Week Ending March 31, 2000
Well, the event we've been expecting has finally happened... the Mars '01 Lander mission has been cancelled. Even
though we expected it, and even though it's the right thing for NASA to do, it still isn't easy to take. We've been
working on our hardware for years now, and to have our ride to Mars disappear just twelve months before launch is
hard.
It sure isn't as hard as what happened to the Mars Polar Lander team, though.
Space exploration is an unforgiving business. "One strike and you're out", as Tom Young put it when his committee
reported last week on what has been wrong with the Mars program. After everything that has happened, what's best
for the nation's space program, and what's best for us, is to wait. Wait a little bit while NASA comes up with a
more reliable way to land hardware on Mars. Wait a little bit to take a good hard look at our own work, and to make
sure that we've done as good a job as we need to in a one-strike-you're-out business. We think our stuff is about
as good as it could possibly be, but another good hard look at everything we've done sure won't hurt.
So we'll wait. Right now, we don't even know when we'll fly. With Mars launch opportunities only every 26 months,
the summer of 2003 looks like our next reasonable shot at it. NASA has told us to finish up our instruments, and
that they'll fly them as soon as they can. So all we can do now is keep pushing. We'll be ready when the time
comes.
Week Ending March 24, 2000
We had a great week. There is a lot of news, but the big event for us was the first real full-up test of
Pancam. It's together in all its glory now, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL, and on Thursday and
Friday the past week we took our first real panoramic images with it. It's going to take a lot of time to put
them together to make a true panorama, but even a quick first look suggests it's going to be really good. We'll
put the images up on this site as soon as they're ready for prime time.
Week Ending March 17, 2000
Despite the uncertainty about when we're going to fly, testing goes forward. This week, the focus has been on
the Marie Curie rover. It carries our APXS instrument, and this week it has been in "thermal vac" testing,
experiencing the temperatures and pressures it'll see on the way to Mars and on the martian surface. We expected
this test to go pretty well... after all, Marie Curie is a copy of the Sojourner rover that did so well on Mars
Pathfinder. Still, it's always nerve-wracking when you do something like this to a piece of hardware you've
worked so hard on. The test isn't over yet, but so far the APXS has behaved like a champ, and we're keeping our
fingers crossed.
Week Ending March 10, 2000
Well, after lots of thought and analysis, we've decided to take the easy way out of that problem that we found
in the Pancam cable a few weeks back. It was a sophisticated cable called a "flexprint", and the elegant solution
would have been to correct the design problems, build another one, and make it work. The easy way, though, is
just to replace it with conventional cabling... in other words, plain old wires. It'll be a little heavier than
the old design, but it's easy, it's cheap, and we know it'll work. And at this stage of a project, sometimes
you just go with what you know will work!
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Week Ending February 26, 2000
Well, this week was a good one for a change. We still have the problem with the Pancam cable, but all of the other
instruments have now passed the electromagnetic cleanliness tests with flying colors. We still don't know when we're
going to fly, or on what spacecraft, but the instruments are going to be ready to go when the opportunity arises.
Week Ending February 18, 2000
We didn't have a very good week. This was the week that we were planning to do our first big test of all the APEX
hardware together. The test is called EMC, for "electromagnetic cleanliness". Basically, it means making sure all
of the pieces work together without creating any electrical interference for one another. Problem was, we never
really got to do all the testing we had hoped to do. Every piece of APEX hardware had been tested before this week,
except for one cable that runs up the outside of the Pancam mast. Well, it turns out that that cable has some
real problems with it, and the problems kept us from getting a lot of the testing done. We'll be able to build a
new cable and fix it, but it's one of those setbacks you can hit at this stage of the game.
Week Ending February 11, 2000
We had a bit of a slow week for a change. With all the APEX instruments now delivered to JPL, our focus has turned
to getting them hooked up together and tested. A lot of this past week was spent on software work. The next big event
happens this coming week: our big "electromagnetic interference" (EMI) test. What we do in this test is put all the
instruments and radio transmitters onto a mockup of the lander deck, and then operate them individually and together,
checking to see that stray electromagnetic signals from one piece of hardware don't mess up what another piece of
hardware is trying to do. We're hoping to find no unpleasant surprises!
Week Ending February 4, 2000
The Mössbauer Spectrometer is at JPL, and it works! Goestar Klingelhoefer flew the sensor head in from Germany
early in the week, and spent several days getting it hooked up with the electronics. There were some problems at
first, and by the middle of the week we were a little bit worried. A phone call to Ralf and Bodo in Mainz cleared
things up, though... it was just a software problem that was easy to fix. A few minor changes, and the whole setup
was working perfectly. This is a very big milestone for us, since it means that all the APEX instruments are now
built and delivered to JPL. We still don't know if we're going to launch them next year or not, but we're on track
to do it if the opportunity comes.
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Week Ending January 28, 2000
It has been an interesting week, to say the least! The APEX news is that we've finally wrapped up the testing
of the Pancam cameras, and we're now ready to start putting them on the mast. The big Mars news is that it
sounds like there's a slim chance that the Mars Polar Lander team may have heard from their spacecraft! It's
far from certain, but there's at least a chance that the spacecraft was still alive weeks after it landed.
Getting any data back from it looks like a real long shot, but it'd be great just to know it got onto the
surface in one piece. Watch the Mars Polar Lander website
for details.
Week Ending January 22, 2000
We're still not sure what's going to happen with the '01 mission, but other than that we had a great week. The biggest
news of the week is probably that the Mössbauer spectrometer sensor head passed its vibration test, and is now only
about a week or so away from delivery. The other big accomplishment was that the Pancam mast has been put together,
and we've put it through its first motion tests. The tests went beautifully... it was nice to see the hardware in
action!
Week Ending January 14, 2000
NASA's efforts to figure out how to restructure the Mars Exploration program continue. We still don't know what it's
going to look like... only that it's going to be different from that timeline you see over there to the left!
For now, we're just focussing on getting the APEX instruments done, so that they'll be ready to fly when the opportunity
comes. The Pancam mast is all assembled now, and early last week we deployed it for the first time... made it stand
up just like we will right after landing. The cameras are finished now too, and we should have them on the mast within
the next few weeks.
Week Ending January 1, 2000
The last couple of weeks have been pretty quiet due to the holidays. We're still waiting to see what the new Mars
program will look like after the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. One piece of really good news
is that NASA has appointed a blue-ribbon panel to look at what happened to the missions we just lost, and what to
do about the future ones. It's a very good group, chaired by Tom Young. Tom is a member of the NASA Advisory Council,
a former director of Goddard Space Flight Center, and a former executive with the Martin Marietta corporation. He
also played a big role in the Viking project back in the '70's, so he knows what it takes to be successful in
exploring Mars. It'll be very interesting over the coming weeks to see what kinds of changes this group comes up
with.
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