Everyone likes suprises right....

At very short notice ( <36hrs ) - Steve and I managed to meet up in Milton Keynes yesterday evening and do another Q'n'A - this time an hour long talking about everything that's gone on in the last 12 months or so since the first Q'n'A last September.

http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_071106.mp3
Approx 14 Meg, 1 hour 48 seconds long.

Sorry I didn't have time to do a call for questions - but with the time between knowing it was on and doing it being so short there just wasn't the time to call for them, plough through them and then pick them...I think I got through all the good stuff though. I tried to see any left over stuff mentioned here, things that might have been asked for a Pancam update but better suited to Steve rather than Jim - and I was able to ask my admin team if they could think of any as well ( thanks guys ).

This time it was on the lounge area on a hotel landing....no ducks or wind noise - but occasional passers by heading to and from their hotel rooms - I hope the quality's good enough (I think it is)

If someone wants to put down time markers for transcription and people do the same as last time, I'd be happy to put together another PDF like last time.

Enjoy!

Doug

w00t

Great stuff Doug. I'm up for a transcription chunk.

I'll have a listen today at lunch, then post a listing of times/logical breaks for transcription signup.

A very big thanks to you and Steve for doing this. It is so good to hear all the detailed stuff from the mission.

So what was SS doing in Milton Keynes?

Famous for its roundabouts and concrete cows if I recall....

Aberdeenastro

Primary reason was giving a keynote lecture at the London Geological Society....which then resulted in a "while you're in the UK, can you come and do something at the OU"...which is in MK, 56 miles from ME

Doug

"I don't want to go into the crater untill we think we found an exit route...
...I THINK we'll find an exit route..."

That's our Steve!

Great work Doug, really enjoyed it, sounded like you both were telling a tale about all the past sols...
And you can actually "see" Steve "possessed" by Discovery's spirit we he talks about the Everest and Victoria panorama...That was my favourite part...If you have followed that not so scientific line only for a bit more it would have been perfect...

Opportunity's RAT is still working. A way out can be MADE.

Sound was excellent. Good mic-ing on SS but you're sounding like you're in a can or something Doug. Very good of him to make himself available for that chat. It's likely this good bedside manner that has provided the impetus to make MER such an interactive treat. Can Steve be seconded to ESA for a couple of months? Ask him next time!

Much better than the other way around. By design, I'm sure. If there's only one mic, Doug knows which way to point it!

My favorite part: Going back to home plate to look for more bombs... and that strange silica stone, (fuzzy something).

That is a really enjoyable interview. I found myself cheering at several parts of it, as you discussed various parts of the ongoing adventure. Great job, Doug.

Thanks Doug! This Q'n'A was the best yet!
Can somebody post images of those two mentioned rocks (Gong-Gong and Fuzzy Smith)...I'm having trouble googling them up...

GongGong
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre.../20060202a.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...HEP1212L0M1.JPG
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_..._1_True_RAD.jpg

Fuzzy Smith...ahh...got it
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CP1214L0M1.HTML
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CP1131L0M1.HTML
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CP1121L0M1.HTML

Doug

Fuzzy Smith, Sol 772, Seq 2595 - http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit_p772.html

Thanks for your truly full involvement on what you're doing. Enjoyed the chat very much. Steve's always the same and I love the way he is. Lot of informations there. Thanks again.

Bingo
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins..._1_True_RAD.jpg

Fuzzy Smith...well I look forward to more data on this chunk of rock..

I've only just listened to the interview and I can only say it's been the most enjoyable evening I've had in a while.. It felt real good to hear Steve talking to you and share not only his scientific knowledge but his personal feelings and emotions about the latest achievements of our dear sister-rovers out there.

Thank you guys so much for having this conversation.

The reason I waited to listen to it 'till just now is been that I was looking forward to it so much and didn't want to have it ruined by 'noise' I made it a multimedia-experience by having Daniel's galleries and MRO-Victoria images on display to suck it all in visually as well. (better than a real good movie IMO).

I was surprised by Steve's mention that Victoria's investigation 'should' take years. It makes me believe he's fairly confident that funding will be assured as long as the vehicles are functioning properly

Y'all ready for another couple of years guys? I am!

However Steve's last words should be remembered at all times of course; "Don't ever take for granted..."
Something unexpected is always possible to happen, I hope we can all remain thankful for all the combined effort this mission has had going for it if something unexpected would happen, causing either rover to die.

As Steve mentions, Victoria has been a fantasy from within the first 24 hours of the mission, they got there and everyone one them and every one of us dreamed of seeing it through Oppy's eyes and we are seeing it, in all its glory.. For the scientific part, I hope they get to have the answers they hope to get answered from Victoria, but, again, let's all be very gratefull just for having seen it so far..

Nico

OK, make that lunch today - my headphones were AFU thanks to my 2.5 year old, so I had to obtain a new pair.

Here are the sections I chose, trying to keep them in the 5 minute range.

Section 01 :: 00:00:00 to 00:05:11 :: Spirit- El Dorado to Low Ridge Haven :: odave
Section 02 :: 00:05:12 to 00:10:12 :: Spirit- Return to Home Plate and after :: NMRguy
Section 03 :: 00:10:13 to 00:16:53 :: "all the things that are funky on both rovers" :: odave
Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans :: lyford
Section 05 :: 00:22:26 to 00:26:38 :: Oppy- Erebus & Olympia :: imipak
Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky :: lyford
Section 07 :: 00:31:44 to 00:37:39 :: Oppy- Victoria arrival, conjunction operations :: paxdan
Section 08 :: 00:37:40 to 00:43:33 :: Oppy- AM Odyssey passes, HiRISE image of Victoria :: imipak
Section 09 :: 00:43:34 to 00:49:23 :: Oppy- Victoria plans :: Marz
Section 10 :: 00:49:24 to 00:54:19 :: Oppy- Victoria early analysis :: CosmicRocker
Section 11 :: 00:54:20 to 01:00:48 :: Oppy- After Victoria? S1K bug effects, "the adventure that just won't stop" :: MarkL

Orange = has a volunteer
Green = transcription done.

