it'll be just about the best-documented 1cm drive ever.
[Next post: sol 863, June 7.]
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Aw, crap. Not this again.
Footnotes:
[1] This ripple was later named "Jammerbugt," after a Danish municipality, for some reason known only to Steve Squyres. I had recently been promoted to the rover driver team lead, and one of my first responsibilities was to lead the anomaly investigation into the Jammerbugt embedding.
I had lots of fun with this assignment -- my final slide included a picture of Captain Kirk ("Risk ... is our business") alongside a quote from Jim Erickson ("What I don't want to see is that we lose our nerve"). But more importantly, the investigation turned up something called the "Sullivan Asymmetry," which we named for Rob Sullivan, the science team member who noticed it and told us about it.
It turns out that the ripples were softer on one side and harder on the other, because as the Martian wind blew across them, almost always in the same direction, it deposited softer material on the leading side and harder material on the trailing side. This knowledge would help us avoid future embedding events because it meant that when in doubt, there was always a harder-packed side we could swerve toward. While that wouldn't have prevented this particular embedding (the root cause was a miscommunication between teams, and we solved that in a different way), it probably did prevent lots of future embeddings.
Oh, and one more thing about Jammerbugt. Rover driver Paolo Bellutta called it "Britney Spears Ripple" -- "Oops, I Did It Again." Funny as hell, but I decreed that we are not naming anything on Mars for that person, and that was that.
This weekend, we had a little excitement on Opportunity: she got herself embedded in another ripple.[1] It's just like it was back at Purgatory, only not as bad: having learned our lesson from Purgatory, we had a slip check that stopped us before things got too hairy. Nevertheless, we're jammed in there pretty well, and it's going to take a bit of work to get ourselves out.
Today, we're just starting that process, commanding 5m of driving straight ahead. We'll take high-quality before-and-after pictures, along with a whole bunch of lower-res images in between. If we're lucky, we'll make about 1cm of progress. But it'll be just about the best-documented 1cm drive ever.
[Next post: sol 863, June 7.]
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Aw, crap. Not this again.
Footnotes:
[1] This ripple was later named "Jammerbugt," after a Danish municipality, for some reason known only to Steve Squyres. I had recently been promoted to the rover driver team lead, and one of my first responsibilities was to lead the anomaly investigation into the Jammerbugt embedding.
I had lots of fun with this assignment -- my final slide included a picture of Captain Kirk ("Risk ... is our business") alongside a quote from Jim Erickson ("What I don't want to see is that we lose our nerve"). But more importantly, the investigation turned up something called the "Sullivan Asymmetry," which we named for Rob Sullivan, the science team member who noticed it and told us about it.
It turns out that the ripples were softer on one side and harder on the other, because as the Martian wind blew across them, almost always in the same direction, it deposited softer material on the leading side and harder material on the trailing side. This knowledge would help us avoid future embedding events because it meant that when in doubt, there was always a harder-packed side we could swerve toward. While that wouldn't have prevented this particular embedding (the root cause was a miscommunication between teams, and we solved that in a different way), it probably did prevent lots of future embeddings.
Oh, and one more thing about Jammerbugt. Rover driver Paolo Bellutta called it "Britney Spears Ripple" -- "Oops, I Did It Again." Funny as hell, but I decreed that we are not naming anything on Mars for that person, and that was that.
2011-05-27
Spirit Sol 852
Retract the APXS and swing the IDD away for imaging, then return and place the MB where the APXS was. Simple enough; we could do it in our sleep. But this is the third try, the first two having been frustrated by random uplink failures -- nobody's fault either time, just plain bad luck.
Theoretically, we just have to roll the sequence forward to thisol and deliver it, and we're done. But Chris and I can't help thinking up better ways to do it, and in the end we pretty much rewrite the whole thing.
Al Herrera notices the activity and perks up. "You guys just changing the sol number?"
"Nope," I admit, "we had five minutes, and thought of something else."
