Mark Adler

State from Sol 16

• Rover is in good health, and all functionality is available.
• The rover completed the planned traverse. The total odometry was 70.76 meters and the direct distance from the starting point is about 45 to 46 meters. The rover is level to within about 3°. Rover absolute heading according to the engineers is within 10° of correct. According to the atmospheres group, the heading is about 40° off based on a rear hazcam. We need to resolve that discrepancy. The final Sun-find was not executed, apparently due to field problems. The sequence appears to have been paused due to some field interruption, and so the Sun may not have been in the predicted position at the completion of the traverse.
• The test director ruled on the issue of absolute heading, and the mission manager does not need to establish the absolute heading with measurements every Sol in order to continue to receive DTE. The test director will work the issue with the field.
• The test director ruled on the image volume issue, and we are permitted to bookkeep the Hazcams at 1.05 Mbits as opposed to the current 2.1 Mbits. However we cannot modify the software to do that, and will have to account for it manually. This may require a longer validation phase during sequence development.

Sol 17 is an Approach Sol:

• At start of SOWG meeting, the chair requested one surface mini-TES on Mini-tes1, five atmosphere mini-TES space two minutes apart to look for turbulence.
• This Sol will be a drive to a trenching site, white1: nine meters to a get close-up Navcam and Pancam of the trenching site, and then one meter to the trenching site, followed by Navcam and Hazcam (Hazcam must be on DTE to target trench point). The next Sol will be the trench and possible IDD activity.
• The test director ruled that compressed sky images are permitted, but again we will have to account for the data volume reduction manually.

Sequence Development:

• We started significantly over-subscribed in FIDO time. Arm activity was deleted. A large Pancam mosaic at the end was deleted. Several IPS observations were deleted. The cloud movie was shortened to three images. The final sequence almost exactly filled the FIDO time and DTE. As usual, the UHF was less than half subscribed. Much of the time in sequence design was spent deleting and shrinking activities to get the sequence to fit. Do to many modifications, the mission manager requested an extra validation to make sure that the turns and approaches were correct, that the IPS power on and off commands were correct, that the mast deploy and stow commands were correct, and that the UHF and DTE commands were correct.
• A "blind" IPS observation was attempted, with the understanding that the targetted terrain is relatively homogeneous so that precise pointing was not necessary. Naturally, the actual pointing will be documented by a Navcam wedge.
• 2.1 megabits were added to the DTE allocation to correctly account manually for the two Hazcam pairs on DTE.
• The uplink was approved with three minutes to go.

Sol 18 Considerations:

• Sol 18 is a low DTE day, again about 4.1 Mbits. Adjust contingency sequence data volumes if necessary to obtain DTE contingency data.
• Determine the trenching target. See if UHF contains information needed to support traverse on Sol 19. The mission manager will need to decide whether a traverse after trenching is allowed with older Navcam data. We won't have enough DTE to get Navcam data from the new position.

Cumulative Comments:

• It is important for the theme groups to sequence their requested observations, and in particular they should sequence their highest priority observations first. On Sol 15, the highest priority Pancam was not sequenced by the theme group, but the second and third were.
• Given extra time during sequence development, it is worthwhile to review the science priorities as well as to review, in sequence order, the visualizations of the image and remote spectroscopy requests.
• The modeling for IPS points needs to be updated. Ground testing should be performed to determine the duration of IPS measurements as a function of coadds. In addition, the modeling for Navcam images needs to be updated, since they appear to take up twice as much space in the resource modeling as they should at 16:1 image compression after a 12:8 pixel compression.
• The tools do not provide a means to determine the actual length of planned traverse segments. Furthermore, there are no good estimates with uncertainty of the meters per minute that the rover (with hazard avoidance on) can traverse as a function of the terrain type. Finally, there is limited information on the dead reckoning capability of the rover on gyros with respect to heading errors. Overall, there was no way to estimate the traverse duration or error based on the traverse design and terrain expectations, other than the experience of spacecraft team eyeballing the situation. This would not be acceptable in a real mission.
• We need to request a change control board to adjust the Hazcam data volume in the command dictionary from 2.1 to 1.05 Mbits.
• Clarification from PI: we have a mission success location if a) use two out of three in situ instruments, and b) the PI is willing to advocate that the science is new and different enough to make it a location.
• We need a ruling from the test director on whether we need Hazcam from one meter back and Hazcam at the current location in order to perform an arm operation. This may be affected by FIDO's ability to implement a stop one meter short after a long traverse. If not, we may not ever be able to do targets of opportunity after a long traverse.
• Before this Sol, we are at 2 out of 3 locations, zero trenches, and approximately 130 meters. We in the unusual position of being ahead of our mission success criteria!

Special Notes:

• Starting on Sol 16 and on all subsequent sols, the afternoon sol will begin at 12:15 PM with all subsequent events shifting later by 15 minutes.

Updated sequence development schedule starting at 0900 and 1415:

• 70 minute Sequence Design
• 10 minute Sequence Validation
• 10 minute Sequence Approval

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