NASA MER press briefings
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January 28, 2004
Natalie: Opportunity completed first part of standup. Spirit continues to improve.
Rick Welch: Really another great day for Opportunity at Meridiani. We did complete the first two parts of our four part standup. Graphic? Images we acquired during standup process, starts with wheels stowed, now released, lower now on deck. Last little raise up and set down to ensure rocker bogie mobility system latched. Very successful day getting standup done. We did other good things. Mini-TES actuator test good. Tomorrow for sol 5 complete standup activities including retracting lift and deploying rear wheels. Also do some prep for egress. Front direction pretty clear. We see a lot of airbag out the rear so we really want to drive off the front. Right now the lander tilted up at the front about 4 or 5° what we want to do is lower that front edge down about 5 degrees. Tomorrow afternoon we'll be dragging in the rear airbags to get them really bunched up and then we'll push down with that back petal about 40° further to push the lander up. Depending on how well that goes will determine how quickly we egress. Right now we're sort of planning for an egress on sol 9. That would be Sunday night. Ready for rest of standup.
Matt Golombek: 3 year effort to select sites. Most important aspect is a safe site. We had extensive evaluation using data gathered from MGS and Odyssey. Sites selected were best imaged and best studied sites in Mars history. We evaluated all data that existed to come up with predictions that the site would be safe for the lander and scientifically interesting. We used images down to 3 meters/pixel, thermal emission for albedo. Looked at topography and relief\ . Looked at radar to determine roughness of and competent soil was. Predictions: 1. safe for landing. 2. safe and trafficable for rover. 3. very few rocks. 4. look completely unlike any other place on Mars. All these predictions seem to have been the case. We expected a dark surface with little dust, basaltic sand like surface with a discontinuous outcroppings. Meridiani Planum also turned out to be the smoothest flattest surface we've ever seen on Mars. Since landing all our predictions matched. A "ground truth". Image tour of landing sites. Hubble view shows bright and dark regions. Four previous landing sites were in bright red areas dusty. This site is in a dark gray black region dust free. Next image postcard from Opportunity, dark, outcrops. Next shows topography outside the crater rim is flat. Spirit site at Gusev is brighter as you can see, more rocks, reasonably flat. Next shows gradient as we go to brighter and brighter locations. Pathfinder, rockier, brighter, dustier. Higher albedo. Next is gradient at Viking too. Brighter still. 20% rocks. Viking on even dustier and brighter. Final visual shows significant dunes. All of the predictions we expected for Opportunity site have come to pass. Bodes well for our ability to use remote sensing for picking sites. Final panorama of Opportunity site. See in the distance outside the rim how smooth and flat it is. In accord with our predictions. See pebbly surface with small outcroppings of white material. Seeing rim dive down and background picks up some of the flat terrain outside of the rim. Horizon is as flat as any place we've seen.
Jim Bell: Morning, afternoon :) Update on Pancam today and also mention that mini-TESS passed healthcheck. Science team happy about that. Pancam investigation going well. Completed acquiring mission success panorama with thumbnails. 75% down on the ground. We've had opportunity to insert some little sequences when we had a few extra minutes between engineering activities. Exciting for science team. Nice bonus. For Opportunity, we've acquired 514 full-frame Pancam images for about 240 Megabits. On Spirit 2239 Pancam images or 1.3 Gigabits of data. This image is the first part of the Pancam mission success panorama, full resolution, in color. Stitched together one part near outcrop. Covers about 130° so it's less than 20% of full panorama. Color is dark and reddish consistent with coarse basaltic particles Matt mentioned. No direct compositional info yet though. Background is the brighter and still reddish rocks. Color of those rocks is consistent with the color of the bright dust we see in the bright places that Matt talked about. Near the end of the pan here, see this beautiful outcrop showing layering and other stratigraphy. About 8 meters away and really tiny, only about 10 cm tall, somewhat of an illusion. Next is a zoom up on part of that panorama. Very high-res view of one part of that outcrop. Taken with blue filter, highest possible spatial resolution. Low compression at only 2:1. Challenge to creep up on full resolution because we're being careful around the flash situation and. Some of the detail is pretty phenomenal. Start to see small grains, pebbles, cobbles you can't see in lower res Pancam or Navcam images. Some of the layers seem to be composed of these grains and pebbles. There are many hypotheses as geologists almost ranging from volcanic lava flows, ash falls, sedimentary deposits from wind, from water. We don't have direct info on composition yet but these images help us decide where to go with the rover. For scale, little rock in very middle of scene just past outcrop. It's about 10 meters away and about one inch in size. Next visual is a color part of panorama. Circular smooth spot is a class of features resulting from airbags. Nice example in next visual. Zoom of two high-res Pancam images. Marks show the radial spokes in the circle. Right image about 3 meters or so away. These patterns come from (show slide of airbag inflated test at NASA last year). Each airbag is a big balloon with a circular center area and radial straps, support spokes. Seeing in Mars picture where it rolled across the ground. Perhaps EDL team putting together animation. We can see it traces out a figure-8 pattern in crater. Central circle in airbag print about the size of a basketball. Cool to think about but physical properties folks on science team having a blast with these. We're leaving an indent and it's acting like a fine grained material but material not sticking to airbags like at Spirit site. Physical properties are telling us about the grain size, electrostatic or other physical properties. Spectacular images and great debating. We're still mindful of Spirit out there and many of us on the team want to get back into that investigation and start solving some of that puzzle at Gusev.
Jennifer Trosper: Yes, we are very anxious to get Spirit back to science mission. Last week very little control. Over weekend, partial control. Now working to get complete control. Still not quite there. Yesterday determined it was safe to use HGA and today while we're communicating with Spirit over LGA, we're actually moving the HGA to calibration position and then to stow position. If that goes well, in a few hours we'll do an HGA communication session and be back on the communication plan that will allow us to transmit 11,000 bits per second instead of the between 40 and 120 bits per second so you can imagine the additional debug data we'll get. Other plans we have for today, I mentioned yesterday we are attempting to get a trace from flight software of the problem to see if our hypothesis was correct, to compare to the testbed and if so then begin to delete some of the files from flash files system. Had some difficulty getting script to run on the vehicle. Method is kind of a backdoor into flight software fairly surgical technique. If not able to complete surgical technique, we have larger hammers we can use to solve this problem. Plan is to maintain flash data, probably not corrupted. If we can't do that then we can delete the data in the flash memory. Talked to science team and almost all of it is replaceable. APSX and Mossbauer is replaceable. Moving forward. Getting on HGA. Attempt surgical technique for one more day. Hopefully be back doing science early next week.
Q. Status of that heater? Could it shorten surface life.
Rick: Issue maintains. Heater that stays on over night. Additional info from last night's data which corroborates that it is actually the mini-TES shoulder heater that we thought previously. Longterm issues, we're still working on that. Near term, not impacting us at all.
Q. Specific areas in outcrop that are best target? Selected area to recommend targeting?
Jim: we don't know how trafficable yet. Haven't done the driving detail approach. May be areas we can't access. May be easier or harder areas. We've seen the whole outcrop at modest res. Only seen one small piece in highest res. We have more data onboard that hasn't trickled down to earth yet.... (lost connection here, sorry)
Steve: ....those are the two hypothesis I've heard.
Jim: That coves the major ones. It takes high resolution to see that structure and detail. One sacrifice you make in heavy compression is that small scale features can be washed out. Being able to have the chance between standup activities to take these high res images is a real bonus.
Q. Acquired at Spirit site some high res images of crater off in the distance. May actually be exposed bedrock there as well?
Jim: this is subject of some debate. Unlike at Opportunity we had not had the opportunity to take low compression data. Most of the high-res was off on the distant hills and down at magic carpet and by our feet. The crater is going to be a near term target once we get back On he road. What we have is mission success panorama. We tried to take a long panorama across that crater but ran out of time and then the problems. Finishing that is a high priority.
Q. In terms of the dust, warned that 90 day life because dust clogging solar cells. What are you looking at for planned longevity.
Matt: Really question for engineers. The dust in atmosphere, tau 0.7-0.8 at both landing sites which is fair bit dustier than any time in Pathfinder mission and so far initial suggestions from solar panels is that dust is accumulating on solar panels at the same rate as Pathfinder. Longevity? Over to Rick.
Rick: Too early to tell. Solar input a little less than what we had expected because of the tau but we still have plenty of energy and watch it. 90 days is realistic. Matt: optimists think twice that. (question "any pessimists?") Not among the scientists (laughter).
Q. Now that you've seen high-res views of pebbly surface, what does that suggest about the kinds of measures on soil before you get to outcropping? Maybe measures of the soil and of the area where the airbags hit?
Matt: preliminary discussion with science team this morning. Agreement we're in unique spot and we need to characterize these soils the best we can. Chem measurements, mini-TES, hazard cam and Pancam images. Strong desire to trench to try to gain the mechanical properties of that material it's all sitting there for us. Also tantalizing clues in remote sensing data. So far data, DIMES, shows these craters have dark floors consistent with basaltic granule covered surface. I predict when we get out it will be generally brighter surface, either redder or a modeling of that white outcrop that will come up in various places, overall brighter and different from where we are so more important that we characterize this wonderful spot.
Jim: the act of getting ready to drive, checking out the rover, will also serve double-duty for science experiments, wheel motions, test motions from engineers. Just driving will accomplish two things. Almost anywhere we go we'll run into airbag bounce marks. Secondly we'll be creating wheel tracks. That gives us two data types. Rich data set for physical properties.
Q. Some confusion during landing about how long it was bouncing. Now that you've see bounce marks what do you think?
Jim: haven't seen EDL reconstruction.
Rick: they're reviewing data and coming up with an animation and we're all waiting for it.
Q. Layer of dust, why is it not dusty?
Matt: swept clean at surface by winds. Dust beneath these small pebbles. Characteristic of desert where you have high winds and you'll leave the pebbles and cobbles, too big to be moved, but dust can be swept up. Soil processes that will keep the pebbles and cobbles up at the surface. Places in Mojave where there's a meter or more of airborne dust where there are cobbles of this size that are kept up on the surface, elevated up by processes like freeze thaw, and dust infiltration below it so this layer stays up at the surface.
Jim: and there must be some processes in the bowl of this crater that assist in that because we're in the darkest spot around and out of the crater it's brighter.
Q. What you're doing data handling with Opportunity now that you know about Spirit problem. Also, division of labor>.
Jennifer: We have a process in place we've been using and tomorrow Opportunity will be deleting the cruise phase products we believe are the source of the number of files problem we have on Spirit. We're also setting the limits to be lower. Keep in mind that we've tested in the testbed filling up this flash completely and we have software that throws out based on priority and we've done tests like that so there's something about the situation we're in that we don't completely understand because we've filled up our file system and not hat this problem. Because we don't understand it completely, we're working to limit the number of files onboard. Team makeup a lot of shuffling in the last week. We have one team that's split in half for each of the vehicles. Opportunity landing and impact to egress it takes more than half of our one team because of complicated activities to land and get rolled off the lander. In the case of the Spirit problem, we have people in reserve that have been brought onboard to, strategic people familiar with process and flight software, working on Spirit. Anomaly team is probably 15-20 people. Last night we added another 10 people to move toward getting to our nominal time line and over the next few nights we will go toward our full overnight time line of staffing with science and engineering teams in prep for getting Spirit back on its feet for the science mission.
Q. Are you really seeing pebbly layer in the outcropping and also could you talk about that picture where you can actually see out through, will TES be able to do work out that region?
Matt: smaller than pebbles, gravel. Geologists have these specific categories. Indication in high res is that they're embedded in that material, not just sitting on top, on vertical faces poking out. When you look out to lowest part of rim where the easiest drive out, there is a reddish layer in foreground and behind that a darker layer. There's debate whether topography or just a different color. My eye sees topography. Certainly want to hit that with Mini-TES.
Jim: biggest area of debate about pebbly layer in outcrop is whether it's a continuous layer or a unique aspect of one rock, holding out judgement on distinct discreet layer.
Q. Gravels, pebbles and cobbles, are you seeing different colors.
Matt: certainly a dark small dark particle resolved in high res. For the first time an indication of different hued particles. No color yet but it looks like different color small particles among the dominant dark gray. Ideas are that they are particles weathered out of the brighter outcrop. Also possible carried in from impact or other processes. Way too early.
