[this first part egress will be in this same post; earlier at top, later at bottom. Second half is above, or here
Sol 7... I'm sitting here in front of NASA TV. Commentary is due to begin at midnight....
and welcome to the control room. I'm sitting here in front of my computer, looking at the control room with everyone sitting in front of their computers and all. Everyone is working. 12:30 in afternoon on Meridiani Planum.
Narrator sounds like Jim Erickson, Opportunity's Mission Manager, with Gay Yee Hill (nasatv). Chris Lewicki is the flight director (Flight).
Earlier today they did an egress bump, a movement 10 cm, to ensure all is well with vehicle before they commit to actual egress. Opportunity will be heading straight forward.
Flight will conduct a poll to see that all is ready for egress.
Yay for Erickson; he's holding a small model of lander and explaining stuff, but he pauses for telecom (what they're calling voca) from one of the team members to Flight, rather than talking over that chatter. Kudos to him; this way we can follow both threads.
Erickson: we've received all the telemetry to verify vehicle's status and position. Make sure all is well before committing (this will be the poll). Then once all have checked their telemetry, Flight will ask each person/subsystem to report that status is go before committing to egress.
Explanation of each subsystem:
Telecom, which is responsible for command transmissions to spacecraft and reception from. Makes sure all links between mission control and spacecraft are healthy.
Fault: Vehicle is protecting itself from any inadvertant mistakes made by crew.
Activity. Joel T... Describes what's going to take place.. commands and the things to take place and what block names (first we'll do this, then that. I guess that's why he's activity dude). It's too complex for me to follow and type.
Do the go for egress activate, first an hours' worth of science, then egress, then more science (cameras), and will be verifying all of it in the Odyssey pass (which, presumably will be happening later on)
12:19a Poll begins. All systems are GO for egress...
Erickson: Command is acutally issued at discretion of activity lead/flight.
Someone (imaging?) said, I'm gonna go to the testbed and verify something really quick (laughter in mission control).
ACE - term refers to mission controller; making sure all commands get up through Deep Space Network (DSN). Flight director works through ACE. ACE is the one who sends the actual command.
12:24: Flight: ready to commence activities. The honor for pushing the button is bestowed upon our something mechanical person. Please come forward. (someone named Kevin walks forward, rubs hands together). He's given a headset. Person assisting him: command is in the queue. Now Kevin has the mouse (the mouseclick to execute the command): Flight: the most significant three minute drive in the last three weeks.
Kevin: Copy that. 3, 2, 1, Mark!
The command's away. 12:26. Applause. [Doc M: I know that guy--Kevin; he's in the bike club] This signal will take 12 and a half minutes to reach Mars. It's that ol' speed of light thing.
Erickson: background info on kevin, the mouse-clicker dude; he did something mechanical to ensure that everything's going to go okay with egress.
It'll be 25 minutes (12.5 there and 12.5 back) until the beep arrives back *from* Opportunity to say that it received the command.
Erickson is continuing his description of who does what and what those functions are...
He introduced Imaging (Jim Bell, I believe).
Chris Voorhees-- another mechanical systems guys. Today's when you'll see more mechanical people in the room. A) just to be here; b) each has specialty area, so if needed, they'll be ready to troubleshoot.
Someone in Mission Control asked what the expected power would be at end of egress... Erickson explains to us that Egress is very power intensive activity, so the day after egress has lower activity just so as to recharge batteries. The time for egress is noonish/early afternoon so that there's plenty of solar power, and sufficient time in case they need to delay any of the activities.
and so... we wait. mebbe snack time here at blog/watch. ; )
More background from Gay Yee Hill.. Today's Sol 7. Wake up call from 8:45 Mars time is replayed: Born to Run (they're replaying tape from this morning. This is the first that I've heard anything about wake up songs being played for Opportunity.)
We do the wake up call.. wait for it to wake it up. Can either command it to wake up at a certain time, or tell it "whenever you feel like you've got enough power, i.e, with a certain level from the solar panels." 8:45 is a bit early for Opportunity; usual wake up time is around 10.
12:55 Carrier detected, carrier lock.
Flight: We've got our beep. Egress mega-wrapper is active...we'll be egressing this afternoon.
Lunchtime Lecture is about to begin.. Jason Soderblum (from Cornell) about the Pancam color and spectra (cool!). Is part of father n son team, son of Larry Soderblum, who is from USGS.
Someone: Flight, we have LOS.. (loss of signal.) FLight:time for next beep.. will be 10 oclock at 25 seconds (tho 10'o'clock in relation to what, I haven't the foggiest)
Lunchtime Lecture: We can actually do spectroscopy in pan cam. We're used to seeing hi-res images through these cameras... lotsa detailed images, etc. particle sizes in soil.
