MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending June 22, 2002

What a week… the APXS is done and Pancam is taking pictures!

After a huge amount of work over in Germany, Rudi and Ralf came over
with two completed APXS instruments this week. The electronics boards
for each one are the ones that are actually going to Mars, and the
team at JPL should start working with them sometime this week. The
sensor heads — the part that goes out on the arm — that they
brought over are spare units. We can fly these spares if we have to,
but we’re planning on flying sensor heads that are still back in
Germany and about to begin months of testing. If all that testing
goes well, we’ll swap the spare sensor head with the flight units
sometime in the fall.

And the Pancam pictures are beatiful! We just got the first Pancam
put together early last week, and it took a perfect picture the first
time we pushed the button. Amazing. This one is an engineering model,
so it’s not going to Mars either. But the flight cameras are
identical to it, and those will be coming together over the next few
weeks. As soon as we have some good pictures from those, we’ll
put ’em on this web site for the world to see.