Jim: High quality images take longer to get off the vehicle and engineering takes priority. We're not complaining but it's gonna take a little while to leak off that high-res data.
Matt: we're horribly impatient scientists :D We want off now! (laughter).
Q. Magic carpet different from retraction of airbags at this site?
Jim: We've been discussing it today. Larry Sodablom (sp?) and others looking at this closely. Some indication soils are acting quite different. There was some apparent cohesion at Spirit, some different physical property. At Opportunity it was more like you ran a rake through it, very fine grained and not as cohesive. Some differences and we need some really good compositional information. We got data at Spirit site lot of sulphur and chlorine. Less cemented at Opportunity and one prediction is less salts.
Matt: don't see duracrust at Opportunity.
Q. Mapping out mission course from inside the crater? Do a second evaluation once you're out?
Matt: landing in a crater is a blessing. If we'd been on the plane, we'd have a devil of a time located. We are in a crater with a 20 meter diameter and there are only so many of those in the landing area so narrows it down. Using photogeologists mapping terrain around us using particularly DIMES images and using the inertial space from navigation in the spacecraft and so far we have relative agreement between those two but we're not there yet. We only have one DTE solution and a single odyssey coherent pass solution which gave us a navigation location. We need a second one of both of those to confirm. In addition there's the spectacular effort of taking the stereo images from camera and flattening it out and making a topo map which allows you to more easily compare it to the images. Like with Spirit, we'd like to know exactly where are located before we start traversing so we can pick the best location to go to. Debate if that 150 meter crater to the northeast is the best way to go because it might just be more of what we have in our current crater. So, you could go to the south what's in images we don't yet have (from MGS) there looks to be mottled terrain that has bright material coming up frequently. Driving to the south might be down the stratigraphic column which might be tremendously interesting. You can tell my bias (south).
Jim: Ray Arvidson and others have said how lucky we are to be where we are so we have to, it would be irresponsible not to study this location. We have to exploration here. Second thing is that this big panorama only covers a 20 meter diameter circle. When you look at Spirit's panorama, it covers several, 2, 3, 500 meters of stereo coverage. We have to get a bigger panorama when we get out. We'll want to obtain the kind of panorama we got at Spirit. Find where we are and determine traverse directions.
Natalie: Friday at 9am next briefing.
January 30, 2004
Good morning and welcome to JPL. It's 10 am Spirit in Gusev . It's sol 27, 10am at Opportunity in Meridiani.
Mark Adler (mission manager): Sol 27 for spirit. Still working the anomaly. On sol 25 we did in fact start some normal operations. Took a front Hazcam showing arm on Adirondack. Shows we're still on Mars :D Everything right where we left it. We also got HGA working so are able to have normal HGA communications during day which is important for working on this anomaly. On sol 26 more operation with instruments. Got data from Mossbauer and APSX. Also took several color Pancam images. Show the next slide. Up at the top is the calibration target. Next is the Sun. On the bottom we have an image of Cake and Blanco. Jim Bell provided us with these color calibrated images. We also yesterday completed a scan of flash memory provided us with some important diagnostic info. Mounting flash takes more system ram than we have available. Helps confirm the theory we had that we're running out of memory when trying to mount flash. Still don't know if it's number of files or other characteristics of the contents of the flash. Today on sol 27 continue with task trace going on right now. Take some piece of memory when it's run up mode where it's not functioning normally and see if that shows trace information of what routines were running when the system got hung up. Then we'll bring system back up in cripple mode and delete from flash memory a large number of cruise phase files By doing that, it may provide enough of a change in state of the flash file system to not require as much memory to mount flash. Then we'll try to reboot into normal mode, non-cripple mode and see if the system comes up. We're hopeful that it will come up and if it does we'll resume normal operations and do some housekeeping on the system and begin to play back some of the data in the flash in preparation for a possible flash file format tomorrow. If that doesn't work we'll go back to cripple mode and get more diagnostic info and replan for tomorrow as to whether or not we want to do a format or what is the next step we want to take. Sol 28, if everything goes well, mini-TES checkout, flight software check. Sol 29 hopefully normal operations.
Daniel Limonadi (rover system engineer): Sol 6, about 10 PM at Opportunity. Good couple of days, a bit ahead of schedule. We've deleted same files that they'll be deleting on Spirit. That went well. Gave a boost to Spirit guys. Deployed rear wheels, moved rear lander petal down to get our egress path better. Retracted rear airbags and moved lander petal down. Made our egress path better. Now have a very benign egress path. Released rear wheels, that went well. Released middle wheels. Then we deployed, wiggled, and stowed IDD for drive. Tonight doing instrument checks on Mossbauer and APSX, both a functional check to make sure everything still works after the pyro fire for IDD as well as an overnight calibration. Tomorrow, sol 7, we cut the last pyro device of 60 plus devices. We will then do a small egress bump to drive forward to test mobility actuators. If all goes well, we'll egress at the end of sol 7. We're ahead of schedule. Take advantage of the fact that Opportunity treats us well, and get into a better power state, get the rover on the ground for science. We have some egress video. Preview of what is going to happen tonight. Rover roughly the attitude we have on Mars, recreated in the Issel(sp?) sandbox. 10° nosedown pitch on rover. Egress aid tips are in the dirt. Recreated anatomy of the crater. Very benign egress path. Not too worried about the egress path so we're gonna get on the ground, six wheels on the ground in Meridiani Planum.
Dr. Ron Li (science team member from Ohio State): You've seen spectacular Pancam mosaic from Opportunity taken on sol 2 and 3. Stereo images in 360 degrees. We've processed them and turned them into 3-D model. The process we have applied to get this model is pretty precise and we use a method called barner(?) adjustment that increases accuracy of pointing angles. Next is contour map derived from the 3-D provides elevations. The fact that the lander is inside the crater provides good opportunity to map inside of a crater. Ray Arvidson says first time we've mapped from inside a crater. This data will be used 1. to characterize crater itself, so here we see variation in terms of shape and elevation and size of different features. Each pixel is about .5 meters and you can use it to characterize geologic features in craters. 2. we see terrain pretty clearly here. Pretty good slope to northwest direction. Gives you several candidates for planning rover exit paths. 3. we have size and shape so we can match it to images taken overhead by orbiter or DIMES. Can match to localize where the lander is.
Ray Arvidson (deputy principal investigator): This is really a day of firsts. First time mapping planetary crater from inside. 22 meter diameter, 3 meters deep. Not a brand new crater. Meridiani Planum deposits look like they're being stripped by wind. Some sediment on inside, on outside, bedrock being exposed. We'll be combining this topo with morphology and color and spectral properties to determine relative age of the crater and how it fits into the geology . Second first will be the first microscopic image ever taken in situ on another planet. We have a series of 7 MI we acquired from sol 17 on Adirondack. It's about 20 cm high. First Hazcam image of Adirondack. Now a Pancam view. And finally a little square about 3cm across with the MI. Orders of magnitude change in spatial resolution. Looking at a rock that if you were a geologist that if you were there and whacked it with a hammer it would ring. Very hard, very fine-grained. Third first is first ever Mossbauer view of a rock in situ on another planet.
Bodo Bernhardt (university of Mainz): This graph is the first ever Mossbauer spectrum on a Martian rock. Taken some days ago and was recorded for a period of more than 12 hours. Why stare 12 hours? Answer is that the longer we acquire, the more details we can see so the more patient we are the better is the signal to noise ratio. We were extremely happy to see the small peaks you see to the right and left. The intensive lines we already know from the earlier spectrum but the small peaks are now visible. No doubt what we see here. To explain minerology over to Dick Morris.
Dick Morris: We really do appreciate engineers rescuing this cool spectrum. Thank you guys. What does it tell us. The positions and peaks tell us about oxidation states and minerology of iron. We only detect iron. Tallest two peaks are iron2+ and olivine. We detected that in soil a few days ago. Less intense doublet in light blue pyroxene, irn2+ and pyroxene. Really light blue due to iron3+ but don't know what mineral. May be associated with weathering. Bodo alluded to the not so intense but very special lines , this pattern is the fingerprint of magnetite, an iron oxide. Together Olivine, Pyroxene and Magnetite tell us it's a good volcanic rock, an olivine bearing basalt. Is this unusual? We don't know for Mars yet. On Earth it's one of the most common kinds of rocks we find.
Q. Opportunity questions. Has mini-TES on Opportunity found hematite? Are you not where you thought you were positioned to those craters?
Ray: We did acquire an octant of beautiful mini-TES data a couple days ago. Team busy analyzing it. There are intriguing variations from place to place that seem to correlate with the different materials in the plains and the bedrock and the interior. You'll have to come to a subsequent session to hear the data.You'll be delighted at the result but we're still in the process.
Daniel: we're obviously in a crater. I Haven't heard anything that says we don't know where we are.
Ray: We're definitely in a crater :D We're waiting on the EDL data from flash to reconstruct the bounce history. We've done radio science and it's a different position than where we thought we were. We need to look at images, combine with radio and EDL reconstruction data. We don't seem to be in the crater that Tim Parker put is in initially. (Tim from the back of the room "sorry" :)
Daniel: EDL did come down today. Waiting on MGS for high-res.
Q. Mark, do you have any thinking of what Spirit will be doing when it's up and operating. Ray, did mini-TES not work well? Why the mystery?
Ray: mini-TES is complex instrument and spectra are a bit difficult to interpret. They need time to get this done. They have huge smiles on their faces in mini-TES team.
Mark: Trying to decide if we'll brush or RAT, first, not sure but we do want to finish science on Adirondack and then move to next target.
Q. Ray, what are they smiling about? They've seen something, probably hematite. They're familiar with that, I'd assume. It's hard for us to understand why it's not available. Also, it seems the process is a little different with Opportunity while still on platform. Spirit did more science on the lander, a full pano of Pancam and mini-TES. Is that happening with Opportunity.
Ray: Information is new and they want to check and double check before they make an announcement. Remember we're just on sol 6 going into 7 with Opportunity and we egressed on sol 12 with Spirit. We do have a full panorama from Pancam and we do have one full octant from Mini-TES. I believe we acquired two octants on sol 6 and bits and pieces of other targets. Feeling is to get off the lander and on to the surface, do some soil observation and get over to the outcropping. Tradeoff between acquiring complete pancam and mini-TES panoramas and getting over to that very exciting outcropping.
Q. For Dan, PST egress time?
Daniel: Go for Egress at 12:30 am PST. Command takes about an hour. Data at about 3-3:30 am.
Q. For Mark, Spirit been there almost a month, is it a third of its lifetime over? Ray, are you happy with the science?
Mark: We have observed the experienced the solar degradation we expected. Because of better power and thermal characteristics we've observed it may got month or two longer than plan. We have gone through a third of our warrantee but I expect we've got a few more months to go.
Ray: Science with Gusev on Spirit. New info on Adirondack. Seems to be a good hard volcanic rock, maphic rock. A basalt, suggests it may be excavated from below by craters or broken out lava flows or transported in. Not the kind of smoking gun evidence for climactic history. I suspect we'll take a look at some of these white rocks. If they don't look interesting then as quickly as possible try to do a traverse over to Bonneville crater about 250 meters away. Try to use the fact that nature overturns stratigraphy to see if we can determine other rocks that might tell us about the lake history of Gusev crater. Science is just beginning. Strategic plan to do this radial traverse. For Opportunity it's less than a week and we totally lucked out landing in this crater. 22 m wide, 3 m deep. Fairly easy to egress from but take some time looking at this outcrop. After we're off the lander, sol 7, tonight we'll be looking at the soil and then getting over to the bedrock outcrop and doing some Pancam and Microscopic imaging. Help explain if the process is due to windblown, volcanic or lakebed. All the instruments we'll use to infer what's going on. For Opportunity and Meridiani, we're just at the beginning of the process. Totally ecstatic that we might be on the surface tonight.
Q. Can you tell us more about the arm heater. Best estimate of when we'll see the full Pancam?
Daniel: Nearterm no impact. Longterm still looking at our options. Pancam acquired. Within a couple of sols we should have everything down.
Q. Was that the compressed version or full Mossbauer.
Mark: Compressed version.
Q More spectral traces, data on lily pads? Any newer thought on compaction?
Ray: turn it over to Dick Morris. I haven't seen recent data.