But another source of science from pancam is spectroscopy. We have a suite of filters. two overlap in each eye, so we can do stereo. (Has charts and stuff) Talks about sensitivity and how it compares to what human eye can see. too technical to comprehend, much less transcribe. These things are very narrow, sensitive in narrow regions of wavelength in visible to near-infrared.
One thing that's been boucned around (on slashdot) why is our blue chip pink? Different versions. Theyh're minerals. in bottom left is hematite, cobalt in lower right, gertite (green) back left, and ..
Why is cobalt one look pink? Shows graph showing sensitivity of human eye to different wavelengths - red green blue. When we use L4, L5, L6 filters, we represent approx true color image.
But in bottom image, L2, L? So have put filter that's sensitive to infrared. (that's the one that's pink in calibration target lower right). High visibility for blue visible, flat for red, but for infrared, the graph pops up again.. so the blue colored chip.. gets lots of information in the red channel, so it becomes vibrant pink.
Samething with green color, high infrared, plus yellow, so it becomes orange.. The blue pigment in the nasa meatball looks orange, or red.
Why use these filters? He explains that the spectra for differnt minerals... with high amount of variability at different wavelengths. So try to characterize how much minerals are present.
Bottom plot is hematite... which starts flat but jumps up as graph moves right. Goethite generally follows it. So they're looking for subtle differences between the two, in order to constrain what we're seeing...
So pictures of the lilypads. (airbag marks on surface). when we bounce on it, we brighten it up. the spectral signature... the reason disturbed soil appears more red is that it's not as bright in the blue.
The main reason we came to mars is this (shows image of the outcrop). So cool, so much info in a single frame. Look at plain in the distance. a sheen-- a photometric effect (cf. road in distance, the 'mirage' one).
So they're extracting different spectra from distance part and closer up material. peaks at different places.
L4, L5, L6 (roughly true color).. rocks almost has red wine stain to it. (lo, his laser pointer jumps from one to another rock. cannot translate. sorry) Pick up differences in rock. That little dark part of a rock. There's a possibility that it might be gray hematite. This is why we're sending multiple instruments. (400-1000 nanometers, the area that is measured by pancams). To miniTES, it'll immediately pick up slight differences very strongly.... and it'll detect hematite right away.
Other interesting thing. red spectrum pulled off of red stained part of rock. points at spectrum-graph. I fear that this'll all read as gibberish. Shall I start gibbering now? lkjwr[oiukjhadfjhdsf well, anyway, what he said
Now a last scene, from Spirit-- magic carpet region.. picking up subtle differences in this image. different spectrum points in image, with corresponding graphs. Main point. It's pretty subtle. But, for the trained eye (I'm not even paraphrasing here, but summarizing), it's distinguishable. and therefore worth studying.
He's doing Q & A, now.
Jim Bell: The lander cam. when taking stereo imaging, using L2 and R2, and L 4, 5, 6. He's describing a messup with L2, 5, 6 (shoulda been 4,5,6).
back to Jason Soderblum... (all of a sudden, I'm starting to get what spectroscopy is). end of lecture. Go egress.
So, for the layperson. It's a photography using filters that isolate different parts of the visual spectrum. Use that with known spectroscopic signatures of different minerals in order to "see" what minerals are present. Damn. I feel so enlightened. In a spectral sort of way. I don't know if this can be translated without seeing these graphs. Which sure as heck don't translate in mere ascii.
Now we're getting Gay Yee Hill and Jim Erickson.. talking about the sequence of beeps we're getting. First (received alreayd, from what I can tell) that says "signal received" and then subsequent beeps that tell status, that is, "I did this" ... and antoehr beep "I did that" and then, to cap it all off... there'll be that UHF high-data rate transmission from Opportunity to Odyssey (orbiter), with all the gory (or gorgeous) details.. then Odyssey sends it on back to us... I think that's the 3am time thing they talked about.
1:29. Someone, to flight: Didn't report it earlier, but we broke an internal [acronym here; PRT, which Doc M says is a resistor, which is something in the power system] on the [lost that]. HOping Erickson translates it for us, if it's newsworthy.
queries back and forth between Flight and ....
Flight, Systems. I have the EDR, 204 30 0h-
Erickson: they're discussing the failure of a platinum resistor thermistor (temp. sensor) it was one they'd expected to fail on Mars soon after landing. So they didn't know exactly when it would fail.
Thermistors are hard to bond down to surface of spacecraft.. this one was a difficult one to bond down (they'd replaced a couple others but left this one be, so expected it to fail). No impact on egress; totally unrelated.