"Not surprised," he chuckles, and returns his attention to his laptop.
Well, the new way is better, it really is. Can I help it if Chris and I are perfectionists?
[Next post: sol 857 (Opportunity sol 836), June 1.]
Theoretically, we just have to roll the sequence forward to thisol and deliver it, and we're done. But Chris and I can't help thinking up better ways to do it, and in the end we pretty much rewrite the whole thing.
Al Herrera notices the activity and perks up. "You guys just changing the sol number?"
"Nope," I admit, "we had five minutes, and thought of something else."
"Not surprised," he chuckles, and returns his attention to his laptop.
Well, the new way is better, it really is. Can I help it if Chris and I are perfectionists?
[Next post: sol 857 (Opportunity sol 836), June 1.]
2011-05-17
Spirit Sol 842
Meanwhile, back on the other side of the planet ... Spirit's been working on this lengthy IDD campaign on the soil in front of her. The other day, they tried to RAT-brush the soil (yes, really), but instead of the RAT hovering over the soil as they brushed, they apparently actually made contact.
We don't like it when stuff like that happens: the ground should be where we think it is, damn it. So today we're doing a bit of an engineering experiment, touching the soil, putting the RAT into the hover position, taking lots of images as we go. Science-free.
Since the mission started, there's been a bit of a friendly rivalry between the two rovers, particularly when it comes to total odometry. At times, Spirit's been ahead, and at other times, Opportunity's been out in front. Now, with Spirit not driving at all for six months -- and probably never driving long distances again -- Opportunity is poised to take the crown for good. As if to rub this in, Brian Cooper came downstairs and taped to the rover drivers' workstation a fortune cookie fortune he got just the other day:
NEVER LET AN OPPORTUNITY PASS YOU BY.
[Next post: sol 852, May 27.]
We don't like it when stuff like that happens: the ground should be where we think it is, damn it. So today we're doing a bit of an engineering experiment, touching the soil, putting the RAT into the hover position, taking lots of images as we go. Science-free.
Since the mission started, there's been a bit of a friendly rivalry between the two rovers, particularly when it comes to total odometry. At times, Spirit's been ahead, and at other times, Opportunity's been out in front. Now, with Spirit not driving at all for six months -- and probably never driving long distances again -- Opportunity is poised to take the crown for good. As if to rub this in, Brian Cooper came downstairs and taped to the rover drivers' workstation a fortune cookie fortune he got just the other day:
NEVER LET AN OPPORTUNITY PASS YOU BY.
[Next post: sol 852, May 27.]
2011-05-09
Opportunity Sol 814 (Spirit Sol 835)
When I walk into the SOWG room, I'm startled to see Steve Squyres sitting there. Turns out he's out here so he and John Callas can meet with the NASA bigwigs about another round of funding for the mission. I wish him well, of course, and I ask, "Is it going to be harder now that Spirit's down a wheel?"
"The Spirit site is awesome!" Steve exclaims. "There's a whole class of science you can only do sitting in one place, and we've never done it at the Gusev site. No, no, we've got a great story to tell. It's just that there's only so much money to go around." And they might cut one of the rovers in order to save that money. Ulp.
He also tells me Rob Sullivan was thrilled with the MIs we took yesterday. "Rob was really, really psyched when those MIs came down -- you shoulda been there." Which is always nice to hear. Rob's a super-nice guy, and I like it when he's happy with the science we get for him.
The SOWG is over in 13 minutes -- shorter than an engineering keepout, as somebody points out -- and we're off. As we're wrapping up, everyone takes a moment to wish Steve good luck.
But Brenda's not worried. "If Steve Squyres can't get people excited about Mars, then the world is coming to an end."
"That's not the issue," Steve says modestly. "The blood's running ankle-deep at headquarters."
"Yeah," Matt Keuneke chimes in, "they'll be like, 'No funding unless you find a dinosaur bone.' And then they'll probably ask, 'How big is the bone?'"
Well, that's reassuring.
