First the bad news: The REMS (meteorology experiment) team confirmed that
two out of 3 wind sensors on one of the two booms on the remote sensing
mast are permanently damaged and cannot be used. They are getting good
wind data from the other boom and are working on getting as much
information as possible from the one working sensor on the other boom. The
most likely explanation for the damage is that the descent rockets threw
dirt up on the top of MSL during landing, but it will be a while before we
can take pictures (using the camera on the arm) to confirm this. The other
sad news is that one of the leaders of the engineering team, Jake Matijevic
passed away last weekend. I worked with Jake on the Mars
Pathfinder/Sojourner project over 15 years ago, and again on the Mars
Exploration Rover project. I enjoyed every interaction I had with him, and
along with the rest of the MSL team will miss his contributions to the
latest, most ambitious rover project.

And now the good news: More cheers and applause today as MSL successfully
deployed its arm and wiggled its wheels in preparation for its first drive. The first drive
was planned today, and everyone is anxious to see the results tomorrow
morning. It will be a short (3 m) drive, then a turn in place followed by
another short drive, intended to check out the mobility system. If all
goes well, we will be able to plan a longer (up to 10 m) drive next. After
the drive is complete, the rover will take a bunch of images to determine
exactly where it ended up, and to allow more observations to be targeted
from the new location. ChemCam continues to work well, returning data of
better quality than expected. Roger Wiens, the ChemCam Principal
Investigator, will summarize early results during a press conference
tomorrow at JPL.

Ken

The MSL mission continues to go very well, with the first movement of the
rover wheels planned for tomorrow. The tactical operations team continues
to take on more challenges, planning more and more scientific observations
each day. I spent most of the day on strategic planning of the Mastcam
characterization sequences, trying to figure out how best to fit them in
among the other activities planned for the next few sols. This was a
refreshing change from my previous focus on tactical operations, but all of
this work is interesting.

But the big news at JPL today was NASA's selection of the next Discovery
mission, called InSight . The NASA Discovery program goal is to fly medium cost (less than $425 million) missions to the planets, and is very competitive. The decision was great news for JPL, as the mission is led by Bruce Banerdt, a JPL geophysicist, and will involve many other JPL scientists and engineers in the next few years. Despite the successful landing of MSL this month, JPL has had to lay off hundreds of employees, in part because the peak in the
effort to develop MSL has passed and there are few NASA planetary missions
in the queue. InSight, a mission to explore the interior of Mars using a
seismometer, will keep at least a few engineers and scientists busy,
avoiding further layoffs. This was especially good news to me because I
was concerned that the engineering expertise at JPL that enabled the
successful Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover, MSL, and other missions
could have been lost if more layoffs were necessary. Once these engineers
are lost to other companies, it would be nearly impossible to get them back
at JPL in the future. Not only would may of them put down roots in other
places, many private companies pay engineers more than they are paid at
JPL. So keeping these talented individuals at JPL will be good for NASA
and good for planetary exploration.

Ken

Having completed the SOWG Chair shifts assigned to me over the past 4 days,
I didn't have to get up before dawn this morning. After trying
(unsuccessfully) to sleep in, I went straight to the ChemCam room at JPL to
see how the first Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) data looked.
Fortunately, everything we planned yesterday worked well, and the ChemCam
team was ecstatic about the results: a better spectrum than expected, and
Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI) pictures taken before and after the LIBS
shots showing where on the rock the laser hit. What a great day for the
ChemCam team! More Information .

I was hoping to spend more time looking at RMI data and catching up on
other work today, but ended up having to prepare a presentation on the plan
for characterization of the Mastcam cameras. We didn't have time to fully
test all of the capabilities of Mastcam before launch (too much other
testing to do), so we'll have to take a bunch of Mastcam images of Mars to
determine how best to focus the cameras and compress the data, among other
things. The Principal Investigator of Mastcam, Mike Malin, has not been
feeling well, so fellow team member Jim Bell and I volunteered to prepare
and give a presentation at the daily "science discussion" meeting this
afternoon. Jim is more familiar with the Mastcam experiment than I, but he
was on shift as Science Uplink Representative today and couldn't attend the
science discussion. So I gave the presentation and answered a few
questions about how and when the Mastcam characterization will be done,
hopefully in the next few days.

