MER Status Report Week Ending March 2, 2003

Thermal vac testing of MER-1 is almost over. It’s been quite an
experience. Back in December, when we put the MER-2 rover into a
thermal vacuum chamber and ran it under martian conditions, it was
quite a struggle. We got all the data we needed, but a lot of things
also went wrong. The worst of them was the “speckle” problem in the
right Pancam camera, which we finally killed off in a test on MER-2
last week.

For MER-1, though, thermal vac testing this past week has gone much
more smoothly. Everything has gotten better over the past couple of
months: hardware, software, and people. There was no speckling in the
Pancam on this rover. We got tons of Mini-TES data, and the data
showed that this instrument is just as good as the one on MER-2, or
even a tad better. And we did the first full-up test at martian
temperatures of the fix to the Moessbauer Spectrometer problem that
turned up months ago. The Moessbauer data looked great, so that one is
behind us now too.

As in the last test, two of the real standouts were the Instrument
Deployment Device — also known as the rover’s arm — and the
Microscopic Imager that it carries. Here’s a sequence of five
Microscopic Imager pictures, taken as the arm slowly moved the camera
to bring things into focus. Pretty cool, huh? Now imagine what it’ll
be like next January when this same camera is taking close-up pictures
of martian rocks.