Mars Exploration Rover Status Week Ending May 10, 2003

Well, we had our first big rover operations test this week. It
wasn’t pretty, but it was a lot of fun. This was the first test in
which we actually walked through the procedures that we’ll use to do
science operations once the rovers are on Mars. The thing that made
it really interesting was that we did it in our new MER Mission
Support Area at JPL. It’s a great facility, but everything was very
new to us. It was sort of like the first day in a new school… you
could almost hear people saying “Where’s my homeroom? What’s my
locker combination?” It took a little while to figure out where
everything was.

Over three days we practiced two martian days, or sols, worth of
surface operations. The first sol was an “approach sol” where we
drive the rover to a rock that we’ve selected. The second one was
a “spectroscopy sol” where we use the instruments on the arm to look
at the rock in detail. The first sol was pretty ragged, frankly…
everything was new and we had a lot to learn. The second sol went a
lot better, and that one probably would have actually worked out
pretty well if we had been doing it for real on Mars. So we’re
learning.

This kind of rehearsing is most of what we’ll be doing over the next
eight months or so. And by the time we land next January, we’re
going to have to be very, very good at doing geology with robots on
another planet. It’s a somewhat specialized skill, I guess, but it’s
one we’re going to have to learn.