Note: I am posting my old blog entries from elsewhere on the internet. This entry was originally posted on 5/28/08.
Sleep is proving to be a problem – no matter how physically tired I am, my internal clock is having a hard time letting me sleep. Plus I either have some bad allergies due to dryness and the damn cactus flowers, or I’m coming down with a cold.
There was a glitch in communications due to the radio onboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter going into safe mode, which prevented us from uploading a new batch of commands two nights ago. Luckily, Phoenix had a “runout science plan” onboard in case this happened, and continued to take more pictures to fill in the panorama. MRO has turned the radio back on, but we’re going to use Odyssey and Mars Express as our relays until it is known why the radio went into safe mode in the first place, because we don’t want it to do it again and lose some of our data.
Characterization phase continues, with the first few steps of unpacking the robot arm expected today. I spent my first shift in the lab, sitting in on meetings as the teams continue to get ready for when we’ve finished characterization and can start the actual science observations. For every instrument we have on Mars, there is a “flight spare” on Earth, and we have a lab set up with these spares so that we can run spacecraft commands through them to test if the commands work before we try the command on Mars. Due to the complicated nature of some of the instruments and a variety of personnel and management reasons, we’re a bit behind in this process and are trying to debug some of the commands in the lab before we send them to be validated – run through the full lander mock-up in the payload interoperability testbed – and up to the spacecraft.
Tonight, however, I want to follow some of the actual operations goings-on, since I don’t have much to contribute to the debug of a part of the instrument I’m not actually involved with.
Here is my favorite picture so far, taken as part of the science runout. That’s a shiny lander!
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