As before, just pick whatever section you want to transcribe, but post your choice here so we can avoid duplication.

To start things off, I'll take Section 1

Fabulous interview, Doug!

Post a Word template for the transcript and I'll do 11.

We didn't use a template before, we just did our own straight-up text posts into this thread. I agree that having a template would reduce the amount of reformatting Doug has to do on the final PDF assembly. The previous one can be found here.

What's best for you, Doug?

When I look at that rock, it reminds me of Bounce rock. Not in looks or
composition, but in circumstance. Perhaps it also came from an impact
far away.

Just pure straight forward text's good for me.....

Format it thus though...


SS: Blah blab blah
DE: And blah blah?
SS: Oh yes...blah blah.


Doug

Part 11

(why not start at the end)

D: Now you said that you’d like to know if you can leave or where you can leave. If you do leave Victoria, where next?
SS: (laughs) Ha. Well …
D: There’s not a great deal.
SS: No there isn’t and what that says is that you should not leave Victoria without having done Victoria very well. We spent 21 months getting here. Since the day we landed, the dream goal of the mission was getting to the crater. I mean I remember, gosh it was the night we landed I think or within 24 hours of landing. We figured out more or less where we were, and then the guys at JPL found the “MOC strip” that had the landing site in it and printed it out. Enormous -- you know 3- 4 feet wide and 20 feet long or something. I remember unrolling it on a table in the operations area and Tim Parker, Mike Malin and a couple of other guys on the team were pointing. “Well OK here’s the little crater …”, we hadn’t named it Eagle Crater yet, “Here’s the little crater where we landed” and “Oh wow look at that crater over there!” and that was Endurance, and ”Boy it would be neat if we could get there”. We’re all clustered round looking at these little craters and thinking where we’re gonna go, and away down, 20 feet away at the other end of the table is this big honkin’ thing and it was just this fantasy, at the time. But we saw it the first night. You know, we knew that that thing was there. It was such an effort to get there and there’s so much scientific potential here and you have to go so far before you get to anything else. I mean the next crater onward from Vic that potentially offers more, scientifically, than Victoria does is I dunno 12, 15 kilometres away.
D: To the ESE there’s a really large … For some reason the community have nicknamed it Ithaca. I don’t know why. I think that’s rude. (Laughs) But it’s a long way to the SE and you know how navigable is that terrain anyway? It took so long to get this far.
SS: You’re talking about a distance from here to there that is more than the total distance traversed by the rover so far. So I do not look at that as a realistic goal. I still want to find an egress route. I just don’t like the idea of driving this thing in and not being able to get out. For example, we’re not gonna do 360 degrees around the rim of this thing before we go in because there’s so much that leads us to want to go in. Suppose we do 90 degrees or 120 degrees around the rim, then we find a good ingress point and in we go, we do some work in there and then we come up with some scientific question that is best answered by more imaging from the rim. I wanna be able to do that, you know. I don’t wanna just get stuck in that crater forever. So even if we don’t drive off to some distant crater, there are reasons to want to get out. But as to where you would go next, its hard to think that far ahead. I mean you’ve got to realize for example we certainly intend to go into this crater. If we go in and we lose a wheel, as has already happened on Spirit, that’s it.
D: That’s it, you’re stuck.
SS: You’re not coming out. I mean the demonstrated hill climbing ability with one bad wheel is about a seven or eight degree slope. And so if you drive in and you lose a wheel that’s it, you’re there forever. Just like Spirit’s never gonna climb McCool Hill. If we go into Victoria and we lose a wheel “whhittt” (neck chopping gesture) that’s it, game over.
D: If you add the sol numbers together now its 2001.
SS: Oh is it now. Today? Is that right? Yeah I guess that’s right.
D: 990 and 1011.
SS: Yeah that’s right. We just cracked 2000 sols.
D: One thing I should touch on which we laughed about a year ago, the S1K bug.
SS: Yeah.
D: I never thought we’d actually have to worry about it but …
SS: How did you come through the S1K bug? (Laughs) You must have folders that have ..
D: I have folders to rename. I haven’t done it yet.
SS: (Laughs) I think we came through it fine.
D: The fabulous Midnight Mars Browser tool that many of us use to grab all the pictures, a little Java app that James made, that needed an S1K fix. The JPL image website, that needs an S1K fix.
SS: Oh really?
D: Yep. There’s something 1000 up way high. It’s reporting them incorrectly.
SS: Uh oh. OK.
D: The pancam tracking site, that needed a little fix because that was set to a thousand then was giving you one again. But how was it, I mean did you catch everything before you …
SS: I think we caught everything. We tested it very thoroughly ahead of time. We saw this coming months and months and months in advance. A lot of software people went to work on it, made every change that it looked like we possibly needed to make and then we tested the hell out of it just like we test the hell out of everything before we actually use it. And so yeah, we’re very very thorough in our testing of it and I am not aware of any problems that we’ve had with S1K. I mean S1K for Spirit came during conjunction. And I was a little nervous about that but nah as far as I know it’s all been fine.
D: Opportunity is ready to start all over again with Victoria; Spirit’s just about ready to start moving.
SS: Yeah, just started moving today.
D: It’s the adventure that just won’t stop?
SS: Well its been that way for a thousand, two thousand sols depending on how you look at it. It will stop. It’s gonna stop some day. We don’t know when and so all we can do is you know the attitude that I’ve been trying to take and the whole team’s been trying to take from the very beginning is you know we have an extraordinary opportunity here. Every day is an adventure. It could end at any moment. Just cherish it every single day. Don’t ever take for granted this incredible gift that we’ve got, and lets just push hard and squeeze the most we can out of these vehicles while we got em.
D: Steve, thank you very much.
SS: Glad to do it.

Hey that's the second time today that MMB has been attributed to me. As much as I'd like to take the credit, I think Mike deserves a mention as I'm sure he contributed to it somehow.

