Maine to Mars Blog Index
November 28, 2007
Ahh, another ORT

ORT 7 is less than a week away, and preparations are under way. This exercise will cover EDL, Entry, Descent and Landing, plus the first three Sols, or days, on Mars. Most of the blocks we have been testing are not nominal operation type sequences; acquiring and analyzing samples, taking panoramic images, and the like. The first several Sols on Mars will be dedicated to checking out and characterizing the instruments. These involve turning heaters on, taking test pictures, as well as images of the solar arrays to check on deployment, the RA during it's unstow process, and running calibration scans with each science instrument. I've been running a lot of RA tests aimed at characterizing the actuators and heaters, and then moving the RAC around to image the footpads, and the MECA and TEGA science instruments. So far, things have been going quite well.

Posted at 11:54 AM

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A native Mainer writes about his experiences as an engineer for the Phoenix Mars Mission, an effort to see if a robotic lander can find evidence that life once existed on Mars.

Robert Bovill was born at Maine Medical Center July 5, 1979. He graduated from Thornton Academy in 1998. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Maine in Orono, and then went to the University of Arizona for graduate school. He was employed full-time as a test engineer for this Phoenix Mars Mission a year and a half ago by the University of Arizona.



See a rendering of the Phoenix Mars lander during the final seconds of descent.

See the instruments on the Phoenix Mars lander.

Abbreviation Glossary
Testing  
FVT   Functional Verification Test
GDS   Ground Data System
OPUS Odyssey/Phoenix UHF System
ORT Operational Readiness Test/Training
PIT    Payload Inter-operability Testbed
PTL Payload Testbed Lab
PVV Payload Verification and Validation
   
Places  
JPL  Jet Propulsion Laboratory
LM  Lockheed-Martin
UA/LPL University of Arizona/Lunar and Planetary Lab
   
Events
EDL  Entry, Descent and Landing
   
Instruments
EM  Enginerring Model
FM Flight Model
ISAD Icy Sample Acquisition Device
MECA Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer
OM Optical Microscope
RA Robotic Arm
RAC Robotic Arm Camera
RASP Rapid Active Sampling Package
SSI    Surface Stereoscopic Imager
TECP   Thermal and Electrical Conductivity Probe
TEGA  Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer
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