(no subject)

Proposal is done.... shipped off to CS back at Ames. A sign of my stress level is that I'm listening to marches on iTunes...

Right now, it is overcast with a snow flurry outside. Most people have gone to bed.

Pascal has been even more dictatorial than usual... telling your staff how to do their jobs is not likely to curry much favor. We nearly lost our camp doctor (JD Polk, NASA's chief flight surgeon) and did lose our camp cook. Volunteers, anyone? Sigh...

I thought we were in trouble when my sister Vicky volunteered to make dinner for 30... she's not known for her cooking skills. But she and JD did quite well... he surgically carved a ham ;-). Tomorrow, my former advisor and now-colleague SH has volunteered to cook Indian food (he brought his spices ;). So we may do OK.

Tomorrow's my halfway point, anyway... time for laundry. Maybe... even a shower, using the 10 gal. sunshower bag in a wooden enclosure. It has been six days... my contacts keep bothering me, from all of the fine alkaline dust.

It has been lovely, out in the crater itself. The drilling site is the first thing we've done on Inuit land in five years, other than aerial surveys and brief traverses. I picked up a half-dozen small shatter cones for later distribution ;). And I get to be traverse leader, since I both know the area, can handle firearms and it is my project.

Today... another interview, this time with Kathia from Figaro. Actually writing a feature for their Sunday magazine supplement next month. The CNN segment yesterday will be part of a 10 minute Science and Technology segment on CNN International in a couple of weeks, and also as a 2-min splotch on CNN domestic.

I feel like my project has accomplished something... we've discovered issues that will change NASA's overall approach to Mars drilling. And found the diagnostic and performance data that we needed for 2005 and 2006. Hopefully, it will feed this next proposal (test in Antarctica, remote controlled) and then a Mars Scout flight proposal for a drill in 2011.

If anyone is interested, an AVI movie is here. (3MB) Note the roll of duct tape in the foreground (chuckle)...

Hi-ho, hi-ho...

37 degrees, calm, bits of blue sky with only a few snowflakes... looks like a good day. I've decided to not redeploy to a third drilling site, since even repaired the drill will be flaky. Better to wrap up some bonus tasks at this site... exciting the shaft vertically so we can characterize the frequencies and modes of movement along that axis. And integrating some of our control software with Honeybee's. That should take us to early afternoon, then after lunch we'll start tearing down the site and packing -- the drill team leaves tomorrow.
( Couple of site 2 photos... )

a productive day...

Today we ran experiments in the field... first, we vertically excited the extended shaft of the drill with a glued-on stinger, attached to a small shaker. That gave excellent results. We now have the compressive axial modes and frequencies and solved where the 68Hz noise was coming from (90 gear teeth, spinning at 45rpm (or times 0.75 Hz)).

Then we integrated a copy of our automation software with the drill control... and demonstrated the automation in control of the drill, doing simple up-down motions with the shaft. A year ahead of schedule... we aren't slowpokes. :).

Then we took down the site and packed the drill away at base camp. SH made a great dinner, his own homemade Indian specialties.

( A few photos... )