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.

Well, it took a little time for the TEGA to analyze the data from the bakeout, but I finally got word. Another 10 percent of water was cooked away from inside the ovens.

We're scheduled to run yet another bakeout test here in the PIT this week, in preparation for three runs on the spacecraft the week after Thanksgiving. TEGA needs the level of water to drop low enough to not interfere with their scans, but that's not completely dry. We'll see how much closer we can get after next week.

The PIT has been quite steady this month. I mentioned some MECA testing in my last post, and we've been doing a lot more since then. We've been running tests to characterize the instrument; getting the focus position of the OM nailed down and understanding the nuances of the wet chemistry cells.

We also have been testing the RA unstow sequences with the lander at different tilt angles and orientations. Everything has been running quite smoothly. Things are looking good for the upcoming ORT.

With the arm being a single-point of failure for the mission (arm fails, mission fails) most of our testing is done with the RA. As TEGA, SSI and RAC were all built here at UA, the teams are close and so we do a lot of testing on those instruments too. MECA was built by JPL, and so far the testing hasn't been very vigorous. Recently, we have starting doing a lot more MECA verification. The first round of major testing was nailing down the Optical Microscope (OM) focus position. During the ORT we did get some OM images, but they were not in focus. A couple of the MECA team members came up to work with the RA team during its testing of sample delivery to MECA. In conjunction, they did additional testing, by moving the lens closer and further from the sample until we attained in-focus pictures. Our Engineering Model (EM) is different from the Flight Model (FM), so the positions won't be the exactly the same, but they'll be close, and we now know how to find the position and what the images should look like.

Yesterday we ran a 12 HOUR TEGA test in preparation for a run on the FM this weekend. I'll let you know the details and how the tests went next week after thr run on the spacecraft.