(Well what do you know, Doug does appear to say James on the recording, Climber mush have subconsciously absorbed this when listening and thus made the same mistake in the 'New Adventure' thread. )

James

odave: Thanks for breaking it into chunks. I'll take part 10.

I'll take section 7.

I said James OMG.... Michael - so so sorry I think I'll smooth over that little bit with the transcription write up

Doug

The only thing that ticks me off about that is that James hasn't open-sourced his program code yet - or even released it! Come on James, I want to see how you generate those amazing natural color renderings. And steal the code.

Section 1:
=======

DE: We'll, it's been just over a year since we last chatted. Have you stopped trying to make predictions about what might happen...

SS: [laughs]

DE: ..or 12 months ago did you think "it would be nice if we could do this, it would be nice if we could do that"? Aspirations of 12 months ago, how do they tie in with today?

SS: I think they tie in pretty well. I think the biggest difference between what we had hoped would be the situation a year ago and what is the situation is that because we've lost the right-front wheel on Spirit, we can't climb anymore. So I had had thoughts about maybe going up McCool Hill, or something like that, or at least going part way up it, and that's not in the cards. Spirit just can't climb anymore. We can do slopes up to 7, 8, 9 degrees, but you need to be able to climb 20 degree slopes for that kind of thing, so that's off the table. But other than that, the plan was, let's go explore Home Plate, let's find a safe place to spend the winter, let's try to get to Victoria Crater. So we always have a long term plan. We've got a long term plan now for both rovers. But what actually happens is always dependent on what Mars throws at you.

DE: Now, in those 12 months, it may seem like Spirit's spent most of them sat at Low Ridge Haven...

SS: Yeah.

DE: ...you've covered a lot of ground since last September, and we worked from the top down. First stop was...

SS: Now, you're going to have to remind me where we were last September, because I think in sol numbers, I don't think in...

DE: We'd just, it was, I guess, late 600s, just got to the summit...

SS: OK, all right...

DE: ...at the summit a couple of weeks...

SS: ...so we're comin' down off the crest of Haskin Ridge.

DE: Indeed.

SS: Yeah, OK.

DE: The first major stop was probably El Dorado

SS: Well, El Dorado, sure. But there was all that Commanche stuff and everything before that. Seminole, Commanche, several others in there. But El Dorado was a big one, yeah.

DE: Did anything stand out once you got there and got the instruments onto it? About what was going on, and why all that dark material <unclear>

SS: I think El Dorado...and El Dorado is not unique. There are other things very similar to it. There's something like that over on Clark Hill, for example. But I think of El Dorado as being basically an aeolean cul-de-sac, a place where the pattern of the winds is such that sand can get in but it can't get out very well. It just has to do with the nature of the prevailing winds and the shape of the topography, and so it provides sort of a local trap for sand grains. Once they get in, it's very hard for them to get out of there.

DE: It was a rapid sprint thereafter...

SS: Yeah, it was.

DE: ...and you had, Paso Robles was a surprise not far from Larry's Lookout...

SS: That's right.

DE: ...and then you hit Tyrone,

SS: Tyrone, yep.

DE: ...and Arad.

SS: Arad, yeah.

DE: Were they telling similar stories...

SS: Similar but not identical. Now I don't know what the composition of the soil is at Tyrone. By the time we got there it was really gettin' tight, I mean it was scary. 'Cause we were trying very hard to get to a safe place to spend the winter. At that point we had said "OK, we're done doing science, just get the rover someplace safe", and then we got stuck, and of course having the right-front wheel not functioning made it even worse. So that was a very tough situation. Arad, we did do a careful investigation of, and it's similar, but not identical to what we found at Paso Robles. It has an enormous amount of ferric sulfate salt, as was the case at Paso Robles, but Paso Robles had a significant quantity of phosphates, and we didn't see that at Arad. So there's something different there. But they're conceptually similar.

DE: Did it surprise you how quickly it went from "free power for everybody" to "quick, let's find a slope, because" ...

SS: No, it's straightforward math. We knew exactly what the current was going to look like, it's easy to predict. We weren't seeing any anomalous rate of buildup of dust on the solar arrays or anything like that, it's just the changing of the seasons. We knew exactly the pace it was going to happen at, we were trying to be someplace safe by about sol 800, and it was a little later than that, but not much. The only thing that really made it sporty was that all of a sudden, we lost that wheel. And that made it a lot more difficult, because we had what looked like some really good places to spend the winter on McCool hill that we were heading for, and then when the wheel went out, all of a sudden our options were very limited. And fortunately Low Ridge was there, and actually we got pretty lucky. Low Ridge turned out to be a pretty good place to spend the winter. Very interesting place, interesting geochemistry, we found two meteorites, it's been a great place. Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.

My turn to appologise Michael. Don't know if it was sub-conscient or else but I'll not do it again now that I know that James doesn't want to share his code
BTW, thanks James for pointing it out

Also, I'd like to help for transcription, but my english is not good enough (you know, I understand "James" when "Michael" is said )

(edit, having actually read the thread) -- I'll take chunk 5.

Well I would, if my code wasn't so embarrassingly poorly written and inefficient! Most of it has been written very experimentally to try and fix problems while rushing to get pans made for you guys and is therefore not the best code you've ever seen. Way down my list of jobs are lots of things to tidy up, I'm not sure they'll ever get done.

I do keep meaning to write a web page detailing the procedures used to make the images.

Too much to do too little time though...

James

Haha! That's pretty funny, climber. I thought my English was decent enough, but I had a devil of a time translating Doug word for word.

Doug: Here is Part 10. You will probably want to edit at least some of my interpretation of what you actually said. I did not include all of the umms and uhs and repeated words, only enough to capture Steve's unique style. His main monologue in this section was so long that I broke it into a few paragraphs that seemed logical to me.

[Part 10]
…Note to Doug: You may want to check my interpretation of what you said.
…49:24

DE: Have you been able to see in any kind of the outcrops that have been so amazingly visible, anything you can go, ah yes, I can see how that ties in to what we saw in, in Endurance?


SS: Yes.