Meanwhile, the local Flagstaff newspaper, the Arizona Daily Sun, ran an
article about the adverse effects that the cuts to NASA's fiscal 2013 Planetary Science budget would have on the USGS Astrogeology team if they are enacted by Congress. As described in the article, the outlook for Astrogeology is not very good, but the article is accompanied by a picture of me smiling happily. So a few of my colleagues asked my why I was smiling. The picture was taken while I was in Flagstaff last Monday, and apparently the photographer didn't know how it would be used, because he asked me to smile as I recalled the recent successful landing of MSL. I guess he should have take some pictures of me looking depressed just in case, but I'm hopeful that Congress will recognize that the Mars program is a source of great national pride and restore NASA's Planetary Science budget. Anyway, I'm enjoying being involved in an exciting rover mission while I can.

Ken

I served as SOWG Chair again today, planning Sol 13 activities for MSL. The tactical planning team is getting better at getting everything done in time to send commands to the rover, so we were able to fit more new scientific observations into the plan today. Fortunately, the science team was led by an "all star" crew today, including Steve Squyres as Geology Science Theme Lead. Steve is the Principal Investigator of the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rovers that landed on Mars in January 2004--first Spirit, then Opportunity. I have been working for Steve as science lead for the Microscopic imager, the close-up camera on the MER instrument arms. So we were joking today about the role reversal--as SOWG Chair I lead the science team today. The Opportunity mission continues to be operated from the floor above the one where the MSL team has been working, so I reminded him that upstairs he's still my boss. It was great to have such expert support today, and we put together a good plan. Mid-way through the planning process we learned that the SAM instrument checkout planned for Sol 14 would have to be spread over two Sols because the successful completion of the first part of the checkout would have to be confirmed by analyzing the results on Earth before the second part could start. To avoid having to spend an extra sol to get this done, we scrambled to move the first part of the checkout into the Sol 13 plan. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that it was not easy. We handed the new plan off to the second shift, and hope that they will be able to implement it.

So now I'm done with the set of four shifts as SOWG Chair, as scheduled. It was exhilarating and I'm glad I had the opportunity to serve the project in this role, but I'm also glad to have a break for a few days. I'm hoping to get more sleep tonight and to catch up on all the other work that has been piling up over the past week. I'm also looking forward to having more time to analyze the data we have received from MSL and attend the Science Discussion meeting, which always conflict with tactical planning meetings.

Ken

Those of us supporting MSL tactical mission operations are living on "Mars time." A day on Mars, or "sol" is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, but our workday doesn't shift exactly 40 minutes later each day because the tactical schedule is tied to the receipt of data from the orbiters that are relaying information from MSL to Earth. Each orbiter (MRO and Mars Odyssey) flies over MSL twice a day, early in the morning and late in the afternoon. But they don't fly over MSL at the same time every day, because their orbits were designed to view different parts of Mars every sol so that the orbiter instruments can observe a wide variety of locations on the planet. So the start time of the tactical shifts can vary by up to a couple hours from day to day, but overall slips later and later, cycling through 24 hours on Earth in about 5 weeks. I had been getting to JPL at about 5:30 each morning, but didn't have to be there until 6:30 this morning. I was treated to a beautiful sunrise when I arrived, and felt more like an Earthling than a Martian for a change!

Today's planning of MSL activities went very well--the operations team is learning how to work more efficiently while ensuring that every command is safe to send to the rover. Meanwhile, the rest of the science team discussed where to drive after the mobility system is checked out. The favored plan is to drive toward the east to examine an outcrop of bright material . But first, we have to make sure everything is working well. The good news today was that the DAN neutron experiment is working well, and SAM's electrical baseline test was successful. More instrument checkouts are planned for the next few sols--more on those later.

