Acid testing...
Nov. 26th, 2002 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayAnother day, another telecon... this one is about automated drilling at a Mars-analog site in Spain (Rio Tinto). The drill site is underwater, in an acid river in which only very primitive life forms can exist. There are seeps coming out into that river that have Ph <2. And still contain life...
We have the Spaniards online... their phone bounce-back is giving us an annoying echo. Our prototype drill is coming from a Texas consortium of Baker-Hughes and Johnson Space Center... same basic mechanism that we are going to test in the Arctic permafrost. We are arguing over whether we can adapt the one design, or need two separate drill designs. David McKay (of ALH84001 fame) is in the conference, from Houston. Carol Stoker is the PI. As a co-investigator, I'm supposed to come up with the teleoperation means and any automation. Which is why I dragged uphopeforyou this morning, since she worked on the teleoperation project we did in the Arctic last summer. And she could do the user interfaces bilingually...
We have the Spaniards online... their phone bounce-back is giving us an annoying echo. Our prototype drill is coming from a Texas consortium of Baker-Hughes and Johnson Space Center... same basic mechanism that we are going to test in the Arctic permafrost. We are arguing over whether we can adapt the one design, or need two separate drill designs. David McKay (of ALH84001 fame) is in the conference, from Houston. Carol Stoker is the PI. As a co-investigator, I'm supposed to come up with the teleoperation means and any automation. Which is why I dragged up
hopeforyou this morning, since she worked on the teleoperation project we did in the Arctic last summer. And she could do the user interfaces bilingually...