DE: (a few difficult to decipher words.) So, are we seeing higher, lower, both?


SS: Probably both. I think we’re seeing both higher and lower. Umm, that’s a guess. But uh, we’ll be able to back that guess up, umm, as we get more information. The reason I think we’re seeing higher is because I think there is a plausible scenario which we have actually gone uphill, up section a little bit, as we have moved to the south. Uh, there’s a good chance that’s why the blueberries went away for a while. We always had blueberries strewn about the surface. Of course, those can be moved by the wind. Uh, but there were stretches of time where the rocks had either these just little micro-berries, or no berries whatsoever, and one plausible idea there is that the berries, being concretions, they form as a consequence of there being groundwater. Groundwater will rise to a certain level, and then, you know, not above that, and it may be that we got high enough stratigraphically that we had got into regions that had not received that influx of water. The water just had not risen that high, uh, so we effectively got above that ancient water table and you lose the berries.

One of the interesting things was, this was fascinating to me and not unexpected…But if you noticed, soon as we got into the annulus, which is the ejecta from deep in Victoria Crater, all of a sudden we started seeing great big blueberries again, which we hadn’t seen in a long time. And so, what that says to me is that there are blueberry rich strata down in the crater that are full of big, ripe, juicy blueberries like we used to see back in Endurance. So, I think we have moved up section a little bit, but I think once we get down in the crater, the big blueberries that you see in the annulus suggest that down in the crater somewhere you are going to get back into that blueberry-rich stuff. And the crater is so deep, that I expect it also goes deeper, goes lower in the stratigraphy than we saw at Endurance.

To me though, the thing that’s most intriguing about Victoria is that for the first time, it really allows us to do good lateral stratigraphy. OK? Umm, we’ve never really been in a place where we can look at stratigraphic changes laterally over distances of hundreds of meters. Endurance was not big enough to allow that. There were only a few good exposures at Endurance anyway. Whereas this place, we can study, going from one promontory to the next, to the next, we can see changes in the stratigraphy, if they’re there. And in fact, we are already getting strong hints in some of the images that there are lateral changes in the stratigraphy.

If you think about it, any depositional process, any geological process that you name, has some kind of characteristic size scale, over which it manifests itself. Uh, think of a sand dune, Ok? We think that many of, we think that much of the stratigraphy we are seeing, both in Endurance and here at Victoria, is eolian…is dunes and sand sheets. Dunes have a finite size. You know, they’re not infinite in scale. A dune will be fifty meters, a hundred meters, two hundred meters across. Something like that. They have a finite size scale, and what that means is, if you had a geologic record someplace that consists of preserved sand dunes, you’re going to see these preserved duneforms fattening and thinning, you know, pinching out, over lateral scales on order of a hundred meters, for example, and so what we’re very interested in doing, to help us confirm this idea we’ve had for a long time, that we are in fact seeing lots of eolian crossbedding in these craters, is to look for what geologists call lateral facies variations over length scales that are the characteristic size scales that you would see associated with certain sorts of processes. So, we think we can learn a lot, and this is what really makes Victoria unique, besides just it’s depth…We think we can learn an awful lot by sort of driving from promontory to promontory to promontory, and imaging each one, and seeing how things change.


DE: Each one gives you a slice of the pie …


SS: Vertically!


DE: …and you just kind of tear the pie apart…


SS: Ah, yeah, something like that. At Endurance we were able to go vertically…very nice, very good, systematic stratigraphy over a depth of about seven meters or so. But here we can do both vertically and laterally, and that’s much more powerful than either one individually.
…54:19

I will take

Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky

Just because I want to spend my weekend trying to spell Jammer bucht... Yammerbook... Hammer Pants?
Plus I get to type DIATOMACEOUS EARTH!

Doug - thanks so much for this. This board is an embarrassment of riches.

Here's Chunk 5. I wasn't too sure about the "umm"s and "err"s - I've left most of them out, but included a few "you know"s. I found I'd carried on quite a way past the end of the slot, so I've left a bit of that in. Also - I remember Overgaard, but "Cornville"?

Many thanks for the interview, Doug (and Steve!) I'm just about to settle down and listen to the whole thing properly.


[ 00:22:26 ]

DE: Let's segue, mildly seamlessly, to the other side of the planet -

SS: OK -

DE: - and do the same thing, run over the last twelve months or so.

DE: Most of the time was post-Purgatory, pre-Erebus. Now you took a
right, you went west around Erebus --

SS: Right, yeah

DE: -- towards Olympia and Payson and so forth. Was that choice of "those
look like interesting targets", or was it "the other way doesn't look
traversable"?

SS: It was both, it was both. The character of Meridiani is such that
what's traversable, and what's good science when you're out on the
plains, tends to line up really nicely, because the science that's
most intriguing of course is in the rocks, I mean there's interesting
stuff in the soil, but the soil's all very similar, and so once you've
done certain things, you've done them. Whereas, you know, the rocks
show lots of interesting variability, certainly the stuff that we saw
at Olympia really paid off very nicely for us. And as it turns out
also, the rock is the easy stuff to drive on. So that was a situation
where both of those things lined up together.

DE: Now you had a pretty lengthy stay around Olympia -

SS: Yeah, that was forced on us, because of the problem with the
arm. The problem with the arm - it took us a long time to figure out
what was going on. That was a surprise, it was a real anomaly;
clearly, something had broken, I mean, something just went wrong on
the rover. And you know, having had the right front steering actuator
go, having had the right front drive actuator on Spirit go, we were
very concerned about losing that IDD joint, because for a while it
looked like maybe we'd just lost the ability to move it altogether,
and that would mean we'd never be able to stow the arm again, that was
going to impair our driving, certainly it would impair usage of
the IDD and all the instruments on it. That was a really, potentially
very bad, situation. And so we really wanted to take our time and
figure that out. It took a while to get it straight, and figure out
how to deal with it. As it is now, we've got it figured, but it forced
a long stay on us at Olympia. Now, the good thing - this is, you know,
just one of those things - we took lots of pictures of the rocks
around us Olympia, and it looked sort of interesting; and then
after we'd been there a while, we'd kind of imaged everything, and
well, OK, the engineers are still futzing around with the arm, what
are we going to do? And so, you know -- well, OK, let's try taking images at
different times of day. And we took images at different times of day,
including some very low light. And then - bam! All that texture at
Cornville and Overgaard popped out, and that was just sensational. But
we really wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't been stuck there for a
while.

