Ahh, back from vacation and what is my thanks? That's right, the 4-12 shift. With only four people working in the PIT, one of whom is the boss (so he's not going to work the late shift!) we don't have a lot of man hours to provide to the mission.

There is ALWAYS more testing. So it comes down to prioritizing, and quite often that means two shifts are required. The only fair way to assign which engineer gets it is to rotate. This week, I get to monitor MECA testing. It's pretty boring really, the MECA teams tells me which sequence to run, I run it, and give them the results when the test is done. Things get interesting only when things go wrong.

Which they do. So boring is good. It gives me time to catch up on my correspondence.

As I mentioned in the last post, next week is a sort of mini-ORT. It'll last more than a week, but it's (supposedly) not 24 hours a day. This uber-test will run through the first 7 days on Mars, and we'll be executing every single sequence, exactly as they will run on Mars in a couple of months. This includes un-stowing the robotic arm, taking the full 360 degree SSI panorama, running through the MECA and TEGA characterizations, starting up the weathering monitoring and so on. Not much science in the first week, but a lot of imaging and checkouts and such. All in an effort to facilitate smooth operations for the rest of mission.

What a crazy couple of weeks it's been around here. We have been running all sorts of tests, practically day and night. Most of the instrument flight software has been updated, so we had to run all the FVTs again. However, we have a characterization test coming up next week, so we've also had to test all the sequences for this mini-ORT. Oh yeah, and the characterization test does not use the updated FSW (flight software). It's not an overly painful process to switch out the FSW, but it's one more detail to keep track of, and one that would invalidate a test if run using the wrong code.