Dick: I've been busy working on Mossbauer so I can't address that yet. Stay tuned.
Q. Which rocks did Mini-TES look.
Ray: Papa395 points right at bedrock, kinda northwest.
Q. For Daniel. Can you shake dust off the solar array.
Daniel: We don't have a mechanism for that. We didn't plan for that. Not a design requirement. At one point we were contemplating lifting solar arrays. Evidence with pathfinder that the decay slowed at the end.
Mark: Dust is very very fine and electrostatically binds. Even if you turned them upside down and shook them, it probably wouldn't come off. We simply accepted that we'd get the lifetime we needed with this design.
Q. Do you have enough Opportunity Pancam to know where you'll go.
Ray: pretty clear we'll egress in +X direction. (I got a phone call and missed quite a bit here.)
Ray: low dunes are interesting. It may be that we want to traverse to this nearby crater that's in the DIMES image. Moving to that crater would allow us to do another radial ejecta survey.
Ron: The outcrop in the right direction for exiting the crater too.
Q. When will you RAT?
Ray: There is a lot of interest in the coatings and that relates to whether or not the so called white rocks are different than the standard volcanic rocks with a dust coating. So brushing first to see if we can remove some of the coating, then RATting and then looking at the mineralogical and chemical difference is in the plans. Then hopefully we'll head for the ejecta deposits at Bonneville.
Q. which way facing with Opportunity. Where does outcropping lie. How long to drive ther
Ray: outcrop is northwest we're facing west. Once we do initial soil observation it will be at best a couple of sols before we get there. Then we'll need some fine positioning to get the particular rock. I can't wait.
Daniel: template from spirit was about 3 sols to get on the ground and the instruments positioned.
Q. For Dr. Morris. Can you explain scientific value to finding a bog-standard basalt that you could find in any mountain range on Earth. Is it smoking gun for no water? All this olivine speaks to an absence of water.
Dick: Yes it does but the weathering rinds and ferric dust speaks to pervasive weathering processes on the planet that could be water driven. So even though we're seeing these rocks that formed under dry conditions, all these dry things have been weathered and that's seen aqueous altering.
Ray: on Earth where you find basalts you can also find limestone. Mars is a real planet and we hope that as we do this radial traverse to Bonneville, to see ejecta that comes from beneath the Basaltic layer, if there is indeed a basaltic layer. If not we'll head for the hills. May not get there but we'll get higher and higher resolution views with Pancam and Mini-TES data.
Q. For Mark, given Spirit glitches, any operational characteristics driving it that will be different?
Mark: We don't expect any impact at all in driving. In our current mode, we could go driving if we wanted to. Main limitation if we can't get flash working which we expect to is we couldn't store images over night. We'd have to make sure we get the hazard and pancam images down each day. Once we get flash working it's back to normal operations.
Q. Mark, more on Spirit software. Before you do what you do on Mars are you running the commands on boxes here.
Mark: we have a lot of very tired flight software guys running all of our commands, scripts and software uploads here in testbeds before we send them up to the spacecraft. Essential during the anomaly phase to characterize the problem and try to replicate the behavior we see on the spacecraft. A lot of work on replication and testing commands we send to the spacecraft
Briefing note: We'll have commentary of rolloff 3-3:30 am on NASA TV, possibly earlier. Check the website for time updates.
February 2, 2004
Press briefing about to start; notes when it's concluded. (The Q&A part is kinda sketchy because my connection was falling down. The first part should be pretty accurate, at least.)
Natalie Godwin: Opportunity has sent us the first 360 color image from the Meridiani Site and engineers have extended her robotic arm so that scientists can study the soil around her.
Jeff Johnson (science team): I am very pleased to announce this morning that the full 360° mission success panorama from Pancam acquired and on the ground. You may remember the Pancam mosaic from day one that Jim Bell presented was referred to as a "postcard" because it represented a kind of snapshot. Now we've completed a full mission success pan. (anecdote about tourists taking pano at grand canyon). This wonderful 360° panorama is in stereo and provides a real sense for "you are there" at the site and gives us a real sense of this bowl shaped depression that we're now in. So without further ado, let's go to the image. This image will start off zooming into the left portion of the image, we'll go right into the edge of the outcrop with all those airbag retraction marks in view, with really dark soil -- this is darker region than we saw at the Gusev site. This is the outcrop as it scrolls that we'll be really interested in spending quite a bit of time trying to document and map as field geologists, the whole outcrop. More bounce marks with the wonderful seams of the airbag itself. As we come upon some slightly larger portions of the outcrop, rocks that are perhaps a few feet in height. The entire outcropping itself is actually very tiny and the layering that we see in the outcrop will be very interesting to us. This area of expanse, looks like there may be some variations. And these wonderful airbag marks here are probably the entry point with the volleyball like textural? and the brighter areas that come in on the dunes there. Just an amazing site that we're still trying to figure out. Hopefully over next few weeks as the rover starts to do it's reconnaissance of the outcrop and sample some of its soils, we'll get a better idea of geologic history of this site. As much as we've been in awe of all of these wonderful Pancam pictures, I'd like to talk about Pancam's ability to do spectroscopy in visible and near infrared wavelengths. You'll remember that Pancam is two cameras. Let's go to that image. On each camera there's a filter wheel. The Pancams are the two dark objects on the outside of the camera bar in this image. See the navigation cams there too. Pancams only about the size of your hand. Filter wheel exposed in that lower image. Each Pancam has 7 positions so we have a total of 14 filters that we can use to image. Pancam is sensitive from blue light out into the near infrared, beyond where your eye can see, to about a thousand nanometers or one micron. Compare that to mini-TES that can go from 6-30 microns. What can we get from all these colored filtered images. Simple case is that the dirt on Mars is very red, very bright in red wavelengths and very dark in the blue. We can do more by looking at how the brightness varies looking through these different filters we can get an idea of the geology. Especially if we want to try to unravel the geologic history of the site. Each mineral has a fingerprint in the near infrared visible spectrum. When we put together a spectrum using these 14 filters, we can compare with samples here on Earth to get an idea of what minerals the area is composed of on Mars. So what does Mars look like. This image shows the calibration target, sundial which is approximately truecolor. I'll focus your attention on the color chips in the green, the red, blue, and the yellow. Plot is two types of data. The solid lines where the colors correspond with actual color chips are spectra acquired of color chips in a lab on earth. These dots are the brightness values from each of the filters that we acquired from actual Pancam data. Those dots are lying right along the laboratory Earth measurements and that's what we like to see. The camera is very well calibrated. So the spectra we extract from Mars will give us a very accurate idea of the true spectral characteristics of that surface. Next slide shows Gusev and a bit of the variability we seeing in these 14 color spectra. In the upper left is the magic carpet region. Focusing in on the rock to the left of the airbag retraction marks. Colors in the lower image correspond to spectra on the right. We've extracted spectra from those spots. You can see that the yellow area is the soil in front of the rock which is very bright in the infrared. A little green area is on top of the rock is even brighter. Rock itself, blue spectrum is very dark. Typical for dark basaltic rocks we see here on Earth. What intrigued us was some spots on the rock. Red spectrum looks a lot like the blue spectrum. Interpretation is that those dots are just little bits of dust that have accumulated in the recesses of the rock face. Next slide from Opportunity in Meridiani. Looking out to the north. The yellow box is of the dark sand dune-like material above the outcrop and cyan, the bluish is out toward the horizon and those two are about the same so to the eyes of Pancam those may be the same types of material. The red spot is a dark portion in the outcrop. Slight variations in darkness that we're starting to investigate. That spectrum is intermediate in brightness. The green spectrum is very bright rock. The bumps and wiggles in the spectra are what we focus on to try to determine minerology of the different rocks. The final spectrum was a small blue cobble that was very flat and dark in its spectrum. We'll be investigating that some more as well. May be piece of ejecta from nearby crater. Pancam will allow us to take those very subtle spectral features and allow us to map those into the scene to try to do some remote geology to get a better understanding of the landing site as well.
Joe Melko (arm engineer): Today on Opportunity was all about the IDD and final checks on in situ payload. First we brought the arm out to ready. Telemetry and pictures let us know all was well with the arm. All the pieces were in the same place :) Confirmation to the team that they had done an extraordinary job. Probably the most complex mechanism on the rover. Only possible because of talent and dedication of the team. Bob Bonnets, Laurie Sarishi, Eric Bomgardner, Ashite, Rich Flieshner, and Rice Billings, (phonetic). Given a tremendously difficult task of fitting it into a very tiny space. Next thing we did was we checked out the RAT, ran motors in free space and it checked out. This first image shows us where it was at when we first deployed it. Entire IDD team showed up today. Great adventure, very happy. The RAT's pointed toward us. Later we moved it around pointed upward. Also checked out the RAT magnets. This is a RAT close-up taken by Pancam. Next we moved it around and exposed Microscopic Imager. We also moved the MI cover. With that, we've covered all the motors on both Opportunity and Spirit and they're all working great. Jeff, our motor and flight software engineer can breathe again. Next we checked APSX and the doors are open just where we left 'em. Instrument looks in good shape. Finally, looked at Mossbauer. Later in the evening we're taking MI of the soil. Tomorrow more MI of soil and putting Mossbauer down on surface.
Jennifer Trosper: In addition to great accomplishments on Opportunity that Joe and the team have made over the weekend, Spirit has made incredible progress over weekend and I am extremely happy to tell you that today we are doing science just like we were 10 sols ago. Spirit is back to the state she was in on just about sol one. Over the weekend we downlinked some additional data and essentially confirmed our suspicions about why the first problem had occurred, related to the number of files in the file system and the amount of RAM necessary to allocate in order to manage those files. We believe that suspicion is correct based on the additional data we got. When we entered into that anomaly we may have had side effects that we don't understand. We've gotten the data down so we will erase and reformat the flash memory tomorrow. Today moving forward with science on Adirondack. First pull back the IDD and change to RAT to brush it. Then we'll do MI and APSX overnight. Tomorrow reformat flash. Then RAT the next day. Spirit is the driving mission. Already strategizing how to drive far and fast.
Q. (lost connection for this question and first part of answer)
Jeff: Still looking at orbital images to see where we are. It may be the outcrop goes all the way around and it's just covered up on the other side. May investigate by trenching. Perhaps we can hit some of that bedrock.
Q. What sized object created depression?
Jeff: Meter or two in size. Could have been a secondary impact.
Q. Is the sense that the evidence you're looking for isn't present in the immediate vicinity so have to strike out to find it.
Jennifer: long term plan from science team is to drive towards the crater and working to do that quickly.
Q. Distant part is looking out of the crater and onto the plains? Contradict earlier assumptions that the materials in and out of the crater were different?
Jeff: They're looking the same to Pancam. Thermal emission data we're gathering is more sensitive and that may account for the differences. Mid-mission we want to get out of the crater and look at that. A little difficult to compare distant objects with near, atmosphere interference.
Q. Now that you have full Pancam how many places you can see out beyond crater.
Jeff: geology team looking at that. There may be some very subtle features you may not be able to see from orbit. For the rest of us, we're just trying to get our bearings.
Q. Sense of where you're going to go in outcrop?
Jeff: As of yesterday science team started thinking seriously about how to attack the outcrop. Need to map it completely with all of our tools and so there's debate about how you do the best science the most quickly and with the best results. One suggestion is to go up to the close part, saddle up to it and take a lot of high-res pictures traveling down the length of it.
Q. Is that the left side, would you follow it in parallel?
Jeff: right, how far off we need to be to use both Pancam and mini-TES and to not hit the solar panel. Every day getting new data that can change our perception.
Q. Outside of the crater, you can get a sense that there may be some blocks on the horizon. Artifacts or real?
Jeff: We're still debating ourselves. Once we get to the outcrop or out of the crater may be able to get a better idea of what's beyond.
Q. Are you really ready to go driving? Does it drive autonomously or with a human driver.
Jennifer: 11 minutes 45 seconds one-way light time. We don't completely joystick it. We have a different approach. Rover is programmed to avoid obstacles. We have a low-level of driving where we only go places in the images we can see, and then collect images at the end of the day to see how it did. May have a mid-day go no-go. As we get into more difficult terrain we may turn on more of our hazard avoidance software. We'll be characterizing things over the next few days. We have a Mars yard here to test things.
