MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending May 27, 2002

The big news this week has been all about Mini-TES. The tin whisker
problem that we had a few weeks ago now seems to be officially behind
us. We had to do a pretty scary repair job on Mini-TES 2 to fix this,
but it looks like the fix worked. We just finished putting the
instrument through some pretty thorough "thermal vacuum" testing in
Santa Barbara, subjecting it to the same kinds of temperatures it
will experience on Mars. The news was as good as it possibly could
have been — even after the repairs, the instrument works as well as
it ever did. So Mini-TES 2 now has a clean bill of health.

Of course, things are never simple. Mini-TES 2 may be healthy, but
we’ve known for awhile that we’re also going to have to do a little
bit of repair work on Mini-TES 1, and the time for that has come.
This isn’t nearly as big a deal as the tin whisker job was; we just
have to put one new wire in, to make the design a little safer and
more reliable than it is now. But you have to do that sort of thing
very carefully, which means a trip to Santa Barbara. So Mini-TES 2
heads back down the coast, Mini-TES 1 heads back up the coast, and we
keep sweating just a little bit.