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October 25, 2003 In the operations readiness tests we're running, we spend a lot of time talking about elves and gremlins. "Elves" are the people behind the scenes in our tests who make life easier for us by keeping the rovers running smoothly. But the same people are sometimes "gremlins". We call them that when they do something to challenge us, by making the test harder.
The gremlins were hard at work during our latest operations readiness test. The last couple of times we've done this, it was pretty easy to drive the rover off the lander. Not so this time! This time we landed, put the mast up, took some pictures, and discovered that the lander was almost completely surrounded by large, dangerous-looking rocks.(Rocks that were put there by the gremlins, of course.) We couldn't drive over rocks that big, so we had to find another way to get off the lander. The only reasonably clear path was the one directly behind the rover. So way we did it was to "hyper-extend" the lander petal that sticks out behind the rover, tilting it down at an angle to make something like a ramp. We then drove backwards down the ramp, sort of like backing out of a driveway onto the surface of Mars. Pretty cool.
And this was supposed to be our last "nominal" test. The next test, in November, will be an "off nominal" one. We're all very curious to see what the gremlins come up with for us next time!
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