National Aeronautics and Space Administration

“ The thing that will help the most is taking pictures of lots and lots of these things. Unlike the APXS and Mossbauer, MI can do quick photos, about 5 minutes. We can do "touch and go" every day, a quick look at the soil and then go about our business. We should be able to take dozens of MI pictures of the soil over the course of this mission so we could get a statistical characterization. In the MI picture we showed you, there's a grand total of only 2 of those spherical rocks. There might be a range, some broken ones. What do you see if you find a broken one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What we've seen is one small part of the story. We've got to fold that in with other patches of soil, the outcrop, what's above the outcrop, all the other pieces. We have gotten another interesting clue. We're getting more information about composition. This is mini-TES data. Very nice instrument that has provided us some great data. This is one of our images overlayed in color with the concentration of hematite. First mineral map from the surface of another planet. The blue stuff is low in hematite. The red is height in hematite. ”

“ It's sol 32 on Spirit now. Tomorrow we plan to do arm operations, brush operation and MI, and one or both spectrometers. On the following sol we'll repeat that sequence with a grind operation, MI and spectrometers. That would be sol 34. On sol 35 we'll start our drive out. We'll probably drive to north side of lander and point ourselves in a straight line to Bonneville crater. On Opportunity we expect trenching on sol 14. Tomorrow go 3 meters of 6 to the outcrop and do our trenching. Then do the move to outcrop. ”

“ You can have things that freeze in air or that grow up layer by layer. If we find concentric structure in a broken one, than we're headed down that path. We need to sol by sol take lots and lots and lots of pictures and build up a library. ”

“ The main thing that I'm getting out of this is that there are several components to this soil and they're unevenly distributed around the crater and who knows what's outside of the crater. that could get even more interesting.
Q. Intriguing things is some seemed to be layered, a rich hematite above bedrock, some seems much patchier.
Steve: Fine particles can be blown by the wind. Little round particles can roll. I'm interested in concentration of these little guys as we get closer to the outcrop. Are they coming from the outcrop? Maybe they're weathering and falling out of the outcrop. ”

“ Q. Mossbauer has narrower field of view. Can you get Mossbauer of specific objects?
Steve: APXS even bigger, 38mm diameter, almost an entire MI field of view. You could try to get really cute, really fancy with positioning. That's hard, man. This is a 5° of freedom robotic manipulator on the surface of another planet that's sort of flexible and has got wheels that can slip in the soil. Right way to do it is to just find a place where there are a whole lot of these things. There are places where there are a bunch of them, much better chance of hitting one. ”

“ The Olivine is green as well. If it grows nicely in color you'll actually get a gemstone called peridot which was the favorite gem of Cleopatra the queen of Egypt who was actually of Greek descendence, but that's a different story (laughter) . ”