DE: Now what was that actually telling you, how did it relate back to
what we'd seen previously..?

SS: It wasn't telling us anything fundamentally different, it was just
much better examples. We had seen the festoon geometry or trough
geometry, cross-bedding, all the way back at Eagle crater. But that
was a situation where - we have some very, very, experienced sedimentologists
on our team, there's a guy named John Grotzinger who is an extraordinarily
experienced sedimentologist who has a very, very good eye for
recognising these sorts of things, and he was able to pick out, from a
distance, in very fuzzy pancam images, some festoon geometry,
crossbedding, at Eagle crater that was really very hard for the
untrained eye to pick out. And - you know, it was there, and we made
our case, and it was good stuff, but what I - what John and I both
wanted all along was some examples of that where you didn't have to
draw lines on top of the pictures to convince people that it was
there, it was just there - Bam! in your face - obvious stuff that was
there.

[0:26:38 - end of chunk]

One thing that I've had people ask me in the past, and you might have
asked me this once, was - are there any things we really regret passing
by, this whole mission long?...

I got a bit carried away... here's chunk #8. Sorry if anyone else had their eye on that bit! Doug, I'm sorry to report that I can't make out what you're saying in a couple of places; I've indicated those with (?) bracketed question marks.



SS: ...they're going to be fabulous mosaics when they come down, but, ah,..

[ 00:37:40 ]

y'know, the thing that's hurting us right now is that we still don't
/quite/ - almost, but not quite - have enough power to start grabbing
a.m. Odyssey passes. I mean, those a.m. Odyssey passes can be
tremendously valuable in principle; A.W.A., right? We're /real/
close to being able to use a.m. Odyssey passes, but not quite yet, and
so right now our data volume is pretty restricted, and that's going to
be the limiting factor on our pace along the rim of this crater for a
while.

DE: How do the A.M. Odyssey passes work - do you, actually [?] the
rover stay comparatively awake and then deep sleep after the pass, or..?

SS: The way you do an a.m. Odyssey pass is, simply, that you wake the
rover up - you turn the CPU on - at the time when the, uh, vehicle is
going overhead; but the problem is, you can't deep sleep on a night
like that, because the battery - what deep sleep is, is you take the
battery off-line, essentially, and then it automatically goes back
on-line when the rover wakes up in the morning; but you can't wake the
computer up if the battery's off-line; and so, especially on
Opportunity, a.m. Odyssey passes are pretty costly, powerwise, and we
just can't quite afford 'em yet. It'll change soon, but I think about
500 watt-hours is probably the magic number, I think once we get above
500 we'll be able to start doing a.m. passes again, and that'll speed
things up, because the science that we have for Opportunity planned
for the next several months is very, very, very pancam based; you're
going to be seeing a lot of pancamming, and not too much of anything
else, because that's where the real science lies for the next few
months.

DE: Now, you've said that you want to go... clockwise.

SS: Yeah... initially.

DE: ..because clockwise looks perhaps a little more exciting...

SS: Yeah.

DE: ...is that based on the pancam imagery, or is it based on HiRISE?

SS: No. HiRISE, HiRISE. I mean,..

DE: ...cause you can't really see what's up, because we're up against
?? that way.

SS: OK. You notice that the MRO project acquired that image in their
first six days of normal orbital operations. OK. They did that at the
request of the MER project. We went to - I mean, I'm on the HiRISE
team...

DE: (??)

SS: ...but, yeah, we had a team meeting in Berne, is Switzerland -
gosh, what was it - probably five, six, seven weeks ago? I don't know,
a number of weeks ago; and my whole pitch at that meeting was, `Let's
make sure that we get a HiRISE image of Victoria crater before
conjunction, so that we can use that to support this upcoming
strategic decision of, do we go clockwise or counterclockwise around
the crater.' The entire timing of that image, the reason that the
HiRISE took it when it did, was so we could use that image to help
make the decision on which way to go. um... It's a fantastic
image. I'll tell you a funny thing about that image. It was - as I
said, it was planned during the first six days of HiRISE
operations. We had no idea how good the pointing was going to
be. There was considerable concern that we would just miss the target
altogether.

DE: It was *spot on*.

SS: Well, you see, that's the frustrating thing. If I knew -- what we
did was, the most important thing was getting Victoria
crater. Everything else - Eagle, Endurance, all that stuff - was
secondary. We had this big image, and we wanted to make sure that we
got Victoria. So what I said to the HiRISE team was, look: don't screw
around, you know, while it's tempting to bias the centre of the frame
northwards so that we can get Eagle, and Endurance, and the
heatshield, and the backshell, and the parachute, and the lander, and
all the tracks, and all that stuff, let's just put it dead centre on
Victoria and maximise our chances of getting Victoria, because
/that's/ the image that we have a tactical need for now, is - is to
plan which way we're going to go around the crater. Had I known that
the pointing was going to be that good -

DE: Yesss!

SS: -as it came out, it was just dead nuts right in the middle of the
frame, you know? And if I'd've know that it was going to be that good,
we would indeed have biased it north, so one of the things that's now
on our to-do list is to, at some point, to go back to the Opportunity
site and do a shot that *is* biased to the north, and that will catch
all of our other hardware, and tracks, and everything we've done in
the past. But, yeah, it was funny the way that image worked out,
because I was, uh, prepared - we were all prepared for the pointing to
be bad, and it was perfect - just perfect.

DE: (??) just bang-on.

SS: ...and what a picture.


DE: It's, um... it's nice to see something -- MOC did a fantastic job,
seeing the rovers,

SS: Oh yes, yes.