After the usual back-and-forth with Tim Parker and Matt Golombek, Paolo and I plan a 52m drive, including the autonav chunk at the end. Quite respectable progress, if it works out.
As we're wrapping up, Steve returns from the long meeting with the money men. "I went in thinking they're thinking the easy thing to do is to cut Spirit. So I hit Spirit so hard, one of the scientists asked whether we should shut down Opportunity." He grins wickedly. "Then I showed 'em Victoria Crater."
He sighs. "I expect there will be belt-tightening and cuts, but I expect we will have two rovers for the next year and a half."
That funding will have to come from somewhere, and it might end up coming from one of the other Mars missions. Steve offers his opinions on where that cut should be, should it absolutely have to be made. "If it were up to me and I had to cut one, I'd cut the U.S. participation in Mars Express. MEX can live without us. Then I'd cut MGS. MGS is not that great, with just the one camera working -- Odyssey can do everything MGS can, plus -- but MGS is doing great science and MOC is a great camera, and it would be a shame to lose any of it."
[Next post: sol 842, May 17.]
"The Spirit site is awesome!" Steve exclaims. "There's a whole class of science you can only do sitting in one place, and we've never done it at the Gusev site. No, no, we've got a great story to tell. It's just that there's only so much money to go around." And they might cut one of the rovers in order to save that money. Ulp.
He also tells me Rob Sullivan was thrilled with the MIs we took yesterday. "Rob was really, really psyched when those MIs came down -- you shoulda been there." Which is always nice to hear. Rob's a super-nice guy, and I like it when he's happy with the science we get for him.
The SOWG is over in 13 minutes -- shorter than an engineering keepout, as somebody points out -- and we're off. As we're wrapping up, everyone takes a moment to wish Steve good luck.
But Brenda's not worried. "If Steve Squyres can't get people excited about Mars, then the world is coming to an end."
"That's not the issue," Steve says modestly. "The blood's running ankle-deep at headquarters."
"Yeah," Matt Keuneke chimes in, "they'll be like, 'No funding unless you find a dinosaur bone.' And then they'll probably ask, 'How big is the bone?'"
Well, that's reassuring.
After the usual back-and-forth with Tim Parker and Matt Golombek, Paolo and I plan a 52m drive, including the autonav chunk at the end. Quite respectable progress, if it works out.
As we're wrapping up, Steve returns from the long meeting with the money men. "I went in thinking they're thinking the easy thing to do is to cut Spirit. So I hit Spirit so hard, one of the scientists asked whether we should shut down Opportunity." He grins wickedly. "Then I showed 'em Victoria Crater."
He sighs. "I expect there will be belt-tightening and cuts, but I expect we will have two rovers for the next year and a half."
That funding will have to come from somewhere, and it might end up coming from one of the other Mars missions. Steve offers his opinions on where that cut should be, should it absolutely have to be made. "If it were up to me and I had to cut one, I'd cut the U.S. participation in Mars Express. MEX can live without us. Then I'd cut MGS. MGS is not that great, with just the one camera working -- Odyssey can do everything MGS can, plus -- but MGS is doing great science and MOC is a great camera, and it would be a shame to lose any of it."
[Next post: sol 842, May 17.]
2011-05-06
Opportunity Sol 811 (Spirit Sol 832)
At the end of the SOWG meeting, I point out to the whole team what I was able to mention to only a few people yesterday: that we're now up to sol 810 on Opportunity, fully nine times our nominal mission. And there is much rejoicing -- applause and cheers on the audio net.
The drive went beautifully, just perfect. We're perched on the side of the ripple just as we'd hoped. Only problem: there's no visible banding.
Well, it's barely visible if you stretch the images juuust right. But apparently this is something that disappears up close; it's a lot more visible if you look off to either side, along the ripple. That's a weird effect. It's plainly some sort of optical illusion, but I have no idea what causes it.