Q. How much distance a day, a week?
Jennifer: In the early days, 15 meters or so a day and hope to increase that quite a bit.
Q. What's the operational way you suggest you handle Opportunity given spirit encounter. What have you learned?
Jennifer: The specific problem the number of files is not simply, the resource you need to manage for the number of files is not simply flash, it's associated with the amount of RAM you need to manage those files. So we're down linking additional data about how much RAM is being used. We understand the problem well enough to avoid the problem. Keep your file number low, look at additional data and make sure you don't exceed the limits.
Q. For Opportunity, the first thing is Mossbauer? What's the exact sequence?
Joe: First we'll take a few more MI of soil, then put Mossbauer down and integrate for nearly 24 hours. Then next day we'll spend with APSX for the (full?) day. Based on what we're getting from first two instruments we'll decide what's next.
Q. Dust may settle on solar panels and reduce effectiveness, any other weather that may be risky.
Jennifer: dust is something we do understand but when we did the design we made an assumption based on Pathfinder in coming up with planned lifetime. Other factors are cold which requires more survival heating at night and more heating for science instruments during the day, or at night if we're doing science at night. That can cost us more energy for both survival and science. So, dust and temperatures.
Q. Status of Opportunity's heater and status of determining Opportunity's location.
Joe: The heater is still on. There was a second device put on by our thermal people for this type of case. There's a secondary device that turns it off during the day. At night it's on. With some changes in planning, we can still accomplish everything we intended to do. Much later as it gets colder we'll re-evaluate.
Jeff: Where we are is still being researched. Hopefully by end of the week we'll have a final answer.
Natalie: next briefing on Wednesday at 10am.
February 4, 2004
The press briefing is about to begin; notes when it's concluded.
Steve Squyres: Good morning. We've got some really nice stuff for you today. We've taken our first good look at soil in our crater, our home here at Meridiani. There's some really interesting things. Features we've never seen before. I said it was like a cool geologic fieldtrip. Welcome to our first stop. Here you see the Navcam image of the soil in front of the rover and we're zooming in to Pancam image. This caught our eye a couple of days ago. We knew, even from the Navcam images, that we're looking at soil with at least 2 components, at least. We saw a bunch offine grained soil with coarser material on top. The coarser material looked like gravel but when we looked closer, they looked darned round. The nice thing about distinctive characteristics is that every characteristic, a shape, a color, a texture, has a story to tell about how it formed. Only so many ways to make something round. Sort of round could be from tumbling. If they're really round, that narrows down the range of possibilities. Blobs of molten lava thrown in the air, an object accretes layers, ways you can do it. We were very interested to see just how round these stones in Pancam image were. So we stuck out our arm and took a look. We have this robotic arm with a number of instruments, one of which is a Microscopic Imager. MI on the end of the arm. See Hazcam images of arm going through motion of taking image of soil.
Ken Herkenhoff: You've seen pictures from all of Spirit's 10 cameras. Opportunity so far, just 9. Here's the 10th, the Microscopic Imager. Designed to emulate a geologist's 10x handlense. This graphic starts with Pancam view. Zooming in to MI frame. Full field of view is about 3cm across, a little more than an inch. Smallest particles we can resolve are about 1/10th mm across. The larger one is about 3 mm across. MI dust cover has an orange tinted window that can give us crude color information. This is an example of a merge of those two color frames. Zooming in on some particles. Sand grains about 1/10th mm. Various shapes and sizes from 1mm up to a few mm across. The entire image is in full shadow so no sunlight. There's a variety of shapes from spherical to angular. Next image will show an enhanced color version that emphasizes variation in color across these grains. Just right of upper center there's a rather red grain . Those are relatively rare here. Most gains are less red. The variety of particles and shapes here indicates a variety of sources. There are some holes probably from gas bubbles either by volcanic or impact processes that Steve mentioned.
Hap McSween: All of these features are interesting but the really intriguing ones are the round ones. There are a number of geologic process that can yield really round objects. First Pancam suggested little balls, little spheres. MI shows very few are actually spherical, many are flatter or broken and could be derived from the round ones. One process we considered is that grains on a seafloor or in moving water roll around and accrete or grow by adding layers of material. These are called oolites. And we got excited about the possibility that we might have found oolites. The problem is that very few of these objects are spherical balls, they have other shapes, and so they're unlikely to be oolites. Also oolites shouldn't have bubbles, holes we see. Other possibilities is that large meteors when they impact the planet melt some of the target materials and this rock is sprayed out as a fine jet of droplets of liquid, and as they fly through the air they make shapes like dumbbells, teardrops, sometimes buttons. I think I've seen all of those shapes looking at these MI images. They cool quickly into a glass but if a target rock had water, that could cause the gas bubble holes that we see. Volcanoes spew out liquid droplets. But more likely, with violent eruptions have ashes that are buoyed by hot gasses and as they are suspended they begin to coagulate together into rounded pellets we call lapilli. I think it's possible that these things may be lapilli. Also intriguing that many of these things may relate to the outcrop. If this is an ashbed we might be able to find some connections between that, maybe it's weathering and shedding the things that Ken has given us.
Steve: we don't quite know what these things are yet but we've made significant progress in narrowing down the possibilities. The good news is that with the plans we have ahead, in the coming sols we think we can unravel these mysteries. I want to step back for a minute and refresh everybody on the big picture. Recall that the thing that brought us here was the hematite, a mineral that is closely associated with liquid water. Recall also that we're trying to do is to read the geologic record, look at all the different terrain types, look at the different materials, and try to put together using all our tools we have at our disposal, a comprehensive picture of what happened here long ago and whether or not water was involved and whether it was a habitable place. Somewhat cliche, but I've likened this process to the parable of the blind man and the elephant. What we've seen is one small part of the story. We've got to fold that in with other patches of soil, the outcrop, what's above the outcrop, all the other pieces. We have gotten another interesting clue. We're getting more information about composition. This is mini-TES data. Very nice instrument that has provided us some great data. This is one of our images overlayed in color with the concentration of hematite. First mineral map from the surface of another planet. The blue stuff is low in hematite. The red is height in hematite. Tremendous variation. Hematite is fairly low in that rock outcrop. Very high in the material above the outcrop and the material below it. As you get closer to where we sit, you see less and less, particularly at our airbag bounce marks. The place that we have taken the soil measurement is not in this image, it's over way to the right side in the very low-hematite stuff. We've looked at this soil with MI, Mossbauer and we're looking right now as we speak with APXS. We know that from this hematite concentration map that we're looking at a place where we don't expect to see much hematite. In order to see the hematite we're gonna have to move. That's next. The next thing we're gonna do with this rover is to start to head to that outcrop. As we work from right to left across the face of that outcrop initially into an area that is relatively hematite poor but as we head across that outcrop, we're going to be moving into materials that are progressively more and more rich in hematite, we're going to be seeing other pieces of this very complicated scientific elephant. Over to Franz Renz who will be presenting the findings of the Mossbauer spectrometer.
Franz Renz: O have good news. We see a magnetic compound but the bad news is that we don't know which one it is. It will take us a few days to see which one it is. Not as easy because concentration is quite low. The image: Here you see Mossbauer spectra. You see the magnetic phase. You see the signal to noise is very low. That's why we can't identify it yet. It will take us a few days. In the middle you see a feature we've actually seen before on the other side of the planet, a basaltic structure with olivine inside. Olivine has some iron which has lost two electrons. If you're not familiar with this, look at a green wine bottle there the iron which has lost two electrons gives it the green color. The Olivine is green as well. If it grows nicely in color you'll actually get a gemstone called peridot which was the favorite gem of Cleopatra the queen of Egypt who was actually of Greek descendence, but that's a different story (laughter). And besides that we have one iron that's lost three electrons. If you look at a beer bottle, the brown color comes from an iron that's lost 3 electrons with silicates around. It's a basaltic structure as we've seen before and we're happy with this.
Mark Adler: Opportunity has had a very, very productive couple of days. On sol 10 mini-TES checked out and is working well and we've taken a quite a few spectra with that as you can see from the wonderful mineral map of the hematite taken at the Opportunity site. The Mossbaur began its 24 hr integration on sol 10 and completed it on sol 11. That data was collected on sol 11. And we put the APXS down for a 14 hour integration overnight and so that's ongoing right now. It's about 8PM at the Opportunity site right now and it's about 8am at the Sprit site. At Spirit, we're engaged right now on the formatting operation. On sol 30 we attempted to do some science operations. We had a day where we were testing format operation in the testbed so we were going to continue our arm operations on Adirondack, take some MI images and a spectra. Unfortunately at the beginning of that day we tried a sunfind. Didn't succeed, wasn't able to complete the sunfind operation and so activities not allowed to continue because vehicle was not certain of its attitude. So we had to recover from that and later in the day we got a sunfind to succeed. Failure related either to activities ongoing at the spacecraft at the time or a file in the flash corrupted. Bolsters our desire to format flash filesystem and get ourselves back into a clean state. On sol 31 we did preparation for the format operation. Go to sleep early, skip overnight comm passes, get the cold as possible with as much power in batteries as possible. Poor rover woken up early at 6am. Rebooted into cripple mode which does not use flash memory. Flash operations underway. A 4 hour process started about 20 minutes ago that will erase all contents of flash and check hardware, check all the chips. We don't think hardware, but being safe so checking it all. Going through all the 224 (?) megabytes of the flash memory system and erasing it over the next couple of hours. Next we'll reboot and reformat the flash file system. After that we should be in normal operation and we will reintroduce Odyssey pass overnight and tomorrow morning we'll go back to science operation.
Q. Segregation of materials in mini-TES suggests that unlike Gusev, there's very little mixing of fine material. What does that tell you about surface.
Steve: We're still looking. Story we're putting together is that we have a number of different components. We've got the big grains. Starting to narrowing it down what those might be. That they're so strikingly spherical points in very specific directions. We have something that's very red and very fine grained exposed in bounce marks and doesn't seem to have much hematite. Then we've got this sand. Based on Mossbauer and mini-TES and MI, that looks like some finely ground up basaltic sand. That's at least 3 different components there and they're mixed in different ratios in different places. Looking for correlations there. No complete story yet. I'm interested in finding a place with as high as possible concentration of little pebbles and slapping the Mossbauer, APXS, and MI down on those. Find out what just those pebbles are made of. That's going to be interesting. And we're going to dig a hole, in the next few sols, drive to a place where there's some of this stuff and dig a hole with the wheels and see what's below the surface. It's going to take us a while to piece this together. The main thing that I'm getting out of this is that there are several components to this soil and they're unevenly distributed around the crater and who knows what's outside of the crater. that could get even more interesting.
Q. Intriguing things is some seemed to be layered, a rich hematite above bedrock, some seems much patchier.
Steve: Fine particles can be blown by the wind. Little round particles can roll. I'm interested in concentration of these little guys as we get closer to the outcrop. Are they coming from the outcrop? Maybe they're weathering and falling out of the outcrop. I don't know but we have the tools to find out. If we work our way through this problem and piece it together clue by clue, we're gonna get it.
Q. How far traverse from current spot then how far will that be from the outcrop.
Steve: I don't have a really good answer because that was being decided in a meeting I wasn't at. I'm actually off duty today. I think... (off-camera: "three meters and three meters".)
Hap: the trench location is three meters from where we are and the outcrop is about another three meters from that. Relatively short distance.
Q. Steve, a day or two ago a colleague was discussing a parallel traverse along the outcrop.
Steve: Yes. We're going to head towards the right hand side of the outcrop stopping part way along to do some soil investigations, and then we're going to go right up to the outcrop and work our way across it from the right to left, shooting down and to the right with Pancam as we go, getting very, very high-res Pancam and Mini-TES. We've been preparing for this. Mark was taking about managing flash. One thing we've been doing for days now is we've been taking fewer pictures than we'd like, taking fewer spectra than we'd like to take, leaving lots and lots of room in flash memory. Because when we get to that outcrop we're going to hammer on this thing with Pancam in a very big way. We're going to take hundreds and hundreds of megabits of data and fill up that flash real quick.