DE: ...it's extraordinary to see them at all. But what HiRISE does is,
you go - "Ah, that's a rover" - you recognise it -

SS: Yeah. That image had a lot of impact on us. I said at the time
that it was good to see the rover again, and you could sort of say
it's a silly thing to say, because every day that we take pancams and
navcams and hazcams, we see the rover - bits of it - and, you can take
a panorama of the whole deck and that sort of thing, and that's... But
somehow it doesn't have the same visceral impact as seeing it.

DE: Sort of,...

SS: Sort of, this lonely, valiant little rover --

DE: ??

SS: Yeah, in the middle of nowhere like that, and especially right up
on - you know, just poised on the lip of that enormous crater that we
fought so hard to get to.

DE: Being so brave... (?)

SS: ..that was a wonderful picture, that was a wonderful picture, you
really got to tip your hat to the HiRISE team, Alfred McEuan and that
whole team that did that instrument, because that was just a
magnificent accomplishment.

[00:43:33]

DE: Now, HiRISE will image Victoria again..

Chunk #8 was a good one. I almost chose it initially for the electricity between Doug and Steve, as they both giddily recalled the success of the MRO pass. It was obvious that both parties were revelling in the synergy between the missions after the MRO folks nailed it. I thought the best quote from the entire interview was Steve saying, "it was just dead nuts in the middle of the frame..."

It was nice to hear first-hand of the far-reaching affects of yet another succesful NASA mission. It seems that these missions clearly knew what they were trying to do, and managed to do it.

My favourite bit is definitely Steve talking aout rolling up to Duck Bay for the first pan. There's a Steve Squyre pause that is very eloquent; I didn't quite cheer out loud (I'm English, doncha know, damn it all!) but it did induce quite a grin

I'll take chunk 9, if it's still open.

Zoiks! Who woulda thought it's harder to understand an englishman than a Yank? Here's my take on chunk #9 - it may not be 100% accurate, but I think it captures the gist of the conversation.

----


DE: Now HiRISE will image Victoria again, that's where MRO wants to get it with the stereo pancam?

SS: Yes. Yes.

DE: ...to get a stereo pancam of the crater.

SS: Yep, stereo is very important for us because we want to use that, of course, along with the stereo we take from ground level, to start assessing entry and exit alcoves.

DE: Now, there is a MOC down, (??) there is a little movie some of you may have seen, I don't know how accurate that is, but...

SS: It's pretty good, actually.

DE: And to my untrained eye, the kinda south-east sorta half the crater looks perhaps a little easier, a little more slope-friendly.

SS: Well... i mean, there are some... we could... Duck Bay would've been easy to drive into.

DE: Duck Bay is pretty Karatepe style.

SS: Duck Bay would've been really easy to drive into. I'm not sure it would've been easy to drive out because there's a fair amount of loose soil there. But I think there's prospective entry and exit alcoves at a number of places on this crater. So yeah, um, i mean, the fundamental point of this traverse that we're gonna be doing along the rim for a little while here is to look at the layering at the rock that's exposed in the promontories, and basically use those promontories as sorta like virtual bore-holes, if you can imagine such a thing the way geologists would collect data.... um... to look for lateral variation in the stratigraphy. But while we'll be doing that, we will also be doing some long baseline stereo with pancam looking across the crater and trying to assess slopes. And that, combined with the HiRISE stereo I think we should, eventually, get a very good elevation model for the whole crater.
Um, I don't want to go into the crater until we think we have found an exit route, or until we've just convinced ourselves that there isn't one. In other words, when we go in, I want to go in with knowledge of what the implications are. And so we need to do a much better job than we've been able to do so far in surveying these craters. I think we'll find an exit route.

DE: And if you do, and let's speculate horrendously here. The partial circumnavigation...

SS: Yep, months.

DE: Yeah, a couple of months around perhaps...

SS: uh....3, 4, 5 months.

DE: Now how far around? 120 degrees or so, thereabouts?

SS: We're... the juiciest stuff, the very best science along the way looks like it's 90 to 120 degrees. That arc is where a lot of the very best stuff is, at least as you look at the HiRISE images. Beyond that, the layering is not as well exposed and you also start to get into more big ripples that we prefer to avoid if we can. So it's this next 90 to 120 degrees where it looks like the best stuff is.

DE: From where we are now it's slightly off to the left?

SS: From where we are now, yeah.

DE: Let's say we get in...

SS: Yep. We could spend a LOT of time in that crater.

DE: As long as Endurance and then some.

SS: Oh, Jeeze, it's six times bigger!

DE: Yeah.

SS: Ok, we spent 6 months in Endurance. Ok? This crater is six times larger. [laughter] Ok? And the mossbaurer spectrometer is a lot older, and once we get in the crater a lot of the really important stuff is going to be the mineralogy and geochemistry. So a thorough exploration of Victoria crater is years. [laughter]

DE: Might it fit in, perhaps with one slope on the way in because that's power positive at one part of the year in... in the Martian year, you know... 6 Martian months later, on a slight different slope...

SS: Yes.

DE: And we almost talking about trying to get out almost a year later...

SS: Yes, there are many possible scenarios for how we go in and out of this thing, and we have not ruled any of them out yet. One possibility is you go in, you explore, and you come out the same way you came in, like we did at Karatepe. Another possibility is you go in one place and you come out another. Another possibility is multiple toe-dips, you go partway in and out, then you go to another alcove and partway in and out, and you do that multiple times. All of those are on the table. We don't know enough about the topography and we don't know enough about the stratigraphy to have chosen such an approach yet.

One of the things we've always tried to do on this mission when we face a situation like this, is not try to make too many decisions too far ahead of time. I always encourage the team to, you know, let's make the decisions we have to make, but let's not get too wedded to long term decisions because what happens is you sorta decide, "oh, we wanna do this or we wanna do that", and maybe it's not the right decision, and it's a lot easier to postpone a decision and then make it when you have all the knowledge than it is to make a preliminary decision people kinda get attached to that idea and then you have to realize later you should change it. And so we decided a long time ago, 2 years ago, that we wanted to get to Victoria crater and we have moved towards it with single-minded determination since then. But now that we're here, we're trying to not jump to too many premature conclusions about what's the best thing to do because as we discover and learn new things, we're potentially gonna change our views.

