posted 04-28-2005 01:04 PM            

April 27, 2005

A note to all you Opportunity fans: Get used to the current scenery, because we're going to be here awhile.

We are very optimistic that we'll be able to get out of here, but we're really going to take our time doing it. The first rule in a situation like this is "do no harm", which means that you don't rush anything. We're going to take lots of pictures of all the terrain around the vehicle, to get a very complete picture of the situation. We're going to do lots of testing with the rovers that we have on the ground to simulate the situation on Mars. This testing will be aimed not just at finding a plan that will work, but at finding the very best plan that will work. We may try quite a few small maneuvers with Opportunity that aren't intended to do anything other then help us gather more information... perhaps followed by even more testing. All of this is going to take a lot of time. But this is a very precious vehicle up there, in excellent health, and there's no reason to rush anything. I'll try to provide updates as the process moves forward, but the main message for now is to be very, very patient. No apparent progress in the images doesn't mean anything other than that we're being very careful to do our jobs right.

posted 04-28-2005 02:07 PM               

MER Driver: Yes

Flight Dir: I was going over the new rover commands... what's that new parameter for the forward motion command? It's called !Ay Caramba!.

MER Driver: I'm testing it right now

Flight Dir: Uh... ok I guess

20 minutes later

MER Driver: Mmmm... that can't be good

Flight Dir: If somebody calls for me, I'll be in my office working on my resume.

posted 05-10-2005 11:13 AM            

Phill
UK

posted 05-16-2005 07:50 AM               

Growing up in northern countries, I'm familiar with vehicles being stuck in snow. When trying to get unstuck, the results of first the first few moves, may seems worst than the original problem. But it's hopefully just an adjustment before the BIG backtracking moves.

On a more positive note: The front wheels looks much better and I think two things will come out from this first attempt: First the results (if this situation was predicted) are now confirming the properties of the sand (material) around the rover. Second, they probably learned a great deal from this and the next move will be much more effective.

posted 05-17-2005 10:21 AM               

We have begun the extraction process at Meridiani. So far we've executed three sols worth of activity. On the first one we simply straightened the wheels, which worked fine. The next two sols were executed over the weekend, and each commanded two meters worth of wheel turns. We were pleased with the outcome of those, too. The rover moved more than a centimeter in the expected direction during each maneuver, which was just the kind of behavior we were hoping for. (In fact, the motion was actually more than I was personally expecting to see this early in the game.) We clearly moved some soil in the process, and there was an encouraging amount of clearing of caked-up debris from between cleats on some of the wheels.

posted 06-05-2005 06:15 AM            

Its good news for future rover designers since many lessons learned from this episode

posted 06-05-2005 06:50 AM               

Hats off to JPL. Incredible machines. I wish they'd put one on the Moon, maybe land it at the impact sight of the Eagle's ascent stage and then head for the Apollo 11 landing sight. MAYBE, that would make news coverage.

posted 06-13-2005 01:18 PM            

NASA has given Indian names to a number of rocks. We shall disclose the names soon after NASA gives a clearance to make this classified information public," NASA planetary geologist Amitabha Ghosh, currently on a three-city tour to India said on 13th June 2005.

posted 06-14-2005 07:36 AM               

This is the Flight Director's Report: Today Spirit is finishing a remote sensing on a rock called Rama-Naresh-Rajan-Vajrang-Manish-kumar...

posted 08-22-2005 10:32 AM               

BTW, it's been almost a month since any Rover press images were released.

posted 08-22-2005 10:51 AM               

Bookmark this site and check back daily for the new ones from MER and all the JPL missions

------------------
-Ben

posted 08-22-2005 02:01 PM               

On the same topic, I had chance to attend a book signing by Steve Squyres last week at the local library. Steve gave a talk with a really good slideshow where he even had some very recent images from just the day before. He is a great speaker and hops around in front very excited about the images and it's easy to see that he loves his work. Very entertaining guy to listen to, and the question/answer time afterwards went on for about 45 minutes after. The talk was acutally for a local Cornell Univerity Alumni group, but I got told about it from a friend that works at the library since it wasn't a public event.

I wish I could find a job that I could get that excited about. *sigh*

posted 08-22-2005 08:43 PM            

Does anyone have the facilities to re-post the picture with the contrast enhanced to show greater detail in the dust vortex visible against the bright sky?

posted 08-24-2005 05:32 AM            

You need to visit JPL's Mars MER site for Spirit images.

Some of the panoramas from Spirit sat atop Husband Hill on MArs are really fantastic.

They make good desktop images and a printed panorama will sit very nice on the wall.