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ZL2VAL > ROVERS 05.08.04 14:12l 92 Lines 4418 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 940010ZL2VAL
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Subj: Press release, 4th August
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Sent: 040805/1035Z @:ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC #:45115 [New Plymouth] FBB7.00g
From: ZL2VAL@ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC
To : ROVERS@WW
NEWS RELEASE: 2004-191
August 04, 2004
Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status
A rock outcrop with a view of the surrounding landscape beckons NASA's
Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on sol 203 (July 29, 2004) of its journey
of exploration on the red planet.
NASA's Spirit rover has climbed higher into rocky hills on Mars, and its
twin, Opportunity, has descended deeper into a crater, but both rovers,
for the time being, are operating with some restrictions while team
members diagnose unexpected behavior.
Both rovers have successfully operated for more than double the span of
their three-month primary missions. They have been conducting bonus
science in extended missions since April.
While Spirit was executing commands on Aug. 1, a semiconductor component
failed to power on as intended. The component, a programmable gate
array, directly affects usability of the rover's three spectrometer
instruments. Subsequent commands for using the miniature thermal
emission spectrometer in that day's sequence resulted in repeated error
messages.
Engineers on the Mars Exploration Rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have determined the most likely cause is a
timing issue of one instruction reaching the gate array microseconds
before another that was intended to precede it. If that diagnosis is
confirmed, a repeat could be avoided by inserting a delay between
commands that might reproduce the problem, engineers expect. Until then,
the rover science team's daily choices for how to use Spirit do not
include using the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, the Mössbauer
spectrometer or the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.
"While we're being very cautious in how we operate today and tomorrow,
we expect to verify the problem and resolve this issue with a relatively
easy workaround," said JPL's Jim Erickson, project manager for the twin
rovers.
Spirit has driven to a bedrock exposure near the top of a spur of the
"Columbia Hills." The location sits about nine meters (30 feet) above a
plain that the rover crossed for months to get from its landing site to
the hills. Planners intend for Spirit to spend more than a week at this
site, inspecting the rock exposure, dubbed "Clovis," and recording the
panoramic scene from this viewpoint.
Halfway around Mars, Opportunity has driven about 20 meters (66 feet)
into "Endurance Crater," examining increasingly older layers of bedrock
as it advances. If assessments of traversability continue giving
positive indications, the rover team plans next to send Opportunity
counterclockwise across the inner slope of the crater to study possible
targets of dune tendrils, boulders and the base of a cliff.
Four times in the past two weeks, Opportunity has sent error messages
while successfully taking pictures with its microscopic imager. One
theory for the cause is degradation of flexible cabling that runs down
the rover's robotic arm to the instrument. As a precaution while
undertaking further analysis, the rover team is treating use of the arm
as a consumable resource, with cable wear each time the arm is moved
decreasing the possible number of future microscopic images.
"We are being very conservative about this because we certainly don't
want to do anything to jeopardize the instruments," said Dr. Ken
Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Team, Flagstaff,
Ariz., lead scientist for both rovers' microscopic imagers. "We are
running more diagnostics that we hope will identify the problem. There
are potential explanations that would mean we do not have to treat arm
use as a consumable."
Erickson said, "We will no doubt have more issues with them in the
future. We'll do everything we can to milk the most value out of them
while they are usable, but they won't last forever."
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. Additional information about the project is
available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu
73 - Alan, ZL2VAL @ ZL2AB
Message timed: 22:36 on 2004-Aug-05
Wackiest Warning Labels Ever
----------------------------
A cardboard car sunshield that keeps sun off the dashboard warns,
"Do not drive with sunshield in place."
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