Q. When I do the stuff on my computer that you're doing on Spirit it scares me to death.
Mark: There might be a reason that we spent last 4 days testing that in the testbed. Not an operation we do lightly. We've reconstructed the environment in testbed as accurately as possible and we've verified also that there's not other possible side effects that the operation could have on the vehicle. For example, we store our flight software images in another area of flash that's separate from the flash file system. We've verified in fact that when we erase that there's no way to corrupt the flight software. The sequence we've developed that's running today checks at every step of the way to make sure that doesn't happen. It is an operation you don't do willy nilly and you've got to make sure that it's done right.
Q. Steve, this is first mineral map done on another planet? What about Spirit's map? What's the outlook for water having existed here?
Steve: Sprit mini-TES produced maps of temperature. These are actual maps of mineral composition. That's a first for this mission. Extrapolating from a few grains of sand to water on Mars, a little hard to do at this point. Stuff we're looking with instruments on the arm at this particular point doesn't really tell us much from a mineralogical standpoint, from a chemical standpoint doesn't tell us much about water. Not until we get to the hematite. There's hardly any hematite in Franz' spectrum. We need to use our mobility to get to where there's more hematite. We're going to have to piece this together bit by bit. Still very early in the mission to do that.
Q. Explain what you hope to tease out of data over the next couple of days. How does hematite vanish in bounce marks?
Hap: We're looking for hematite. It has magnetic fingerprint. That's why we're looking in the region. We don't know yet. We have to carefully evaluate the spectra. Hopefully in a couple of days we can give you an answer.
Steve: We haven't looked at a bounce mark up close yet. One hypothesis, an idea is that the hematite is carried in some of the coarser grains, maybe the really round guys, and there's fines beneath it that doesn't have much hematite in it and bouncing pushes the coarse stuff underneath the fines and Phil's instrument can't see them any more. The MI picture is a 3cm/3cm square. Only a fraction of that surface area is covered by bigger grains. Most of it is that basalt sand. Mossbauer doesn't see that whole 3cm square are. It sees a smaller 1.5cm circular region, probably near the center. It's seeing whatever happens to be in its field of view. We're interested to find out where that was. When you push it down, it may leave an actual imprint. We'll take another MI after moving APXS away to see if we can see a Mossbauer nose-print. Possible that it didn't even hit one of those pebbles. We need to piece this together bit by bit.
Q. Adirondack and arm operations status?
Mark: operations did not complete, the RAT checkout and arm move. Position of arm and Mossbauer exactly where it was before the anomaly started. We'll start again after the format.
Q. When you turn a rock over it's sometimes even more interesting sometimes. Any plans for that? Wouldn't that be interesting?
Mark: We are going to do a trenching with Opportunity.
Steve: Best way is by moving wheels. Trenching operations should push small pebbles. We don't have an arm that can pick up a rock and look underneath. If we find a compelling reason to do so, we might find some clever ways to look at it in ways that the hardware was not necessarily designed for and I'm sure that if I was to propose something like that, I'd have to go to my mission manager and have a long heart to heart talk ;-) Oh man, but there are so many things that are interesting here. I could think of a thousand things that are but there are only so many sols in the mission. But I can assure you that if we find a compelling reason to turn a rock over, Mark and I will have that conversation.
Q. Seems to be some uncertainty of shape of these round rocks, spherical or flattened. Could you nudge them with the arm and see the shape?
Steve: We will see these things move as we contact them with instruments. Mossbauer has a plate that goes to contact with the soil. The thing that will help the most is taking pictures of lots and lots of these things. Unlike the APXS and Mossbauer, MI can do quick photos, about 5 minutes. We can do "touch and go" every day, a quick look at the soil and then go about our business. We should be able to take dozens of MI pictures of the soil over the course of this mission so we could get a statistical characterization. In the MI picture we showed you, there's a grand total of only 2 of those spherical rocks. There might be a range, some broken ones. What do you see if you find a broken one. You can have things that freeze in air or that grow up layer by layer. If we find concentric structure in a broken one, than we're headed down that path. We need to sol by sol take lots and lots and lots of pictures and build up a library.
Ken: We can also do stereo with MI. We can use the arm to place the MI in a couple of different places and where they overlap.... (lost connection). Steve: ....some of the are really, really round.
Q. Mossbauer has narrower field of view. Can you get Mossbauer of specific objects?
Steve: APXS even bigger, 38mm diameter, almost an entire MI field of view. You could try to get really cute, really fancy with positioning. That's hard, man. This is a 5° of freedom robotic manipulator on the surface of another planet that's sort of flexible and has got wheels that can slip in the soil. Right way to do it is to just find a place where there are a whole lot of these things. There are places where there are a bunch of them, much better chance of hitting one.
Q. Trenching 101. Tomorrow, which wheel, how deep, how long?
Steve: Tomorrow is drive, not trench. Mark: Usually front right or front left turns while the other wheels are positioned to prevent rover from moving. Usually direction that pushes dirt in front of the rover. Then we carefully back the rover out of the hole so as not to disturb it and then we're in a position to get the instruments over the hole as well as being able to look at it with Pancam and Mini-TES. It doesn't take very long, typically rotate wheels a couple of dozen times. We take an image after each rotation. Could take an hour or two.
Steve: Worth pointing out too that there's a dual purpose. One purpose is to expose sub-surface material for science value. Also has engineering value. We're in a whole in the ground, a crater. We've got to climb out. Mobility people want to know more about the soil properties. They will get a lot of data to help plan drives. Serves both purposes.
Q. One of the most striking features are impact craters. Heat shields have impacted. Nay plans to visit these two impact craters?
Mark: we have an idea where heat shield impacted crater at Spirit site. We're headed to south side. Impact is north side. That's not our target. Might have done some digging but not the kind that these folks are looking for.
Q. Schedule over the next few days? When will we see Spirit brushing and RATting. When trenching for Opportunity.
Mark: It's sol 32 on Spirit now. Tomorrow we plan to do arm operations, brush operation and MI, and one or both spectrometers. On the following sol we'll repeat that sequence with a grind operation, MI and spectrometers. That would be sol 34. On sol 35 we'll start our drive out. We'll probably drive to north side of lander and point ourselves in a straight line to Bonneville crater. On Opportunity we expect trenching on sol 14. Tomorrow go 3 meters of 6 to the outcrop and do our trenching. Then do the move to outcrop.
Steve: We'll do the trench, take a sol or two to investigate the trench then drive to outcrop and drive across the face of outcrop, probably slap the arm down and look for a day. We'll spend a couple or three sols driving along the front edge of the outcrop taking pictures. Then we have to figure out how to attack the outcrop. We've got a lot more than the outcrop to do. How long we study outcrop depends on that initial data.
February 6
Jennifer Trosper: Spirit status, on Wednesday we spent 3 hours to erase the flash, and 1 hour later in the day to reformat and restart the vehicle. Nerve-racking but the craft did exactly what we needed it to do and is up and running in great health. After that we moved quickly to science. On Thursday, Spirit woke up at 9am, we got data down fist thing and then we commanded craft to use the RAT to brush the rock. We and placed Mossbauer and APXS on the rock overnight. Today we'll place the RAT on the rock and actually grind. Thanks to the people that have been in crisis mode. (listed team members). I want to show an image (image of the instrument cluster on the IDD). It took us a few days to get the testbed testing done and in those two days we downlinked several images that were in flash and for this image we actually posed the arm to get the flag (on the side of the RAT) in the image. Yesterday morning right after we played the Spirit wake-up song, "back in the saddle again" we played a second song, "the star spangled banner", and it reminded me that it's not just about this team of people, it's about every person out there across the country that has contributed, so we'd like to dedicate this image to the American people.
Glen (Reeves?): I actually had a day off yesterday, not in crisis mode and I'm proud of that :D The story of how we got from crisis to relief is the story of a lot of people. First I want to talk about what went wrong and how we fixed it, then I'll turn it over to science team. The first part of the problem was that as we accumulated more files, we consumed more memory and we eventually ran out. Problem 2 was that our reaction to that was rather severe, we corrupted the file system. To get out we needed to pull as much data out of the flash as possible and then reformat. Consuming all the memory is a severe error. The craft did what it was supposed to do and reset itself. The number of files caused us to again, on each initialization, consume the same amount of memory, hitting the problem, and again resetting. It was sol 18 when we first got an idea of what was going on. It took us a couple of days to begin to get data because of communications problems. Over about 3 days we concluded that the system was in this reset loop. We had fortunately built into the system a mode called cripple mode that allowed us to boot without the flash. We thought if we could get into that mode we could stabilize the vehicle. On sol 21 we got into cripple mode and we got communications control back so we could go in and debug. Drawback about debugging a system that far away, if you can imagine the slowest ISP, compared to communications with the rover, I love my ISP :-) During this time, the throughput is fairly low and the most critical part of our activity was to capitalize on every single time we talked to the vehicle. We extracted the absolute most information we could get every time we talked to it. Once we concluded we could keep the vehicle stable in cripple mode, we got to debugging. Our theories proved out and we established that the filesystem onboard was for the most part intact. On the 27th we actually started to use the filesystem again and started downlinking as much data as possible. The file system, though, appeared to be corrupted. This meant that the manner for resetting was going to be to erase all the flash and reformat. We've done that. We're back to the beginning, we've established the state of the system like this many times before. We have a fresh system and we have a procedure in place to work around this problem indefinitely. There are some suggestions to make changes to the flight software to identify the problem more quickly.
Stephen Gorevan: My expectation was to report on the first use of the RAT as a grinding too. Instead, the first time use of the RAT was to brush. In the science discussions over the last few sols it became clear that this capability was available to us. Adirondack looked to be clean but in case there was a cemented coating, we decided to take the brush to remove loose material and to preserve a cemented coating which could tell us something about the history of the rock. This image shows the RAT's stainless steel bristles called the rock brush. It's primary purpose was to remove the grindings from the hole after a RATting. Many of us didn't expect to see a difference. Here is Adirondack before the brushing. Here is the part we brushed. This is a big surprise. All I could think to say, like Mohamad Ali, "This is the greatest interplanetary brushing of all time" ;-) 5 minutes of brushing and we think we have preserved any cemented coating that existed below the dust.
Ken Herkenhoff: Happy to be back up here talking about Spirit science activities and thanks to the engineering team who never stops surprising me. This photo is an MI picture before the target was brushed. It's in full sunlight, lighting from upper right. This is the post brushed image of the same area, same lighting. To my surprise there was a lot of dust there. You'll remember, that we chose this rock because in Pancam images we thought Adirondack was relatively dust free. You can see as we zoom out that some dust remains around the edge and a crack running diagonally from top left to bottom right is still filled with dust. We're seeing mineral crystals on the rock surface and we're very excited to see what continued RAT abrasion will tell us. Looks like a basalt and we're anticipating more data soon.
Matt Wallace: Opportunity is continuing to turn the crank and move forward. We've had a number of very productive days. We completed exercising the arm and the Mossbauer and APXS instruments. Yesterday we completed a 3.5 meter drive with several arcturns to the left, a turn to the right, a turn in place, and a drive forward. Today we sequenced a drive to approach the right-hand side of the outcrop and a target named "Snout". That was a 1.6 meter drive. We came up a little bit short on Snout and so we'll complete that approach tomorrow. Here are some front Hazcam images. (Animation of images moving us to the right side of the outcrop.) This last image shows the target, Snout. We're within half a meter of the target. The second set of images are some of my favorites, pointing in the other direction, rear Hazcam looking back at lander and its y-petal and progressing away from the lander. You can clearly see the tread marks from 6 wheels, the bounce marks, the other side of the outcrop that extends about halfway around the crater. Those are some framable shots, some good ones :) The plan for tomorrow is to move forward 30 or 40 cm. Prior to that we're going to do a "touch" before the "go" -- we'll deploy the IDD and take several of these MI pictures of the soil to continue to catalog the soil in this crater, then we'll re-stow the arm and drive forward to prepare for a full suite of instrument arm activities on Snout, the MI, the APXS and the Mossbauer. Then we'll start an arc along the bottom of the outcrop stopping at choice viewing areas and taking pictures plus dropping the arm down at a few places and taking additional data. Opportunity's in good shape. She's healthy and happy and continuing to do the job she was sent to do.
Q. Software problem similar in a way to what plagued Polar Lander in that you didn't test long enough to reveal problems? Other things lurking?
