Note: I am posting my old blog entries from elsewhere on the internet. This entry was originally posted on 6/05/08.
Once again, a cross-posting of my Mars Phoenix update for some family and friends. I see that I’ve managed to neglect putting in the stuff about the shift lead who ran into the room with a bell like at a diner to ring when some files were ready (Ding! PEF’s up!), the series of jokes about how the uplink team is locked in the room and held prisoner for 12 hours each shift (and some affiliated Darth Vader impressions). But these are the things that are hard to make funny if you weren’t there at 5 am and knew you had 5 more hours of work ahead of you. The uplink process is getting very exciting! Sometimes we had to make changes in the science plan later than we were supposed to. For example, one day some of our data from the previous day didn’t make it to the ground – Mars Odyssey was sending our data down, and they lost touch with the Deep Space Network (our big radio telescopes that we use for communicating with spacecraft) so we needed to resend it, plus we were doing so many things that the plan had to be broken into two parts and use two passes to get it all up. Our daily plans are getting very ambitious, so sometimes the observation schedule needs to be shuffled to fit within power and data management requirements. We want to make sure that we don’t overwrite data that’s still onboard until we are sure that we’ve gotten the data on the ground. And yesterday during the meeting where the plan is officially handed over from the science team to the uplink team, members of the uplink team (especially the robot arm) got some lower-priority observations bumped to the next day so that they could concentrate on getting the soil scooping for our first sample analysis done correctly. As they pointed out in the meeting, “the rock isn’t going anywhere.”
Unfortunately, the plan we put together yesterday never made it to the lander. We send our plans up to one of the orbiters, which then in turn sends it on to the lander. Yesterday we were using Mars Odyssey, and it went into “safe mode” – which means the orbiter detected something unusual with one of its instruments (in this case, probably a cosmic ray strike) and decided to phone home for instructions, so it did not send our plan to Phoenix. We essentially sent the same plan up today, with some minor changes. Today, the person I am learning from was running late, so I was the main ISE and he kept an eye on my work. Pretty cool!
My instrument is very simple compared to all the others, and is running the same sequence several times each day. The sequence is still onboard from when we uploaded it on Sol 4, so we just make sure our observations are in the right place in the plan and that we doesn’t interfere with anyone else. (A sol, by the way, is a martian day. We started counting mission sols with landing occuring on Sol 0. We just planned Sol 11.) The robot arm and the cameras are doing lots of observations that have to be carefully put together each day – the arm moves around to different locations so that the robot arm camera can take pictures, and sometimes it scoops up soil. The big camera is working on documenting our surroundings in high resolution, color, and stereo. TEGA, the mass spectrometer, is getting ready for the first soil sample by retracting its doors and having the robot arm camera take pictures so we can see if the door opened – and actually, we found out that it only opened part way (you can see it here http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=2662&cID=40). But it is open enough for us to work with. Once TEGA gets its first sample, which should be in tomorrow’s plan, we are officially out of characterization phase and into science operations.
I’m going to be very careful about talking about science results as we go forward, because I don’t want to bypass the official science team, since these are the people who have been working for years to get this data. I’ve seen some neat stuff on the internal websites, including some very spiffy movies of the telltale – basically a windsock on the lander – put together from multiple images each day, but I’m mostly relying on the public website for what I post here. Emily over at the Planetary Society (http://planetary.org/blog/) has been following the science team press conferences. I will, of course, keep talking about my part in the process, and posting my favorite released data.
Including this (http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/video/Sol9/dump_compare.gif), which shows two images in a row. Both images show an area to the west of the digging site informally known as “Knave of Hearts.” The second image shows the movement and shadow of the Robotic Arm. Between Phoenix’s Arm and the shadow is a small handful of Martian soil that has been released from the Robotic Arm onto the surface.
NOVA was filming some of the science team yesterday, and so when my shift started Neil DeGrasse Tyson was hanging around with some camera crew. But to keep us on the tactical team from being distracted, they had to leave before we got started. I first became interested in planetary exploration when I was little by watching NOVA episodes, and so I’m very thrilled that NOVA is filming Phoenix which will hopefully inspire someone else.
And now I’m off for two days. I next report to the operations center at 2:30 am on Sunday.
Some questions from friends on the original post:
Q: How’s the lander coping with the Martian dust? i read somewhere that it was very fine and gets everywhere.
A: So far we haven’t been there long enough for the dust to be a real problem, and we even have some instruments for studying it. The big concern is dust accumulating on the solar panels, which will make them give us less power and will contribute to the eventual loss of the lander. This happens with the rovers, but the rovers get cleaned off every so often by a passing dust devil (whirlwind) – which is one of the reasons why the rovers are still going so long after we thought they’d be done. We’re hoping that Phoenix will get some dust devils to come and clean us off, too.
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