[I see that Asa's also blogging this; hee! he says I'm kicking his butt. Asa, I installed a set of typing macros on Doc M's computer that I'm using, mostly it fixes the most egregious (and oft-recurring) typos. Heh. It's only when yer trying to get all this stuff down that you can appreciate the work of another who's doing the same. We've often tipped the hat to one another's transcription efforts. :D
more pausing and background discussion. Sound is picking up crackly sound. Are those potato chips? laughter and murmur-ey talking among colleagues. no thrilling stories, that I can tell "so they, after that, he said... " "no! really? Yer kidding!!!" "Oh, I know, and then, after that, he-- you would NOT believe it!" "No way!" Okay, none of that. I'm making it up. Geez, these poor overworked, time-dragged people. to have microphones on in the workplace, and unsuspecting people watching from all over, listening in on their workday conversation. But I did want to know if that crackly stuff was a bag of chips, and what flavor. I'm nosy that way. (Drink survey, very rough: water, Coke regular and Diet Coke, in plastic bottles. Oh and mugs, as in coffee mugs, I guess).
Now we got Gay Yee Hill and Jim Erickson talking through video of est bed egress from testbed. wheels moving down egress aid (fabric down on the side of lander). It's going smooth, he says (grammarian in me says smoothLY, dude. but I digress). it goes forward, onto the red dirt of testbed mars yard. big crowd in background. that was late last night, when making decision whether to egress today. (late night when? by what reference point? heck if I know)
Now they're looking at the hand-held model (which does not have fabric batwings)
Background noise: laughter. "Now that's a very good story" (damn, missed it!)
Ace, Flight: somethign something that I lost. Okay, got it now. Nominally we're expecting around oh-nine-fifty six.. so go ahead and start listening now. It should be 5 minutes long.
we hope now that Erickson will interpret that fascinating prose for those of us watching at home...
GYH: What are we listening for now, Jim? We're waiting for the beep that says that it's about to roll off the lander. Just a beep (don't spend much power on it, just check in and beep and then check out again) Beep signifies:Rover is about to do it, about ready to roll off the lander. should hear it in about 3 minutes.
Am I hearing music in the background, softly playing? cant' tell.
Now we are approching 2am, I expect that sometime the server'll that this site is hosted on will go down for a reboot. seems a good time to do that for servers, after all NO ONE is up at 2am on a friday night/saturday morning, well unless you're on Meridiani early afternoon Mars time, perhaps, eh?
fascinating background quip: "You could die in that" (okay, I'm sure you could)
Flight, ace. we have beep detection. Copy that. Applause. Becasue of light time, the vehicle should be on the surface at this time
Background quip: But I want to know now.
Music: sounds like The Who, from Who's Next. I'm goin home and when I'm going home, I'm goin' mobile. Keep me movin.
1:57, Weblogger is rebooting the servers. Manila is that way, I guess. we'll resume updating once the server lets us.
GYH makes some comment about how this is a "musically inclined group" and the camera pans on someone playing drums on his jeans with a pencil. He stops. Prolly figured out that he was on TV. Why is it that they want to prove or make a big thing outta geek engineers who like rock n roll music, as if that's, like, newsworthy or something?
end of song. applause. Flight Deejay: and that was "goin' mobile" by The Who.
Flight: next event is the odyssey pass about an hour and 20 minutes out from now. 11:20 UTC (okay, now I know what the 10 oclock reference was. GMT/UTC).
It's on the surface... no longer tied to what we brought with us from earth. 3:20 pacific time is the Odyssey pass. current time is 2:01. Now what is NASA TV gonna do for the next hour and some? If they cover Mission Control, I hope I catch a choice bit of embarrassing gossip. (I do not aspire to be the Wonkette of MER, tho)
Flight (Chris Lewicki) is using a 15" TiBook (or AlBook). Awwwright, Dude! It's standard issue JPL computer (um, I mean, among one of the computers that their MIS issues to them that requests it and whose higher ups approve it). There's one of those next to me, too, with a JPL inventory sticker upon it.
Camera shows a crowd of people strolling in for the big data drop. Steve Squyres (how's your office door?) wanders in.. room's starting to get a little crowded. Camera close shot of stuffed animal near someone's monitor. aw, cayuute. (talk, laughter. I'll hear someone talking and then, after a bit, the voice level drops, as if someone comes by and gestures, "shh! yer on TV!" No, I don't see it, I just imagine it. Geez, these guys and gals kill themselves for 3.5 years, reaching this point. So much so that they nicknamed the rovers "weekend" and "holiday" and at the end of it all, on this most histric of occasions, they gotta keep an eye on the NASA TV monitor to ensure that they're not caught picking noses or otherwise embarrassing selves while awaiting the communications window telling all that Opportunity has left the lander.)
Continue to Egress, Part 2.
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