Glen: I've concluded a couple of things during this process. There was in some of our later tests an inkling of what was out there. During testing, we ran the system right up against the limit and here, the system was asked to perform above what it was capable of. The recovery possible because of what we put in place to be able to analyze and recover. So in that, it's not like Polar Lander.
Q. Can you draw any conclusions about the weather from this dust you're seeing on Adirondack?
Steve: The dust offered no resistance.
Ken: There's actually very little dust, maybe just a few microns. Almost completely removed except for little hollows. Little clumps of dust around the edges. It does look like it's sticking together but not strong enough to keep it from being brushed away rather easily.
Q. Big picture? will you be able to get into the ejecta blanket and get to Bonneville?
Jennifer: We finish RATting today and start driving tomorrow, best case. We're on west southwest side of the lander so we're gonna drive around the lander and head northeast. We do believe we can get there. Strategizing now and initial thinking is we'll start designating the traversebased on imaging, where we design the movement but at the end of each drive we'll turn on auto-navigation for the rover for a couple of meters. We'll extend that auto-navigation each day. Baby steps. Also, we've talked about 4 or 5 places we might stop.
Q. From MGS does it look like there's a rout you might actually get up to the edge and look in?
Jennifer: It does look like there's a path to get to the crater. We'll know better as we get closer. Unrelated but important, we did a demonstration with Mars Express for forward link commanding and return telemetry and it worked very well. International interplanetary communications network in place and functioning well.
Q. For Jennifer or Glen, you're keeping an eye on Spirit, what about Opportunity. For Matt, why did you fall short on getting to Snout?
Glenn: We believe that the issue on Spirit potentially exists on Opportunity so we put in place RAM monitoring and procedures to limit our activities if that amount of space gets low. Matt: We're not entirely sure why we fell short but pretty sure it's soil slippage. The rover is pitched up or back by almost 13° and if you look at some of the testing we've done relative to soil mechanics and capability, you get to 10 ° or so of pitch and you start to get some slip. Based on our ranging and correlating that to wheel tracks in the last couple of hours since we got the data, we're getting 10 to 20% of slip during these traverses. Once we better understand this we'll be able to accommodate that efficiently.
Q. Glenn, you mentioned there might be some kind of software patching to flight software, can you address that?
Glenn: The problem itself is actually that in the configuration of the vehicle we allowed it to consume more memory that it has. We could set a single configuration value to limit that. We're anticipating one to two days to get the information to the vehicle and the actual change would probably take an afternoon, if we did it. If we decide to do it we'll definitely do it for both vehicles but right now we have a good way to avoid the problem and I'm not sure we'll make the change.
Q. This dust seems to have a very sticky property. Stuck to rock and airbags. Electrostatic properties or chemical bonding?
Stephen: Not sure. Ken: Not sure. Certain minerals tend to aggregate better than others without electrostatic being involved. There may be a clay component that allows it to adhere more easily. We can't tell yet.
Q. Given that this rock was dirty when you thought it was clean does this skew things in terms of your ability to do mineral characterization from orbit.
Ken: We'll be taking into account this new data. We're going to continue with remote sensing for dust-free areas but it's looking like they will be difficult to find.
Q. On location of Opportunity, are you close to being found?
Matt: We know we're on Mars at a pretty cool site in a cool crater ;-) A lot of good work in the last 3-5 days, gathering a good amount of information and rather than me give you my interpretation, let's wait on the experts to get up here and give you the scoop. It's exciting and fun and it's coming.
Q. Question from a reader, one of the Opportunity photos, close to the lander, seemed to show some whitish streaks on the soil. Any chance it's frost?
Ken: Temperatures from mini-TES too high for frost, brighter streaks are not white, just brighter and redder, probably a little bit of dust.
Next news briefing will be Monday at 9am.
February 9, 2004
Natalie Godwin: Both rovers are on the move on Mars. 3:30am at Gusev, 12 hours later on the other side of Mars.
Tim McElrath: As you saw with Spirit, a variety of ways to perform localization on the surface. I'm going to talk about radio data. We'll also hear about descent images and IMU propagation, then post landing MOC images. First graphic shows THEMIS imagery. Blue ellipse is based on tracking during approach. 44 miles long, 5 miles across. When we got to Mars we were fortunate and had two DSN complexes in view. So we had tracking data from Canberra and Goldstone so that gave us differenced one-way doppler data. 5 minutes after EDL we got the tracking data all the way down to parachute deploy. That's the black ellipse which we were able to come out with about 35 minutes after landing. That's about 5.3 miles by 1.4 miles. That confirmed several things we'd seen with relatively late parachute deploy and narrow descend. Needed to wait 'till we were on the surface to get a much closer tie on where we were. On the surface we have 2-way doppler tracking DTE and we also have UHF 2-way doppler tracking to Odyssey which comes over twice a day. That little white ellipse is 145 ft. by 3 ft. from two Odyssey passes and 6 DTE communications spread over 3 sols and that pins us down quite well in an inertial frame but problem is that the map is not tied in well with the inertial frame, could be off as much as a quarter mile but turns out much better at only about 500 feet. Since we've got the map tie solved for this location, we can get the same type of location resolution if we need it.
Andrew Johnson: I'm gonna talk about the second way we determine position. This is using EDL telemetry. This is a mosaic of the three DIMES descent images and a line showing the path that Opportunity took. Over to the left is the direction we're coming in from, going basically East but near the end start moving to North and when we cut bridle we are actually moving North. Another view of the same scene what it shows is the descent trajectory coming down and bouncing along the surface. Final graphic is another blowup of the bouncing across the surface. 26 bounces official number of bounces. We bounced along and some how ended up in this crater :D We rolled 200 meters, about 1/8th of a mile for more than 1 minute. Velocity when we cut loose of the bridle was 9m/s N 2m/s W which is 20mph N 4.5mph W.
Tim Parker: How many golfers out there ;-) First graphic is to look at the horizon views from lander and compare to features seen from orbit. Mosaic of 3 images, far right is 18-20 m/px THEMIS vis image. The next image covers most is a MOC image and the final image canted at an angle there is one of the DIMES images. Here is the reconstruction based on triangulation to three craters visible on the horizon. One was visible pre-standup mission success pano. The other two were seen in post-standup pan. The large crater to the east was obstructed by the rim of the crater we're in. This was difficult because the crater we're at was so small that we can't identify features in it's rim to compare to orbiter views. We've zoomed in here on the last prediction from DIMES team on where the first bounce would have occurred in green and the blue diamond is the last nav solution for where we wound up. That is a remarkably close match to where we actually are with respect to the surface. It's only 120-130 m from the center of the crater. That's far down in the noise with respect to our precision of tying the Mars surface to the geodetic grid.
Mike Malin: As you know, I have a camera in orbit of Mars and it flies over the landing site twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon and we've attempted to take pictures of the landers from this camera which has a nominal 1.5m/px resolution but we can use the spacecraft to assist us in getting "super-resolution" of about 0.5m/px and I'm going to show a combination of both resolutions. This is a picture that shows the overall area, the large crater to the right was in the right side of Tim's picture. If your eyes are really good then you can see that crater that had the lines coming from it in Tim's picture has a little dot in it. That dot is the lander. There are other things on the picture as there were with Spirit. We see going from right to left where the heat shield hit. We see a plume pattern where the retro-rockets fired and where the first bounces occurred. We also have a track of all the bounces. At the far left is where the back shell and parachute hit. This is a picture of the vehicle. One of the things to note is how bit it is relative to the crater. The lander fills a fairly sizable portion of the crater. If you'll go to the next picture, I _believe_ :D that we are actually seeing the rover. The rover will not be right because it has dark solar panels. Not at the right angle to see them glint. Won't know for sure until I take another picture after the rover has moved. One of the fun things is that I knew where everything was and about the same hour, a picture we had taken with the Navcam a couple of days earlier had finally came in and it included in the upper corner a view of the back shell and the parachute from the lander, in the direction you'd expect and the right distance. Justin Mackey first saw it. Pancam team took a special picture of it. Really evocative. At the very bottom just off the edge is the crater rim. Outside the crater showing you the parachute and the back shell. That's a view out over the rim of the crater looking out across this vast flat surface and there is the hardware that we've littered the surface with. A nice view. Steve's gonna tell you about some really neat science.
Steve Squyres: OK. Let's see. Where to begin. We had a big weekend, probably the biggest three days of science since we landed. I've got a lot of stuff to show you. Start at Meridiani where the really crazy stuff is. The deeper we get in, the more it reminds me of a mystery novel. You get clues, kinda one at a time. Some of them mean something, some are probably red herrings, you don't know which is which. We're working our way through the clues here. So what I've got is a few more, some pretty tantalizing ones of what we're seeing here at Meridiani. Video shows the familiar outcrop that we've named Opportunity Ledge after the spacecraft that found it. At the far right is this rock we originally named Snout, now named Stone Mountain - we tend to pick quick names sort of in the heat of battle and then we come back with something better later. You'll see a Pancam image as we zoom in. This is a color Pancam that shows this outcrop in detail for the first time. This pretty close to true-color. It is buff colored, or tan, finely laminated, thickness of layers a few mm at most. And then, embedded in it, like blueberries in a muffin, are these little spherical grains I'm calling spherules, spherical granules, because we don't know what they are yet, though I'm gonna run through the theories. They are different in color. The spherules are very, very gray - much, much different from the matrix they're embedded in. This next image is false color generated using infrared bands processed to really bring out those bright dots in the outcrop. Those are the spherules and this emphasizes the point that they are different in color and that's a hint that they may be different in composition which could be a very important piece of information. We drove up to this guy and slapped our instruments down on it. I'm going to show you some Microscopic Imager pictures and what you will see is wild looking stuff. You can see the layers, inherently very, very fine-grained sitting there for millions of years being sandblasted. This stuff sits there, the wind blows, these grains are striking and eroding the softer portions developing this intricate texture telling you how well indurated the rock is. Then embedded in the stuff are the little spherules. Those seem to be pretty tough. So what happens is that the rock erodes away as it gets sandblasted and the little blueberries drop out and roll down the slope where we take pictures of them. There's one in the process of being eroded out. Look at this next MI image. Look at this guy. One of the spherules broken in half. it's hanging out there. If you look carefully and follow the crack that runs upward from that running diagonally. Follow that crack and there's another one, and another one, strung like beads along that crack. I think there are 4 of them. This rock is being eroded away and the spherical grains are dropping out. Now, there are some things here that we know and some things that we don't know. I'm going to take you through the hypothesis still standing. There are several still standing. For the matrix, there's really only two ideas still holding up, that it's volcanic ash or wind-blown dust compacted into a sedimentary rock. This is so fine grained. It ain't a sandstone. Either some kind of ash or stuck together indurated dust. As for the spherules, there are three hypothesis still open but one fading fast. The idea that it's lapilli is fading fast. I wouldn't rule it out yet, we go back and forth. Remember, lapilli form when you have suspended ash above a volcano and the ash agglomerates forming spherical balls that fall out of the sky. The thing is that they tend to be made of the same stuff in which they're embedded. Now we don't yet have, say separate Mossbauer on the matrix and the spherules. We're gonna do that and I think that'll really nail it down but the fact that their spectra are so different suggest to me that they're made of different stuff. So that's one hypotheses but running in 3rd place. Other is that it's some kind of spherical grains formed when molten rock is sprayed into the air, freezes in air, and these droplets of rock, made in impacts, a high energy volcano, fall down on the surface. Third possibility is that they're what geologists call concretions. Concretions form when fluids carrying dissolved stuff diffuses through a rock and precipitates around a nucleus and it grows little spherical granules within the rock. We think we should be able to test all of those. What we're planning over the next few sols is a thorough survey of this outcrop, what we're calling a shoot and scoot where we shoot a bunch of pictures, scoot over about 3m and shoot some more, getting Pancam and mini-TES shots and then we'll find a couple of the best places and go hit 'em with everything we've got. What do I mean by best? For example where the matrix is really well exposed and we can go in with the RAT and see what those layers are like. What I'd really like to find is a place with a bunch of these spherules, RAT across those and see what they look like in cross-section then stick the Mossbauer up against them and see what they're made of, see if they're different from the matrix. One other teaser, a clue that just popped up, not gonna quote any numbers yet, but we have now completed an APXS measurement on the outcrop and it has got a lot of sulfur in it, maybe a few times more sulfur than we've seen at any other location on Mars. So that's what's new on Meridiani so let's go on to Gusev. This is the RAT and our old friend Adirondack. Adirondack looking a bit different thanks to Steve Gorvan and honeybee robotics team have had their way with this rock. It has really opened up a window into the interior that we can use to understand it very well. Pancam image where RAT has ground a hole 2-3mm deep. Next image shows before and the next image shows brushed off and next image shows cut away. Beautiful cut, polished rock surface. Looks like a basalt and Mossbauer and APXS confirm that it is indeed a volcanic basaltic rock. We know what it is. Time to move on.