The bad thing about being perched on the ripple like this is that we took an energy hit, our available energy dropping from somewhere around 440 W-hr to about 386 W-hr, due, apparently, to the 10 degrees of unfavorable tilt we picked up.
Anyway, we're here, and we're going to IDD this thing. While Jeng plans the drive -- a surprisingly aggressive 40 meters -- I work out the IDD sequence. It's unusual for an IDD sequence, a 1x10 mosaic -- basically a vertical column of images all the way down the face. Since the local ripple surface is so uniform, the sequence ends up being nice and clean; I'm quite proud of it. And I hope it works.
[Next post: sol 835 (Opportunity sol 814), May 9.]
The drive went beautifully, just perfect. We're perched on the side of the ripple just as we'd hoped. Only problem: there's no visible banding.
Well, it's barely visible if you stretch the images juuust right. But apparently this is something that disappears up close; it's a lot more visible if you look off to either side, along the ripple. That's a weird effect. It's plainly some sort of optical illusion, but I have no idea what causes it.
The bad thing about being perched on the ripple like this is that we took an energy hit, our available energy dropping from somewhere around 440 W-hr to about 386 W-hr, due, apparently, to the 10 degrees of unfavorable tilt we picked up.
Anyway, we're here, and we're going to IDD this thing. While Jeng plans the drive -- a surprisingly aggressive 40 meters -- I work out the IDD sequence. It's unusual for an IDD sequence, a 1x10 mosaic -- basically a vertical column of images all the way down the face. Since the local ripple surface is so uniform, the sequence ends up being nice and clean; I'm quite proud of it. And I hope it works.
[Next post: sol 835 (Opportunity sol 814), May 9.]
2011-05-05
Opportunity Sol 810 (Spirit Sol 831)
I wasn't on shift yestersol, Paolo and Matt were, but they called in me and Jeng to give them some advice on driving in an area where we lacked good imaging. Our advice was to suck it up and use autonav. They did, reluctantly -- but it turned out that autonav got us within about 50cm of where we wanted to go, plenty close enough, and we're ready for more.
(Incidentally, when was the first time we had two RPs on shift neither of whom was from the original set? (I tend to think of Jeng and Ashitey as originals, though strictly speaking they weren't.) It wasn't yesterday, surely, but I don't know when it was. Ah, I'm such an old-timer now.)
But we're not going to charge down the trench, going for distance. Instead, we're going to try to address a question that the scientists have been kicking around for a while: what causes the banding we're seeing on these ripples? It looks as though there are several sets of ripples, one atop another, with slightly different albedos -- and what would cause that?
To try to find out, we're going to drive up on one and plant the MI on it. That's a slightly scary and just plain odd thing to do; we normally try to avoid these ripples, not climb them. But it's all for science, you know. So it's game on.
I'm RP-1, and Matt's shadowing me today. Since he's come up to speed on the driving (so to speak) impressively fast, I decide to hand him the reins and see how he does as RP-1. The short version is that he does great, planning a very nice approach where we scoot about 17m down the trench, then turn and charge right up onto the ripple. There's a bit of concern about whether we're going to hit the ripple in our post-drive IDD deploy, but then we realize that the ripple's only about 21cm tall, so the IDD would stay completely above it even if we were buried up to our wheels in the thing.
To make things more complex, though, we have very strict limits on our comm headings. If we're about 3 degrees off one way, we'll get a paltry 23 kilobits -- that's kilobits -- and if we're about 3 degrees off the other way, we'll be at a heading where the PMA will prevent us from talking to Earth at all, so we'll get nothing. Fortunately, ripples are broad, and we should be able to hit it spot on.
Though outwardly cool, Matt confesses he's not completely confident -- "I'm not gonna sleep tonight," as he puts it -- and while that's a feeling I know well, I have a lot of optimism about this drive. As long as we don't end up stuck in the ripple, and we've taken good precautions against that, it should be like hitting the broad side of a barn.
Should be. At least, that's what I'll tell myself when I'm trying to sleep tonight.
