MER Status Report Week Ending April 19, 2003

It’s been a pretty crazy week. We’re getting very close to launch
now, and the focus is starting to shift from our spacecraft to our
rockets.

Of course, the spacecraft story isn’t over yet. You saw in a news
flash here last week that the spacecraft team down in Florida found
a wiring problem that required taking both rovers apart and fixing
an electronics board inside them. That work is done now, and it went
very smoothly. But it set us back a little, and the MER-A launch is
now scheduled for June 6th, instead of the original date of May
30th. It’s a headache we could have done without.

The rocket story isn’t entirely simple either. For MER-A, it’s
pretty straightforward. MER-A launches from pad 17-A, which is clear
now and ready to have our first rocket put on it. For MER-B, though,
which is due to launch on June 25th, it’s more complicated.

Right now, pad 17-B, which is where MER-B will launch from, has
somebody else’s rocket on it. It’s the launch vehicle for a mission
called the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or SIRTF. SIRTF is a
very cool mission… a giant telescope to scan the universe at
infrared wavelengths, just like the Hubble Space Telescope has done
at visible wavelengths. Thing is, there’s a problem with one of the
nine solid rocket motors on the SIRTF launch vehicle. It’s a minor
problem, but NASA is playing it safe, and they’ve decided not to
launch SIRTF until that motor can be replaced. Replacing a motor
isn’t hard, but it takes time, and time is something the SIRTF team
doesn’t have… because of us.

A mission like SIRTF can launch at just about any time, as long as
the rocket and the spacecraft are ready. But a Mars mission like MER-
B has to go in a specific “launch window”: a brief period of time
when Earth and Mars are aligned properly to get from one to the
other. Our launch window is coming up soon, and that doesn’t give
the SIRTF guys enough time to fix their problem and get off the
ground before we need to move onto pad 17-B. We’re the ones with the
tight schedule, but it’s SIRTF that has to take the hit, getting
bumped to late summer to make room for us. We feel bad about it…
SIRTF has been waiting for their ride into space even longer than we
have. But Mars won’t wait. So SIRTF goes back to the hangar for
awhile, and we’re up next.