 |  | | | | AMASE 2007: Getting Down to Business
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08.17.07
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Today was a wonderful day conducting the first rover field test on the
Redbeds. After spending all day outside on a large rocky slope and watching
the weather go from cold and snowy to blue skies and sunlit glaciers,
I'm as
happy as a clam.
We knew today was going to be a long day outside with rover. The morning
was
made rougher by the late night we had at Monaco glacier yesterday. I could
not keep from yawning continuously as we scampered about the deck preparing
for the days' activities. Hans, Marilyn, and Terry went out first to hunt
for a good rover deployment site. As the rest of us were awaiting their
return, it started snowy big fluffy flakes on deck! This was not good for
rover electronics of course; luckily this brief flurry passed and we
did not
have any precipitation for the rest of the day.
Out in the field, we set up another rover mission operations test. This
time
we actually had the Cliffbot rover operating in the field while the science
working group sat a short distance away in a gully. I was asked to be the
SOWG Chair for this activity and I found it more captivating than the
previous days' test. The main differences were that we were outside, had a
much smaller science group and had to make decisions much faster. Our
science group consisted of Gerhard, Jorge, Pablo, Ivar, Hans, Will, and
myself. Our mission manager was Steve and he once again had to come up with
a slew of curious mishaps to explain why we could or could not get the data
we wanted from the rover. Our ultimate objective was to explore a gully on
"Mars" by searching for interesting rock targets to image and finally
select
a soil target for sampling. We had fifteen minutes at the most to plan each
Sol's activities (real MER operations are on the order of 6 hours). The
smaller SOWG allowed us to discuss our hypotheses and plans quickly. After
four Sols we had taken some contextual images of the field site, driven the
Cliffbot down a gully wall, taken microscopic images and UV fluorescence
measurements of a rippled rock, and taken a soil sample.
Our science group was hidden from the rover for most of this exercise so we
had to rely on its onboard instruments to explore the field site. After we
uplinked our final sampling instructions we ran around to the rover's
gully to watch it in action. As soon as we saw the field site with our own
eyes we began seeing things we had missed in the images and misconceptions
we had generated. The most embarrassing mistake was not seeing a beautiful
armored fish head fossil in a rock adjacent to the one we had sampled!
Since
our objective had been to search for habitability, the fossil would have
been an amazing find! It was so obvious with our own eyes, but in the black
and white images taken at a sharp angle from the rover, this feature had
been invisible. This dramatically illustrated the difficulties of robotic
exploration.
We'll have each instrument team look at the samples the rover collected as
well as the fish fossil when we get back to the ship.
We finally got all the gear down from the Redbeds and back to the ship
around midnight. My hair is tangled and cheeks are red from the wind. Time
for bed.
Kirsten Fristad
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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