On Tuesday, TechTV sent me to JPL to interview some of the people responsible for the Mars Exploration Rover mission for a Screen Savers segment that will air next week.
I was lucky enough to land interviews with Dr. Joy Crisp, who is one of the project scientists, one of the guys who drives the rovers (who I can’t find any web data on, so I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten his name wrong, like an idiot) and Julie Townsend, who is the Tactical Uplink Lead (how cool does that sound?)
I thought I may be a little silly (“So, tell me, if you had to reverse the polarity on the rover’s main deflector shield . . . “) but mostly serious (“What’s the data transfer rate from the Rover to the DSN, and what protocol do you use to talk to it?”).
When I was there, though, I found it very difficult to joke around, because I am so in awe of these people. I mean, I pretended to do shit in space. These people really do, and their work will have a far greater impact on history than mine. Oh, and they’re all super nice and patiently answered each question I asked like they hadn’t heard it a thousand times already. When faced with an intelligent scientist who is passionate about her work, who is taking time out of her day to talk to me, it just seems wrong to ask some flip question about how many Martians they’ve had to photoshop out of the images.
We talked a lot about what they expected to learn from this mission, and how relieved they were that it’s working so well, especially considering all the losses they’ve had from recent Mars missions. Their optimism and excitement was infectious, and electric, and I was very grateful to be there to share some of it with them.
So I was *incredibly* sad this afternoon when I read that Spirit hasn’t talked to JPL for 24 hours, and they’re afraid that they may have lost contact with the rover.
There’s still some hope that they can recover from what is being called a “very serious anomaly,” but that hope is fading fast.
So if anyone reading this could, you know, maybe look up toward Mars tonight, and send a little Mojo to Spirit, that’d be cool.
UPDATED @ 1800 PST: Spirit Beeps It’s Alive And “Commandable”: NASA Official
NASA officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have confirmed that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has responded to an emergency command this morning by sending back a radio beep — an event which had been stated as a possibility, but not a certainty, at the end of this morning’s JPL press conference. “This means it’s commandable,” a JPL spokeswoman told SpaceDaily.
(Link found via trackback. Thanks, Grant!)
Kudos on the JPL interview – must have been cool. I’m also glad to hear that Spirit is at least alive. When I heard that it had gone AWOL, I had two thoughts:
(1) It was probably running Windows
(2) When we do finally get to Mars, we’re going to be tripping over all of the failed unmanned vehicles.
For all the Mars-interested people out there (including you, Wil ;):
The european Mars-Express space-craft has made some very spectacular 3D pictures of the marsian surface and confirmed the presence of water ice on the south polar cap of mars. The images were released today on a press conference here at the European Space Agencies HQ in Darmstadt (Germany). (which is also my hometown, btw, so I “feel” kind of close to the developments, hehe 😉
Its a bit sad, that Mars-Express was kind of ignored by the international media, after the failed landing of “Beagle”, though todays developments predominate most european news headlines (but not CNN’s ;).
You can read todays article from ESA here (english):
http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEM8ZB474OD_0.html
This article in the german news magazine DER SPIEGEL features all of the pictures:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,1518,283161,00.html
By the way, if you are interested in great journalism from an european point of view, you can read some of SPIEGEL
This just off the JPL Marsrover page —
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20040123b.html
“The flight team for NASA’s Spirit received data from the rover in a communication session that began at 13:26 Universal Time (5:26 a.m. PST) and lasted 20 minutes at a data rate of 120 bits per second.”
SPIRIT LIVES !!!!!!!! Whooooo Hooooo
The little wascal has spiwit.
Has what, sir?
Spiwit.
Yes. He did, sir.
No, no. Spiwit, siw. Uh, bwavado. A touch of dewwing-do.
Oh, ahhh… about eleven sir.
I started a thread in the soapbox as a place to continue the constitutionality-of-jpl meme.
http://soapbox.wilwheaton.net/viewtopic.php?p=829469#829469
(opening in a new window works better.)
Holy crap! I went to HS with Julie Townsend! Friend of a friend and all that. Hey, Wil, if you haven’t done the interview yet, see if you can get a “Where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school” question in. Gotta get some publicity for the hometown, y’know.
Is there anything WWdN mojo can’t do?
Do you think we can harness it’s power next November? Or does mojo not work for that?
Did you know photoshop has a thing on their site about how you’re not supposed to verb their little photoshop trademark? No photoshopped photoshopping for you. Yep. er… Nope.
hey wil,
i heard about the loss of contact with the rover on the radio, (i’m in the UK), and someone had sent in an e mail saying,
“hi, we have taken the batteries out of your little car, as we are sick of it riding around on our roof!!!”
i thought that was really hilarious! i hope that is what happened…to both the mars rover, and Beagle 2, The european attempt. it sounds better than, they just broke!!
anyway…
take care
rach
Looks like they’re troubleshooting the problem…it seems to be the flash memory. They’re trying to lock out the bad area of memory; hopefully, they’ve got some extra on board they can use. (You’d think they’d have put some extra in, with flash prices the way they are these days.) So, hopefully, Spirit will be roving again before long.
Opportunity touches down at around midnight EST tonight. Send some mojo its way, too.
w00t! Opportunity is on Mars and broadcasting! Direct to Earth even. Too bad it can’t drive over to Spirit and replace it’s flash memory DIMM’s. 😉
man, I can’t tell you how happy I am that they’re contacting the rover again, I had pretty much written it off; basically the longer it takes to re-establish contact, the greater chance it’s gone for good. Let’s hope they’re able to get it back to very good health and get some really fantastic science out of it. Also, check out the Mars Express mission over in Europe, really great color pics and some great commentary on all this over at Metafilter
So glad the comments are up. Great job readers getting this book ranked so high! Woo Hoo!
looking forward to the segment on the screen savers!
Thankx .
I mean, I pretended to do shit in space. These people really do, and their work will have a far greater impact on history than mine.
Wil,
Don’t sell yourself short. Your work on Star Trek has undoubtedly inspired the young minds of our next generation space explorers, as much as, if not more than our real-life heros at NASA.
With appreciation,
William