But right now, a partial circumnavigation counterclockwise, errr, or clockwise rather and surveying from the rim to try to find good places to get in and out is what the focus is gonna be, and then we'll pick our routes once we know more than we do now.

I've got it on my iPod to listen to on my morning commute today.

Are there other audio recordings hidden away around the forums? Would it be worth setting up a RSS feed for them so they'd be easier to find, not to mention possibly allowing a subscription to be set up?

If I knew how....I tried for several evenings to make an iTunes RSS feed for the Pancam Audio Updates and other things....but got nowhere - it was just too damn convoluted and awkward.

Thank you for your effort, it was one interesting read and yes it was helpful getting this in text instead.

As a sidenote it confirmed my suspicion that Victoria will get a long study, and that will keep my interest for this mission going as long as it last.

I've never done it but it doesn't look that hard and having them visible in iTunes would be a good thing I think.

The XML specification isn't that tricky to get your head around but it would be a bit painful to constantly reedit by hand. There are quite a few RSS feed generators - here's an online RSS 2.0 "podcast" XML file generator. All you have to do is plug in the data and it will give you the iTunes compliant XML complete with all the iTunes mandatory fields.

Once you have your XML file hosted somewhere then you can publish it in iTunes by submitting it, however you have to have iTunes installed and have a valid iTunes account to do this.[ Submit a Podcast to iTunes ]

Did my best, but I am afraid I couldn't make out some of Doug's lines, under Steve'e enthusiasm. You may want to double check, Doug.

And one rock I didn't recognize he mentions with Overgaard and the festoons - Cornbelt? Cornville?

If they were naming rocks after Arizona towns, there is both an Overgaard and Cornville in AZ....

***************

Section 06 :: 00:26:39 to 00:31:43 :: Oppy- Scoop regrets, rapid drive to Vicky

SS: One thing that I've had people ask me in the past, and you might have asked me this once, was - are there any things we regret passing by, this whole mission long. And for me the one that I regretted bypassing most was a rock called Scoop. And Scoop was a rock that was in the wall of Eagle Crater, kind of on the opposite side of the r from where we were, we imaged it from a distance with Pancam, in fact we did some Pancam super resolution on it. And it looked from a distance to have the best examples of the festoon geometry cross lamination that we had seen, but at this point it's like sol 50 or sol 60 of what we thought was at that point was going to be a 90 sol mission -

DE: And you said you had to be out...

SS: And I said we are gonna get out of here by sol 60, because I want to at least try to get to that Endurance Crater way over there before the rover dies on us. Ha ha! And so all we did is do super resolution on Scoop from a distance and off we went. And had I known that the vehicle was going to last that long, Scoop looked so good - Scoop might have been as good as Overgaard turned out to be - I would have gone over there and done a good M.I. mosaic and really nailed it. But, you know, Overgaard and Cornville? Cornbelt? XXXXXXX turned up and there you are... so those are just text book examples that you don't have to draw any funky little lines on the pictures to convince anybody that the festoons are there. So it was a good stop.

DE: Now you've promised us a pretty rapid drive from there to Beagle and on to Victoria, and that's what it turned out to be...

SS: As rapid as we could make it under the circumstances, yeah.

DE: With a brief, a brief stop...yes.

SS: Jammerbugt - yeah, Jammerbugt.

DE: Now you spent a lot of time back in Purgatory - did those lessons carry straight forward? "Now we know how to do this..."

SS: Oh yes, when we hit Jammerbugt we knew just what to do, there was no... you know, we didn't have to take the rover back into the testbed and bury it up to the hubcaps again and start screwing around, we knew exactly what to do and we were out in pretty short order at Jammerbugt. There wasn't a - you remember at Purgatory it was two and a half weeks before we even dared try to move! So, yeah, Jammerbugt was much less of a problem than Purgatory was. I mean the only reason Jammerbugt happened was that you can be timid in your driving and you can be aggressive in your driving; if you're too timid you go too slowly, and if you're too aggressive you get deeply stuck. And we always felt that we wanted to have a driving technique that would be aggressive enough that we would run some low risk of getting a little bit stuck. We certainly didn't want another purgatory type incident where we were going to be stuck for six weeks or something like that. But we felt all along that if we were too timid about our driving that it would just take too long to get there. So we were fairly aggressive and on that instance it did get stuck briefly but it wasn't a big deal...

DE: Swimming pool owners across much of Western California are celebrating that they didn't have to go and relocate...

SS: We didn't have to go and buy more DIATOMACEOUS EARTH! Oh, that was bad....

DE: You had a brief stop not far from Beagle, a brief IDD workout. Was it the same stuff, the same sort of material you had seen previously, or...

SS: Which spot are you talking about?

DE: About twenty... it was a brief brushing, not far from Beagle.

SS: That might have been when I was on vacation. I took about a three week vacation right around that time.

DE: While you were on vacation, they did a brushing.....

SS: If it was around Beagle, that was about the time that I was off in the wilds of Western China, and was pretty well cut off from the world, so I don't know too much about that one - other than to tell you that any IDD work that we had done on outcrop didn't reveal anything startlingly new...

DE: If it was festooned or something interesting...

SS: I mean I can't tell you the exact details of what the sulphur concentration was or something like that but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

DE: Now the annulus of Victoria has been an absolute breeze!

SS: Yes! Which was nice...

DE: Nothing like that since the run from Eagle to Endurance.

SS: Yes - and it was really, really nice. Everybody was a little nervous about the annulus, it sort of looked too good to be true? After struggling our way through all of that stuff, for so many kilometers, to kind of break out and just have the last five hundred meters be a clear shot to the rim, it's just like we're getting suckered, something's up - we gotta watch it!

DE: There's something missing...