Mark Maimone: We've had a very busy day. Both rovers drove on the surface of Mars. Opportunity in the last few hours drove another 4 meters on the surface. Earlier than that the Spirit drover drove a long drive of about 6.4 meters. We have an image to show you the trail behind the Spirit rover. See the tracks. Lander out of view. See the back face of Adirondack. It may have looked really big but we drove right over it. Another interesting thing is that this was a drive to get to White Boat, a small white rock but also the first test on Mars of the rovers Autonomous Navigation System. That means the rover was in charge of its drive. The people on the ground tell it where we want it to go but it decides how to get there. That opens up new opportunities and distances. We can only plan so far in the images we see. What's gonna happen now is we start to let the rover make its own decisions. It takes a look in front of it, builds a map, avoids the red, goes on green and yellow. This animation shows the process inside the rover's brain as it drives on the surface of Mars. This will continue. What's nice is that until yesterday, the Opportunity rover was leading the game but Spirit tore out ahead with a total distance of about 12.5 meters. Though I just learned that Opportunity moved another 4 meters so it's up to 13 :) Not that anybody's counting. The race is on. Our plans are to explore the crater at Meridiani and at Gusev going for very long drives. Not sure exactly how far they'll be because it's up to the rover to decide how safe. We're going to let it choose its path for some of the way.
Q. Can you elaborate on the concretion model for the spherules and do any of those, how those form, exclude the theories about how the rock layers form?
Steve: I think the idea that they're lapilli would only work with the matrix being volcanic ash. Those two are tied together. With respect to concretions, if you have fluid, water with dissolved stuff in it flowing through a sediment, it can precipitate minerals, stuff that's dissolved in the water, and commonly will nucleate in a spot and this concretion will grow and grow in a spherical fashion. These are found in a variety of settings on the earth. By making observations about how these round things are related to the layers, we can test distinguish between the various hypothesis. For example, if you have a nice layer in the sediment, and then you grow one of these concretions you might see the layering preserved within the concretion. So if we see one of these spherical guys in place with a layer running through it, that would favor the concretion idea. If, on the other hand, you've got layers forming and you've got these things falling in from above, as would be the case for the droplets of glass, it might deform soft layers so by taking many MI images and looking at the relationships I think there's a good chance we'll be able to distinguish on just the shape of this stuff. Then of course the composition will be revealing.
Q. Steve, you mentioned that several hypothesis standing earlier have been ruled out. Can you go through what's been ruled out? Oolites no longer in the running?
Steve: When we first say these layered rocks from a distance there were a bunch of possibilities. Reasonably fine layers could even have been some kind of lava flows. That was ruled out when we saw how thin these layers were. I think that the idea that this was some kind of course-grained sedimentary rock, a sandstone or something like that is ruled out by the high-res MI pictures. These look the way they're weathering like a very fine-grained ash or sediment. Spherical grains. One way to make round things is to tumble them. That's ruled out by the fact that they're round while still embedded in the matrix. Lapilli, I'm still clinging to that one but compositional evidence not in favor. Another thing you might think about are something called ooids, grains that are rounded and created in a wave environment. I didn't list it with the theories because I don't think any of us consider it to be particularly likely.
Tim Parker: I think that if it were oolitic, we'd have layers that were predominantly oolitic.
Steve: Yes. When you see this, they tend to be really clustered together and not just sprinkled a few here and there.
Q. To go back to the hematite, where does it lie and looking outside,
Steve: When we look at the outcrop from a distance with Mini-TES we don't detect hematite. The matrix itself does not appear to be hematite bearing. That does not rule out that the spherules might contain the hematite. Can't tell with mini-TES because the mini-TES spot on the outcrop is maybe 8 inches and so it's seeing maybe 99% rock and 1% spherules. The key to answering that is gonna be to use the Pancam to find a place with a lot of these spherules, RAT it, and look at it with the Mossbauer. There's no question though that the highest concentration of hematite is actually above the outcrop and we don't know what's up there. Everything we're seeing so far is either the outcrop itself and some of the stuff that's fallen down. Some that's fallen has fallen from the outcrop and some maybe from above. We can't tell with the granules in the crater in front of us, their pedigree is unknown. That's the nice thing about the spherules in the outcrop. You know where they come from. The evidence suggests that the highest concentration of hematite comes from up above the outcrop layer that we're not gonna see until we start to climb out of this crater. I would be very interesting to see if there is hematite in the spherules.
February 12, 2004
10:15 A.M. (PST)
Natalie: It's about 3am at Gusev and about 3 in the afternoon at the Opportunity site. We'll have updates on the rovers as well information about the Mars educational program.
Art Thompson: Very pleased to report that we have two very busy rovers on the surface of Mars and that translates to two very busy operations teams. Report card on Spirit is that she's in outstanding health. For the past 7 days Spirit has been a fully functional science platform with absolutely no ill effects from earlier memory problems. Current big picture plan to drive to Bonneville crater 340 meters away. We have started the drive and completed approximately 58 meters of that traverse. 3 successful sol drives. Sol 36 we did 6 meter drive. On sol 37 we did 27 meter drive and I'd like to show a movie on the Hazcam as we performed that drive. Snapshots, not realtime, much faster than we go. We're also taking a bunch of images and making a goodness map which tells us where it's safe to traverse. This second video shows colors, green and yellow are safe, orange and red are areas the rover will want to avoid. Taken from today's 24 meter drive on sol 39. On sol 38 HGA was shaded by the PMA early in the morning so we lost the morning session and didn't get the drive done. Successful at commanding LGA and HGA sessions later in the day (yesterday) and did in fact drive today to a place we're calling Stone Council. The plan is to be attempting to drive to Bonneville and maximize our ability to maximize driving per sol. We'll be staying at Stone Council for a day and doing in situ measurements with the instruments on the IDD. At Opportunity, we're cruising the outcrop. Doing a survey of the outcrop. Started at a place called Stone Mountain. This overhead picture shows the targets, Stone Mountain, then Alpha, then Bravo and Charlie. We were successful at getting to Charlie. We did experience significant slippage early and have studied that and corrected to overdrive up-slope and underdrive downlslope. We pretty much understand the slippage problem. At targets we spend the night, then first thing in the morning do Pancam and an IDD touch and go with MI and Mossbauer, then stow the IDD and drive to the next target. The only problem at Opportunity is that on sol 18 one of the ground modeling tools didn't accurately reflect and we failed to complete the master sequence as planned and so we corrected and executed today. Longer-term to drive over to Sand Patch which has a higher hematite concentration. On sol 21 we'll prep to trench. On sol 22 we'll trench. On sol 23 we'll stick the IDD into the trench and on sol 24 drive to a place we're calling El Capitan.
Mark Lemmon: Images we've been getting from MI at both sites have been fabulous. But there's much more than meets the eye in these images. This image shows the MI and the white arrow points to the lens. The yellow disk is the lens cover that keeps dust from the MI and it is semi-transparent so we can take images through it. First video shows the type of images we take with MI. We usually take a series of 5 images to make sure that one is in focus. MI has a 4 mm depth of field. The series of images is also useful for determining depth, topography. By looking at focus we can build 3-D models of the topography. We've looked at the floor of the crater itself and it's exciting. In particular, this area is covered by finescale sandgrains and these irregular grains coming down from the outcrop potentially and the most spectacular are these rounded spherules being called blueberries because they're relatively bluer than their surroundings. They're actually the size of a bb. This technique of looking with multiple images can also give us anaglyphs. The next still shows a place where the Mossbauer has pushed one of those spherules down into the sand. The other thing we can do is go beyond the anaglyphs so we can push the process and this video shows the best way we have of looking at this kind of terrain. Zoom in from Navcam to color Pancam to MI image. This scene was built from that focal series. This is a depth map video. These are the highest resolution topo maps we've taken of another planet.
Don Banfield: Tough act to follow but I'm going to tell you about some atmospheric studies. Critical because there was concern about the atmosphere during landings. MER rovers giving us good profile data of the atmosphere which should help in future landings. Also, currently the agent of geologic change on Mars is wind. In the past with Viking and Pathfinder we had temperature data at only about this 1-1.5 meter off the surface. With the MER rovers we can use mini-TES to look at the thermal emission of the atmosphere. Much richer dataset. Mini-TES designed originally to look down but can look 30° up. Mike Smith put together the algorithms to build this graph. This is a plot of temperature across time, an 8 or 9 minute block of time after 10 am local solar on sol 12 at the Spirit site. New way to use Mini-TES. We hadn't even thought of this until we got to the surface. Stare up at the sky and every 2 seconds, looking up at the sky take a spectrum and get a profile. Red line is temp at 500 m up, -51°C -58°F Yellow line is temp at 30 meters up. Both lines slowly trending upwards. Red line jitters are just noise but the yellow line has huge jumps on a minute time scale. This is a significant change. This second plot shows the same temperature as a function of time and altitude above the surface on the Y axis up to 1 kilometer. Seeing warm and cold blobs passing over the rover down near the surface. We think that the ground is warming, transmitting heat to atmosphere, warm rises and goes up to 100 meters and gives its heat up to the rest of the atmosphere and then there's a cold blob that comes down. You're watching the boiling of the atmosphere. It's really convection. This is really exciting data that will allow us to much better constrain the models that were used to understand the winds that were a danger at the landing sites.
Sheri Klug: I'm here today because we're highlighting opportunities to tie in the surface mission with NASA's overall goal of trying to inspire the next generation of explorers. A first, landing during the school year. Providing lots of ways classrooms can participate. There are opportunities like being able to send in rocks from your back yard. Over 1000 rocks sent in so far. Children learning about rocks on Earth and rocks on Mars. Tying in to the students' curriculum. We have a program called rover quest which are classroom activities that follow along with the rover, the science discoveries, authentic data. Cooler than just a textbook lesson. We have some specific examples. First slide shows the Mars Exploration Student Data Team using the orbiters, Odyssey and MGS, 25 states involved, looking at landing sites, characterizing the weather, etc, real science in real time, amazing experience, the real stuff, real science, in real time. Next video shows Mars Student Imaging project, about 1.5 years old, almost 3800 students, 5th grade through college, using real tools, targeting actual locations and imaging Mars, and doing analysis and delivering that to NASA. More Mars missions coming up, hope to replicate this every 26 months for the longterm. Exciting for us and the teachers across the country. Red Rover Goes to Mars program highlight as well as the Onsight Participation program.
Wendy Calvin: I'm here as a mentor in the Athena student intern program. Kathy Bowman's brainchild. Approx. 15 students. I got involved to bring my experiences back to highschool. A good chance to show kids you could end up some place you never through you might have. Good way to bring NASA and NASA science into rural communities, small towns. Reward has been to learn how to teach. I have a research position at the university, but not teaching. This is the real stuff. They're using the same tools we are. I'd really like to thank Kathy Bowman for the inspiration, organization, all the legwork, logistics, allowing us, as mentors, to focus on interpersonal communication with the students.
Shannon Theissen (highschool student): When I came here I was not expecting to actually be working with the scientists. I thought I'd be put aside and come as they want me to. But. I actually got to work with the scientists. Wendy has been an awesome mentor. We actually work on the computer with her. You don't have to be a scientist or an engineer to work for JPL or NASA. There's many different jobs. If you want to be part of it, follow your dreams and go for it. It's a great opportunity for any student so if you want to be part of it, go for it.
Q. (this woman from ABC, I think, clearly hasn't been following this mission closely). I'm fascinated. Will you guys put the 3-D images up on the website. These 3-D images are going to be the story of the day. This 3-D stuff is just fascinating. I've never seen anything like it. These glasses. I'm assuming website hits is going to just continue to grow.
Mark: yes. MI is spectacular. Ken Herkinhoff at USGS did just a great job. I never thought that the 3-D products would be this cool. I'm surprised that website interest has continued to grow. Glad for the mission.
