Posted on 02/12/2004 7:40:17 PM PST by Phil V.
Daily Updates - February 12, 2004
Opportunity Status for sol 19 posted Feb. 12, 4:45 pm PST
During its 19th sol on Mars, which ends at 7:41 p.m. Thursday, PST, Opportunity climbed to Waypoint Charlie, where it will complete its initial survey of the outcrop nicknamed "Opportunity Ledge."
The flight team at JPL chose 'Here I Go Again' by Whitesnake as Opportunity’s wake-up music.
The plan for sol 20, which will end at 8:20 p.m. Friday, PST, is to do a "touch and go," meaning Opportunity will touch the soil with its instrument arm around the outpost area Charlie, then stow the arm and drive. It will head for an area of soil that the rover's miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicates is rich in hematite. Over the following few sols, engineers intend to use one of Opportunity’s wheels to spin into the soil and “trench” a shallow hole so scientists can check what's below the surface early next week. Knowing more about the hematite distribution on Mars may help scientists characterize the past environment and determine whether that environment provided favorable conditions for life.
Scientists and engineers will pore over the data collected along Opportunity Ledge this week to target a return trip to the most interesting science locations along the outcrop later next week.
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Spirit Status for sol 39 posted Feb. 12, 12 pm PST
During its 39th sol on Mars, which ended at 7:20 a.m. Thursday, PST, Spirit broke its own driving record. It adding 24.4 meters (80 feet) to its odometer while getting near an interesting set of rocks dubbed "Stone Council." The drive lasted 2 hours, 48 minutes. While navigating itself to avoid hazards, Spirit stopped when it recognized an obstacle, which was the group of rocks that was the day's intended destination.
The flight team at JPL chose Buster Poindexter's version of "Hit the Road Jack," as Spirit's wake-up music. The day's commands were uplinked during the cool morning hours via Spirit's low-gain antenna, to bypass a problem diagnosed the preceding day as shade slowing the warm-up of motors that move the high-gain antenna.
Before rolling, Spirit took images with its microscopic imager and panoramic camera from the site where it started the day.
The plan for sol 40, which will end at 7:59 a.m. Friday, PST, is a short drive forward then using instruments on the robotic arm to study soil at Stone Council.
Microscopic Imager Non-linearized Full frame EDR acquired on Sol 39 of Spirit's mission to Gusev Crater at approximately at approximately 10:04:57 Mars local solar time, Microscopic Imager dust cover commanded to be OPEN. NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS
View Full Image
They were discussed at great length during the Feb. 9 news conference (archived at cspan.org).
You have to remember that geologists, with the exception of vulcanologists at dangerous volcanoes (a TINY fraction of geologists) work and think VERY slowly.
When a field geologist gets a PhD he'll spend YEARS walking all over a surprisingly small area of the earth (bigger than the area either Opportunity or Spirit have roved so far, but still pretty small) examining EVERY outcrop in detail, turning over and over in his head how everything got there and the sequence of geological events in that location, possibily going back BILLIONS of years.
And the rovers gather info and cover ground at a FRACTION of the rate a human would walking around on earth.
Give them a break. You're not going to see new conclusions and analyses from geologists every day. People could be debating what Opportunity has found for YEARS before final conclusions are reached. Geologists are careful, and they like to be sure what they are saying, because in geology you work with such incomplete info.
This makes it look like Opportunity is finished at the rock outcrop. Is that right?
Looks to me like someone pressed pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters and half dollars into the soil.
Martian foreign exchange?
I was going to turn it inside out.
Yes, at first. But I turned my laptop upside- down to correct it, and after that I could always see it correctly, even right side up.
In addition JPL's Marsologists ("geo" is the Latin root for "Earth") have to infer planet-building-and-altering processes on a body with about 1/3 Earth gravity which could alter them a lot from Earth norm. They have no absolute proof that water ever existed there (again, only an inference from topology, etc.) and the atmosphere is entirely different. The average temperature around the planet is far colder than Earth's. All these matters and many others have to be taken into account before any theories are put forward. Here on FR we have a lot of fun playing at "science" but most of us don't really know what the hell we're doing.
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