LAPIS 3 Telecon - 2/2/01 - 1:00-2:00 PT

Participants:

Ray Arvidson (Washington U. in St. Louis) - LAPIS 3 Mission Director, St.

Louis team mentor, and Deputy Principle Investigator for Athena

Cassie Bowman - LAPIS 3 Coordinator

Stephanie Nelson (Wash. U) - St. Louis team assistant

Nathan Peck (Clayton High School) - St. Louis team teacher

Steve Squyres (Cornell U.) not in attendance - Ithaca team mentor

Diane Sherman (Cornell U.) - Ithaca team coordinator

Patti Giltner (Norwich High School) - Ithaca team teacher

Dick Morris (Johnson Space Center) - Haltom team mentor

Bob Houston and associates (Haltom High School) - Haltom team teacher

Jeff Norris (Jet Propulsion Laboratory - JPL) - WITS developer and secondary

mentor for LA team

Bob Anderson (JPL) not in attendance - LA team mentor

Steven Dworetzky (Thomas Starr King Middle School) - LA team teacher (with

students from Marshall High School)

Terry Huntsberger and Eddie Tunstel (JPL) - FIDO representatives to LAPIS 3

1. Ray Arvidson gave an overview of the '03 Mars Exploration Rover (MER)

Mission, FIDO, and LAPIS 3: Currently, Mars Global Surveyor is in orbit

around Mars. It has finished its primary mission and is starting on an

extended mission of a year. Its providing scientists with a different image

of Mars than was provided by Viking in the 70's and making it important to

get to the surface for continuing exploration and discovery. In April of

this year, another orbiter will be launched, Odyssey, which will have a

gamma ray spectrometer to map composition, neutron spectrometers to look for

water, THEMIS (Visible and thermal imager), and a radiation

spectrometer. In the spring and summer of '03, twin Mars Exploration rovers

with Athena payloads will be sent to Mars, touch down in different location

and traverse across the surface doing remote sensing, deploying the arm,

using the Moessbauer Spectrometer, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer,

and

a microscopic imager. It will also have a rock abrasion tool which will be

able to abrade the surface of rocks down to 5 mm in order to have clean

surfaces to look at. Additionally, the rovers will be able to dig trenches

by locking 5 wheels and rotating the 6th and then using instruments to

characterize the trench. In '05 there will be another orbiter and in '07

NASA is discussing the possibility of a long-lived rover.

LAPIS 3 is a way to get very motivated students and teachers involved in

doing rover science in an active way. LAPIS 3 participants will be involved

in the test mission with the MER prototype, FIDO. FIDO has a similar

structure to MER and carries elements of the Athena payload. Through LAPIS,

students plan a portion of the test mission that supports the objectives of

the primary mission. The first year of LAPIS, 1999, the students drove the

rover on the longest traverse of the field tests and used instrumentation to

collect remote sensing data. The second year, 2000, the students were

involved in taking the rover from it's final location and navigating back to

the lander, acquiring science data along the way. This year the tests are

considered "blind tests" which means the participating scientists and LAPIS

3 participants will not be told where the test site is. Since these field

tests simulate Mars missions, participants will only be provided with data

similar to what they would be able to get about Mars (i.e orbital imagery).

The field tests have two main objectives: 1. To help train the science and

engineering teams in rover operations by doing field trials in realistic

terrains; 2. To test operational sequences. The focus of this year's LAPIS

plan will be to have the rover dig a 10 cm long trench and characterize the

stratigraphy and the elements. Trench digging will be an integral part of

the overall plan for this spring so that that LAPIS work will be real and

important.

2. Cassie went through the LAPIS 3 Program Plan and discussion of the

schedule (see Program Plan). Schedule changes so far are as follows: The

WITS training will NOT take place on 2/16, but will instead be postponed to

a later date; The Mars Yard test for LAPIS 3 will be on April 11.

3. Other important notes and action items:

a. Each team will need to have a PC with these minimum requirements: a

Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM and 1 GB of free disk space. If you do not

have access to such a computer, please contact Cassie immediately and we

will work something out.

b. Each teacher needs to send Cassie the participating students names, grade

levels, and email addresses. Please also send information about Spring

Break dates, finals or other testing dates, and potential conflicts with the

LAPIS 3 schedule. We do our best to try to accommodate everyone's needs.

c. Please contact Cassie with any questions or concerns throughout the LAPIS

3 experience. Call 650-340-8350 or send an email to cdbowman@stanford.edu.

We are really looking forward to LAPIS 3. Thanks for participating!!!

Cassie