National Aeronautics and Space Administration

“ From small spacecraft to supercomputers, science missions and payloads to thermal protection systems, information technology to aerospace, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., provides products, technologies and services that enable NASA missions and expand human knowledge. The center plays a critical role in virtually all NASA missions in support of America’s space and aeronautics programs. NASA Ames enables exploration through development, innovative technologies and interdisciplinary scientific discovery. ”

“ Scientists want to study Martian samples with powerful lab equipment on Earth to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to better understand the processes that have shaped the surface of Mars. Most of the samples will be rock; however, researchers also want to examine regolith – broken rock and dust – not only because of what it can teach us about geological processes and the environment on Mars, but also to mitigate some of the challenges astronauts will face on the Red Planet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CAIN: "And folks, listen up again on the flight loop, no, no phone calls off site, outside of this room, our discussions are on these loops on the recorded DVS (digital voice communications system) loops only. No data, no phone calls, no transmissions anywhere into or out." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ames’ prime location in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley at the core of the research cluster of high-tech companies, universities and laboratories affords outstanding opportunities for innovative partnerships with the nation’s technological, academic and entrepreneurial leaders that helps make future space exploration a reality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Studying regolith up close could help engineers design future Mars missions – as well as the equipment used by future Martian astronauts. Dust and regolith can damage spacecraft and science instruments alike. Regolith can jam sensitive parts and slow down rovers on the surface. The grains could also pose unique challenges to astronauts: Lunar regolith was discovered to be sharp enough to tear microscopic holes in spacesuits during the Apollo missions to the Moon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ames’ research in astrobiology focuses on the effects of gravity on living things, and the nature and distribution of stars, planets and life in the universe. The center also conducts research in air traffic management, contributing to safer, cheaper and more efficient air travel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”