Ken

I served as SOWG chair again today, planning Sol 11 of the MSL mission. All is going well, but slowly--we continue to confirm that instruments are working and to get ready for more ambitious activities. Today's plan was so full of stuff that we have to do to realize the full potential of MSL that we couldn't add new observations based on the data we have received so
far. For example, a full hour of the day was spent setting software parameters for all the motors on the rover--thousands of parameters! This is indeed a very complex system. But the rover is healthy and the planning team is getting better at preparing ever more complicated command sequences to send to MSL.

The most exciting news today was that the ChemCam and Chemin instruments successfully returned their first data. ChemCam is the remote chemical analysis instrument that uses a laser to vaporize rock/soil up to 7 meters
away, creating a plasma of ions and excited atoms that emit photons as their electrons relax to lower energy states. These "electronic transitions" are measured by sensitive spectrometers, yielding spectral peaks that indicate which elements are present in the target. In preparation for such observations, we tested the pointing of the instrument by taking pictures of a calibration target on the rover with the Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI), a camera that uses the same optics as the laser
and spectrometers to show where the laser hit the target. We didn't fire the laser yet, because we want to be sure that the pointing is accurate first. We wouldn't want to shoot the rover by mistake! But the RMI images show that the pointing is very good, and they will allow us to improve the pointing by analyzing the offsets relative to the center of the calibration target. Most importantly, both ChemCam and Chemin (the X-ray instrument that will determine what minerals are present in samples delivered to it) are working as well as expected--everyone applauded when the initial results were reported!

Ken

After a nice vacation in Flagstaff, I returned to JPL in time for Sol 10
planning. I was scheduled this time as Science Operations Working Group
(SOWG) Chair, with responsibility for leading the discussion of data
received the previous sol and deciding what to do the next sol. This job
is part of the first shift, which just happened to start at about the same
time I was starting my second shift PUL work before my break in Flagstaff.
So I arrived at JPL around 5:15 AM, early in twilight, when the waning
crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter formed a beautiful line among the "winter"
constellations rising in the east. A nice aspect of working first shift is
that it involves more interaction with the science team, which is less
involved in detailed command sequence planning during second shift. I
started my work day by getting back up to speed on rover operations,
looking at recent data and discussing priorities for new scientific
observations. Rover checkout continues, and we are getting more scientific
data from various instruments.

During the first big meeting of the day, the "Science Kickoff," we heard
updates on each of the instruments. We all applauded when the Dynamic
Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument reported successful completion of their
first "passive" observation, in which naturally-generated neutrons were
measured from Mars. We also received some more MARDI (descent image) full
frames, all of which are beautiful, and there are many more MARDI images
still awaiting transmission to Earth. More instrument checkouts were
planned for Sol 10, as well as continued updates of rover software. At the
end of my shift, I handed off science leadership to the SUR (Science Uplink
Representative, the same role I filled during the first 3 planning sols)
and gave him some advice based on my previous experience. Then I attended
a cameras team meeting in another building at JPL that ended up running
late, so that I didn't leave JPL until about 6:30, over 13 hours after I
arrived. But I felt good despite the long hours, and recalled working an
average of 14 hours/day during the early part of the Spirit and Opportunity
missions. So not a bad day at all!

Ken

Another good day on Mars: MSL's remote sensing mast was successfully
deployed, and a Navcam panorama acquired. Not all of the images have been
sent to Earth yet, but those that have been received are very useful for
planning future observations . In addition, more full-resolution descent images have been received, showing the heat shield soon after it was jettisoned and the surface close-up after landing. Hundreds of MARDI images like these were acquired during descent and landing, and it will take weeks to months to send them back to Earth. But when they are
received, the full-resolution animation of the descent sequence will be spectacular. This has been the theme of the mission so far--we must be patient.
Today was my last shift this month as Science Uplink Representative,
and planning went well again. The plan for Sol 3 included a Mastcam color
panorama which will have about 4x better resolution than the Navcam black
and white panorama. The plan also includes checkouts of 4 of the
instruments that have not been turned on since landing: the Alpha Particle
X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), which will measure elemental chemistry; the
Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) experiment, which will measure the
abundance of hydrogen (water) up to 1 m below the surface; CheMin, an X-ray
diffraction and fluorescence instrument that will determine the mineralogy
of samples delivered to it by the rover's arm; and SAM, the Sample Analysis
at Mars suite of 3 instruments that will search for organics and measure
the isotopic composition of Martian rocks, soil and atmosphere. Of course
we all hope that these instruments have survived landing and are working
well.
My tactical operations shifts have been exciting, and I've enjoyed
working with the talented and knowledgeable engineers and scientist on the
tactical team. But I'm also looking forward to taking a break for a few
days and sleeping past 4:30 in the morning!