SS: But no, actually it was just easy driving, all the way to the rim, it was nice!

DE: Everyone took the MOC images and tried to compare it and think - well, it might be the same as this, and then you take the Pancam images and stretch them - and think well actually it kind of looks like was it the way it was back then...

SS: Yeah, it was really very similar to the run from Eagle to Endurance, it was very easy.

DE: And once you got there....

SS: OH BOY! Yeah, Duck Bay...

The transcription is coming along great guys - thanks!

I'll do Section 3, "all the things that are funky on both rovers". "Funky" is such a great technical term One thing I love about SS is how down-to-Earth (Mars?) his speaking style is.

As a reminder, the section breakdown and current status can be viewed here.

Well, we're almost finished, so I'll go ahead and take Section 2.

For as much as Doug has done for us, it's the least I can do.

OK. Here's Section 2. I must admit that I had a few questions with the British portion of the interview. Blame my damn American ears. So Doug, could you go through and check/fill in the parts with the (??). There should be five spots below. Everything else should be fine.



[From Section 1] SS: ...Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.

***********
Section 2
***********

DE: Now you mentioned Home Plate, and it was a brief stop on the way on the way to something in the winter.

SS: Yeah, yeah. We sort of got some unfinished business there.

DE: You’ll go back. But what’s the story so far? What have you seen so far, and what more questions have you got left unanswered? And you hope to go back and…

SS: Yeah, Home Plate is clearly some kind of explosive deposit. I think the leading candidate is that it’s some kind of explosive volcanic deposit. I think there are a number of things that point to an explosive origin for it, but I think by far the most compelling is this thing that we call the Bomb Sag. There’s a place really right where we first pulled up to the base of it, where we first took that nice panorama showing the face of Home Plate.

DE: (??)

SS: Yeah. And there’s a place called Barnhill. And in the lower unit there you see this place where there a rock that four or five centimeters across that has landed into some clearly deformable sediments, and you can see the bedding deflected beneath it. And that’s what happens when a rock falls from sky. [Snickers from both] OK. There’s no other really good explanation for that, or at least none that isn’t pretty far fetched. So that points to an explosive origin, and the thing that I think leads us to conclude that it’s most likely volcanic is that the composition of these rocks is very closely linked to some volcanic rocks, clearly volcanic rocks, that have been found near by. So most likely it was some kind of volcanic explosion that formed the thing. What we’d like to do is do a more thorough exploration of all of Home Plate. We had to blast across it really fast. You know, we came in on the north side. We did a pretty good investigation there. We went to the base, climbed up on top, did a very good job characterizing the chemistry and mineralogy at that one particular spot, got some pretty good images, but then we had to get out of there. And we didn’t really have time to do much else; we sort of went around it to the left and kind of went sprinting that eastern side taking a few pictures as we went. But I’d like to look at more bomb sags, for example. I’d like to see if there is any significant variability in the mineralogy and the chemistry from one place to another. There was one fabulous, bizarre rock that we found up on top of Home Plate called Fuzzy Smith. That one didn’t get a whole lot attention at the time in the news media, but it’s one of the most bizarre rocks that we have ever seen. It has an extremely high silica content. Very, very high silica content. It’s compositionally different from every other rock we’ve ever found on Mars. There’s never been a rock that’s been found on Mars that has a composition remotely like that one. We took a very quick look at it with the APXS and the Mössbauer, a couple MI images and boom, we were out of there. I know exactly where the thing is. We have to go back and find that rock again! We can do it! But Fuzzy Smith is a real anomaly. And uhh, I don’t know what kind of story it’s telling us. But we need to go back to Home Plate and understand the complexity and diversity of that thing a lot better than we currently do. It’s the biggest outcrop of layered rock we’ve ever seen at Gusev, and it would be crazy not to do it right.

DE: And once you’ve done Home Plate (??), however long that takes.

SS: It’s likely to take a while. We’ve got a pretty slow moving rover these days.

DE: It’s something that you could study for as long as Opportunity studied Endurance, for example. It’s not (??) upside down.

SS: I think we could. I’m not sure that would be wise. But I think we could easily spend quite a few months there. Yeah.

DE: And once you’ve done it, where next? With a stop where?

SS: Southwest. Southwest.

DE: (??) promised lands.

SS: Yeah, Jim Rice has always liked to call it that. I don’t know what it will turn out to be. It’s got this very kind of bizarre etched topography when viewed from orbit. I’m dying to see what it looks like in HiRISE images.

DE: HiRISE images…yeah.

SS: HiRISE imaging is, well, HiRISE was turned back on today. So, we’re going to pick…

DE: It’s pretty high on the list of targets, I am sure.

SS: It’s quite high on the list, yes. So yeah, you’ll be seeing more HiRISE imaging of familiar places before too long. And I’m dying to see what that stuff looks at HiRISE resolution.

DE: Now, most of us know how Spirit's doing with a worn out RAT.

SS: Yeah.

DE: Worn out wheel. Pretty tired Mössbauer spectrometer, but still fairly…

SS: Well, the Mössbauer…

DE: It takes a while, but it works.

SS: Yeah, the Mössbauer thing is just a matter of time. If you want to get a good signal to noise ratio, you just have to count longer. But things like the RAT and the worn out wheel definitely impair our ability to do science. We can’t do things as well. We can’t do a grind, we can’t climb. The Mössbauer--we can take beautiful Mössbauer data. It’s just a matter of time.

DE: Is there anything else that we’ve fully not heard about so much. I’ve read speculation that with the wind on top of the hill, mini-TES might have a little dusting on the mirror (??).

SS: Yeah. OK. Let me see if I can really go through it and name all the things that are funky on both rovers.

************
This should be the end of Section 2--odave, could you match it up with the start of your section 3? Thanks.

I'll do section 04 - Moving Again

Section 04 :: 00:16:54 to 00:22:25 :: Spirit- no more wind gusts expected, moving again, mid term plans

This all makes great reading It's odd - in 'the moment' of these things, you don't really take in the content, you just try not to miss something out.

Doug