MER Rover Status Report Week Ending November 1, 2002

Well, we’re hunting our problems down and killing them off one by
one. But some are easier to deal with than others. Last week we found
and fixed the Mini-TES step-and-settle bug. This week, the focus has
been on fixing the Moessbauer Spectrometer problem that turned up a
couple of weeks ago. Hunting down a problem like this can be tedious,
and you have to be very methodical about it. You might start off with
half a dozen different theories about what it could be. Then you have
to come up with a test for each theory, and run through all the
tests… knocking theories off one by one until you find the culprit.
In this case, the culprit seems to be some rather innocent-looking
wires. They’re the wires that run up the rover’s arm, connecting the
Moessbauer’s sensor head (which is out on the end of the arm) to the
part of the instrument that’s inside the rover. This thing isn’t a
normal bundle of wires, though. A normal wire bundle would be too
stiff for the arm to bend. Instead, it’s a very special kind of
flexible cable. If the flexible cable is in place, the arm bends just
fine, but the instrument doesn’t work right. Replace the flexible
cable with a normal bundle of wires and the instrument works fine.
But we can’t fly it that way, because if we did the arm wouldn’t
bend! So we have to figure out what’s wrong with this flexible cable,
and fix it. At least we know where the problem is now.