Q. Shannon, what inspired you to pursue this?
Shannon: started out in a robotics class. When I got used to it and my teacher said I'd have an opportunity to come to JPL and do that, I was very excited.
Wendy: Teachers are selected and then the teachers pick the best and brightest students. After the internship, they snowball out and go talk to elementary schools and talk about it.
Q. Opportunity, what's the strategic thinking for after you climb out of the crater?
Art: from an engineering perspective, we serve the science community. We'll do what they tell us to do. We can't tell you when.
Mark: I think you've named some of the subjects of the debate. We've kind of figured out the path we want to follow to get out of this crater. Then there will be a discussion about the targets, the blocks or the crater. A chance to hit more than one, look forward to having a rover and debates like that.
Wendy: We're starting to get some high-res from Mike Malin's MOC of areas outside of the crater. Those images still coming down. No decision yet.
Q. What's been done to Spirit to avoid that antenna glitch? What's the latest thinking on what formed the layers in the rock at Opportunity and any more on the blueberries composition.
Art: This is a problem when you've got a dynamic vehicle. We were working around the problem but when we got driving the antenna actuator got much cooler and so it failed the calibration maneuver. Now we do that in the afternoon when it's warmer. We have a group that anticipates these types of things and we just missed this one and it cost us a morning.
Mark: I can't tell you what it is but I can tell you that we've seen some indications. We haven't gone beyond the MI including the RAT. With the data we're collecting right now, we're going to choose the sites we want to go back to.
Q. You canceled trenching last week. There was a test that failed. How confident are you that you're going to be able to trench on Mars.
Art: I wasn't involved in that test in the testbed. Mission management is confident they've worked out the details for trenching.
Q. Can you talk some more about what you can infer from temperature spikes and have you seen any dust devils? Seen this from orbit before?
Don: Haven't seen any dust devils yet. Thermals aren't surprising. Interesting to see them on Mars. Will be able to better understand the winds on Mars. We have TES in orbit which tells us temp looking down but that doesn't do a very good job telling us about the bottom 5 kilometers. Mini-TES can do a pretty good job looking up to 5 kilometers so they compliment each other. MGS is going to fly right over Opportunity and we're going to put a sequence on Opportunity to look up to the spacecraft in orbit so we'll be studying the same patch of air from surface and from orbit.
Mark: Pathfinder told a similar story.
Q. Do you see any signs of fossil life or water formation in those little round blueberries? How long will you study this?
Mark: nothing that leads us to conclude that water had to be involved.
Wendy: we've seen nothing in microbiology. I'm stumped. We'll be looking at data from this mission for at least the next decade.
Q. Can you go into more detail on the Opportunity glitch? Terribly unusual?
Art: we have a ground tool that models all of our actuations. We do a detailed analysis. The wrist can rotate just like your hand. We were trying to approach the target underhanded and we hit a hard stop. We should have rotated over and approached it from above. It was a ground tool modeling we didn't catch. No damage. Had to spend another day there. Understanding the positioning of the IDD and where the target is and which face we want to hit, we have a group that's spent years practicing this but we missed this one.
Q. Can you talk more about Sand Patch and El Capitan?
Wendy: El Capitan seems to have two distinct colors and some interesting morphology. Sand Patch has higher hematite abundance and hoping to trench through there and do IDD work, x-ray and Mossbauer on it.
Q. Sounds miraculous what you can do with this mini-TES data. Can you explain more about how that's done. Could you give a specific example or two of the kinds of work these students are doing.
Don: It's not easy. Magic that Mike Smith has put together. Mars atmosphere is CO2. CO2 has an absorption feature at a particular wavelength, 15 microns, very red, infra-red light and around that wavelength the atmosphere is very opaque. As you go shortward or longward of that the atmosphere is less opaque. So if you look at the emission temperature at the middle of this absorption feature, you're seeing the temperature very close to the rover, down at like 30 meters above the rover. If you look at colors either side of this strong absorption feature, you're seeing higher and higher up into the atmosphere. So the idea is you translate the spectrum of temperature as a function of wavelength into temperature as a function of altitude.
Sheri: One group of students given a unique set of tasks. Trying to predict temperature, overflights and looking at THEMIS morphology. They had to design the experiments on their on. 54 teams around the country, communicating through electronic bulletin boards, an amazing collaboration.
Natalie: next briefing Tuesday at 10:00 am.
March 3, 2004
Dr. Ed Weiler: three and a half years ago, several of us on this stage to tell you about our plans to send two rovers to Mars to investigate water on Mars. We'd just suffered two failures. You're about to hear that Opportunity has landed in an area of Mars where liquid water drenched the surface and was around for a habitable time. Today's results are a giant leap.
Steve Squyres: Ever since Opportunity touched down on Jan 24 we saw this marvelous outcrop right in front of us we've been trying to puzzle out what it has to tell us. For the last two weeks we've been attacking it with everything we have. Every piece of our payload have been used. Over the last couple of weeks the puzzle pieces were falling into place. We've concluded that these rocks were soaked in liquid water. Were they laid down in liquid water? we don't have an answer yet. Were they acted upon and altered by liquid water. We believe yes. First, the little spherules like blueberries in a muffin are embedded int his rock and weathering out of it. Three ideas, lapilli, little volcanic hailstones, one possibility. Two, droplets of volcanic glass or impact. We've looked at these things very carefully. Probably concretions. If so, it's pointing towards water. Second piece of evidence is that when we looked at it closeup, it was shot through with tabular holes. Familiar forms. When crystals grow within rocks, precipitated from water. If they're tabular, as they grow you can get tabular crystals and water chem changes and they go away or they weather away. Next piece of evidence comes from APXS. We found it looked like a lot of sulfur. That was the outside of the rock. We brought with us a grinding too, the RAT and we ground away 2-4 mm and found even more sulfur. Too much to explain by other than that this rock is full of sulfate salts. That's a telltale sign of liquid water. Mini-TES also found evidence of sulfate salts. Most compelling of all, the Mossbauer spectrometer in the RATted space showed compelling evidence of Jerosite, an iron sulfate hydrate. Fairly rare, found on earth and had been predicted that it might be found on Mars some day. This is a mineral that you got to have water around to make. We believe that this place on Mars had a groundwater environment that would have been suitable for life. Habitable place at one point in time. This is a place where minerals precipitated out from liquid water. One of the best kinds of rocks that preserve evidence for life are rocks where minerals precipitate and trap and preserve evidence of past life. These are very, very interesting rocks. Just as a teaser, we have tentative evidence that not only were they modified by liquid water, they may have been laid down by water. Once we have finished up on El Capitan, we're driving to Big Bend and we'll take some very detailed pictures to try to determine whether these rocks were laid down in liquid water.
John Grotzinger: Geological field trip to el capitan location. All the observations fit together in a very specific way to narrow down the case for a specific story of what we have. This movie will show opportunity ledge, about 20 meters wide, 20-35 cm high. Color change, fault, ubiquitous layering. El Capitan, has well preserved textures and layering. We see lamination, the voids steve was taking about and the blueberries. Another still shows this fine layering and one of these spherules. Laminations don't deflect around it. These spherules are concretions that result in the displacement of materials rather than pushing the layers down like they would if they were lapilli. Also, randomly distributed, not in layers. These tabular voids show greatest width in the middle and tapering at the ends. Reminds us of gypsum. Requires water percolating through the pore network. Their absence may be evidence of fluid erosion too. In the next slide, we have where we're going in the future, 7 days of experiments to evaluate rock Last Chance. See layers that are cross-bedded, (only a hint) it requires sediment particles be moved in a flowing current, could be air, could be water, could be volcanic gasses. Experiments designed to help test that out.
Benton Clark: Spectrometer science. You won't see pictures, instead see graphs, the two German instruments and mini-TES. Before we landed we had picked this area because TES on MGS had said it had interesting mineral content. First chart shows the APXS samples. Red is the original soil right off the lander. In the blue dots you see sulfur is much higher in the outcrop. Chlorine about the same. Bromine showing up on the right side. We had known that sulfur was high on Mars from Viking. Inferred at that time that it could be salts. When we analyzed rocks at Pathfinder and Gusev, the rocks didn't contain salts. At Meridiani that was different. At Meridiani, chlorine in green is small, sulfur is in yellow. Sulfur jumped up at McKittrick before we RATted. In third bar, the sulfur jumped up (after RAT) and at Guadalupe, we have the record on Mars, almost 5 times the amount. We interpret this sulfur to be sulfate so we expect magnesium sulfate, epsom salts, on Mars with less water it's called kesorite. Kesorite plus the chlorides add up to a salt concentration that may be 40% of the outcrop. This is astounding. No longer can be considered to be a volcanic construct. Only way you can form such large concentrations is to dissolve it in water and have that water evaporate. Further evidence is that the chlorine didn't go up. Also, bromine showed up high. Up at Guadalupe we have highest level of sulfur and down at McKittrick we have highest level of bromine and chlorine. We have an evaporative sequence. There should be additional salts in such a sequence. Next graph is the Mossbauer spectrum that has detected 4 types of minerals in McKittrick sample, including Jerosite, a large fraction of the iron, about a third. It forms in water at a fairly acid PH. Finally we have mini-TES that has looked inside RAT holes and found evidence of sulfate in the spectrum.
Joy Crisp: After a more close-up investigation we're going to want to broaden our view. How extensive was this liquid water. Our near long term plans include looking at younger material above the outcrop and on nearby plains. We'd also like to drive to Endurance crater. This graphic is a rover Pancam view of Endurance and a smaller crater between it and the rover. This MOC image shows large crater with bright rim around it. We're interested in finding out what that bright rim is made of. We've attributed it to being the older etched unit that underlies the hematite unit across the Meridiani plains. Is it the same as the outcrop bedrock? Endurance is 30 m deep so we would like to visit it. There's mottled plain to the south that we'd like to get to if possible. This MOC image is 3 miles across showing mottled terrain. We would like to find out if the bright material is the same or different from our outcrop rock. We will drive around and try to determine the water history for this area.
James Garvin: What an amazing time to be alive and doing science on Mars. What immediate scientific impact on our program. How can we use these results to target our program. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will do remote sensing from orbit and look for new landing sites. We have earth laboratories and we'd like to bring some of that stuff home to earth. We now have a possible target for a Mars sample return mission. These rovers are the first step to take us to see the new Mars.
Q. Does the data suggest how long the water was there or how deep?
Steve: I want to again differentiate between a standing body of water and water percolating up. We don't know if this bedrock was created in standing water. Best way to address the age problem is to see how extensive this stuff is, how thick this layer might be. Best way is to bring some of it back.
Q. How might you modify what you were going to do given more money and these findings?
James: over the last two years we have worked with our science community to craft a series of missions over the next decade. We've crafted those based on forecasting science. We have resilience in the science elements to follow up on these results from orbit and landers. blah, blah, Mars Lab, Astrobiology Lab, Sample return...
Ed. There are three things in the next decade. Sample return is clear. Both for scientific and in prep for human landings. Clear that we need in situ astrobiology missions. Third priority is to land some things that will prepare for human landings, test for toxicity, etc.
Q. any more on age?
Steve: getting at the duration of this specific formation event is going to be very hard. I'm intrigued by the possibility that something cool could turn up at our other landing site. If you want access to geologic information on these flat plains you need a hole. We got lucky at Meridiani. At Gusev, we landed 250 meters from a crater. These two sites are of different ages so if we find evidence of water at Gusev that would be interesting.
Q. If you found rocks like this on earth what are the changes you'll find life there.
John: I think the answer is simple, on earth, finding fossils in ancient rocks is very rare. Preservation is the problem. You target strategies to go looking for rocks where things would be preserved. This location could be a good candidate. You need to get around and look at a lot of rocks and different samples because there's a tremendous bias for preservation. It's a challenge.
Ben: In addition to physical evidence you can have chemical indications. (lost signal, sorry)
Q. what are key pieces of evidence for soaking rather than small amounts.
Steve: massive quantities of sulfates. with this quantity you have to have had a lot of water involved.
Q. Given geological context, if you find there was standing water, what does that imply about how large a body of water?
Steve: that's part of the reason I haven't fallen over that particular cliff yet. It's difficult at this site to point to a well defined basin