It's not until we've wrapped up for the sol, and I'm back in the office talking to someone, that I realize we overlooked something important. I literally run back upstairs to the Opportunity sequencing room, hoping other people will still be there.
Luckily for me, there are several people who haven't left yet, so there's someone to tell. "We just planned sol 810!" I exclaim. "That's nine times the nominal mission! How did we miss that?"
(Incidentally, when was the first time we had two RPs on shift neither of whom was from the original set? (I tend to think of Jeng and Ashitey as originals, though strictly speaking they weren't.) It wasn't yesterday, surely, but I don't know when it was. Ah, I'm such an old-timer now.)
But we're not going to charge down the trench, going for distance. Instead, we're going to try to address a question that the scientists have been kicking around for a while: what causes the banding we're seeing on these ripples? It looks as though there are several sets of ripples, one atop another, with slightly different albedos -- and what would cause that?
To try to find out, we're going to drive up on one and plant the MI on it. That's a slightly scary and just plain odd thing to do; we normally try to avoid these ripples, not climb them. But it's all for science, you know. So it's game on.
I'm RP-1, and Matt's shadowing me today. Since he's come up to speed on the driving (so to speak) impressively fast, I decide to hand him the reins and see how he does as RP-1. The short version is that he does great, planning a very nice approach where we scoot about 17m down the trench, then turn and charge right up onto the ripple. There's a bit of concern about whether we're going to hit the ripple in our post-drive IDD deploy, but then we realize that the ripple's only about 21cm tall, so the IDD would stay completely above it even if we were buried up to our wheels in the thing.
To make things more complex, though, we have very strict limits on our comm headings. If we're about 3 degrees off one way, we'll get a paltry 23 kilobits -- that's kilobits -- and if we're about 3 degrees off the other way, we'll be at a heading where the PMA will prevent us from talking to Earth at all, so we'll get nothing. Fortunately, ripples are broad, and we should be able to hit it spot on.
Though outwardly cool, Matt confesses he's not completely confident -- "I'm not gonna sleep tonight," as he puts it -- and while that's a feeling I know well, I have a lot of optimism about this drive. As long as we don't end up stuck in the ripple, and we've taken good precautions against that, it should be like hitting the broad side of a barn.
Should be. At least, that's what I'll tell myself when I'm trying to sleep tonight.
It's not until we've wrapped up for the sol, and I'm back in the office talking to someone, that I realize we overlooked something important. I literally run back upstairs to the Opportunity sequencing room, hoping other people will still be there.
Luckily for me, there are several people who haven't left yet, so there's someone to tell. "We just planned sol 810!" I exclaim. "That's nine times the nominal mission! How did we miss that?"
2011-05-02
Opportunity Sol 807 (Spirit Sol 828)
We don't have much drive time thisol, so it's going to be a short one. We'll retract the IDD, then drive about 30m across one ripple and up to the next (almost nonexistent) one before we'll more or less run out of time.
And that's how we'll start down the Goodnight-Loving trail. No, I am not making that name up: it's the actual name of an Old West cattle trail, in keeping with our practice of naming our Victoria-bound drives in that fashion. But I can't help getting the adolescent giggles over this name, and I make a couple of jokes about it in the uplink report. ("And finally, on behalf of all the rover planners, I'd like to welcome all of y'all to the Good Night Lovin' trail. Oh, yeah." It's funnier when you read it like Barry White.)
[Next post: sol 831 (Opportunity sol 810), May 5.]
And that's how we'll start down the Goodnight-Loving trail. No, I am not making that name up: it's the actual name of an Old West cattle trail, in keeping with our practice of naming our Victoria-bound drives in that fashion. But I can't help getting the adolescent giggles over this name, and I make a couple of jokes about it in the uplink report. ("And finally, on behalf of all the rover planners, I'd like to welcome all of y'all to the Good Night Lovin' trail. Oh, yeah." It's funnier when you read it like Barry White.)
[Next post: sol 831 (Opportunity sol 810), May 5.]
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