Squyres report (today) on progress getting Opportunity back under way

http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/
May 16, 2005

Sorry I haven't done an update in awhile! I was on the West Coast most of last week and my laptop died while I was out there, cutting me off from the world for a little bit.

We have begun the extraction process at Meridiani. So far we've executed three sols. On the first one we simply straightened the wheels. That worked fine. The next two, done over the weekend, each commanded two meters worth of wheel turns. So far, we're pleased with what we're seeing. The rover moved more than a centimeter in the expected direction during each of these two-meter maneuvers, which was the kind of behavior we were hoping for. (In fact, the motion was actually more than I was personally expecting to see.)

We'll be continuing to work at this over the coming week. Each day for the next few days we'll uplink a command load that is capable of driving the rover one of three possible distances: 0 meters, 2 meters, or N meters, where N is something greater than 2. We get the commands onboard, and then we get together the next morning, look at the pictures we just got down, and have a go/no-go meeting in which we decide which of the three possible drives to execute. Today N was 4 and we decided to go for it, so we should see the result of 4 meters worth of wheel turns tomorrow morning.

(The reason we're using this somewhat complicated approach to commanding is the way that Earth time and Mars time happen to stack up against one another at the moment. Later in the week we'll be able to go to more normal commanding.)

Anyway, we're real pleased with the results so far, and we'll keep chugging away, bit by bit, until we're out.

Over at Gusev, life is good. We've finished our work on Jibsheet, the composition and texture of which both fit nicely into an evolving story that we have on all the rocks here on Cumberland Ridge. With Jibsheet done, we're now planning a drive back toward Larry's Lookout. This is a long one, but since it's mostly downhill we expect it to go pretty quickly. The plan is to drive to a point that's on safe ground a few meters shy of the east side of the Lookout. There are some rocks there that lie stratigraphically older than anything we have seen yet... in fact, they may be the oldest rocks that we have yet seen at Gusev.