Ken

Today I'm working as Science Uplink Representative again, planning
Sol 2 activities. We now know exactly where MSL is, thanks to more good
work by the MRO HiRISE team: They acquired a new image of the landing area
that shows not only the rover, but its heat shield, parachute, and descent
stage, all in the same image !
So the MSL team is starting to plan where to drive, but I have not been
directly involved in those discussions because they have been occurring
during first shift. Certainly we must move out of the area contaminated by
the landing rockets before analyzing samples of the soil.
The plan for today includes deploying the remote sensing mast,
obviously an important activity, as we cannot use the mast cameras and
ChemCam instrument until the mast is deployed. Once the mast has been
deployed, the navigation cameras will take a full, 360-degree panorama of
the terrain around us and another panorama of the rover deck. Based on the
hazard avoidance camera images received so far , the Navcam panorama should be spectacular!
During one of the tactical planning meeting today, we were
interrupted by the Project Manager for a surprise visit from U.S.
Congressman John Culberson of Texas. He was impressed by the mission
operations area and vowed to protect us from interference from NASA
Headquarters, so that we can do our jobs efficiently. I'm not particularly
fond of politicians, but it was an honor to hear him thank us for our
efforts and we all applauded after his brief speech. Hopefully he will
vote to restore funding for NASA's Mars Program in fiscal 2013!

Ken

I'm working second shift today; my tactical operations role is
Science Uplink Representative. As the title implies, my responsibility is
to represent the science team during the uplink planning process (preparing
command sequences to be transmitted to the spacecraft). The early part of
the MSL mission, called the Characterization Activity Phase, has been
planned and tested in detail; the nominal command sequences were loaded
onto the spacecraft well before landing. As long as the mission continues
to proceed nominally, no changes to the sequences will be needed, and the
uplink planning process will primarily involve modeling the planned
activities to confirm that they should be executed.
It was difficult to leave JPL soon after landing, but I knew I had to
get some sleep before my shift started at 5:30 PDT. I got almost 4 hours
of sleep, so I'm doing fine so far. I arrived at JPL as morning twilight
began, with Venus and Jupiter shining brightly over the San Gabriel
Mountains. Many team members were still at JPL when I arrived, but because
they had been up all night, most of them left soon after sunrise in
Pasadena. It was then much quieter in the operations area as the team
focused on uplink planning. As I met colleagues I hadn't seen earlier, we
congratulated each other but the excitement of landing had mostly passed.
Of course everyone is happy to be involved in the surface phase of the
mission, but the focus is now on doing the jobs we have been rehearsing for
the past few months. One of the rehearsals simulated multiple anomalies,
and we are all glad that our experience in responding to anomalies has not
been needed. The mission is going so well that the mood has gone from
"adrenaline rush" to "business as usual" in just a few hours.
We just received several of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) images,
showing sections of the "movie" of the descent and landing from the rover.
Applause broke out in the camera team's room as the PI, Mike Malin, showed
us the data. These images will allow us to locate the rover precisely.
Earlier this morning the MRO HiRISE image of the lander descending on its
parachute was received, and it is SPECTACULAR. It is the result of months of
planning, requiring coordination between the MSL and MRO projects to
complete a very complicated observation design. The HiRISE team did a
great job in support of MSL!

Ken


Read more on how the USGS is involved with the MSL mission… Read official USGS press release…