MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending October 19, 2002

We’re definitely in the troubleshooting phase of the project right
now, and for the last couple of weeks annoying little troubles seem
to be popping up faster than we can shoot them down. We’re making
progress on the step-and-settle problem that came up last week, but
we still haven’t solved it yet. And this week a new problem came up
on the Mössbauer Spectrometer that we haven’t figured out at all.

This is a weird one. The Moessbauer has four different “channels”:
it’s sort of like four instruments rolled into one. When we use it by
itself, all four channels work beautifully. But when we hook it up to
the rover, only one channel works right. The other three don’t, and
that means that we get only one-fourth as much good data as we
should.

In principle we can “fix” the problem by changing some software, but
we’re not real comfortable with that, at least for now. We don’t
understand yet what’s causing the problem, and using a quick-and-
dirty solution to fix a problem you don’t understand is rarely the
right thing to do. So we’re going to test one idea, and then test
another, and keep testing until we get it figured out for real.

It just gets like this sometimes, and when it does you have to remind
yourself that none of these problems are major and all of them have
solutions. Still, it’ll feel good once we’ve got this batch of
problems behind us.