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.

This ORT has been going amazingly well so far. The science days are going off without a hitch. The days haven't been very intense for the most part, mostly standard SSI imaging, and weather measurements during morning, noon and night. The other night was a sample delivery to MECA OM, and that was cool. The RA acquired a sample, took some RAC images and then paused. During the pause, we actually switched out the boring baghouse dirt sample, and put in some interesting dirt (if you're into that kinda of thing). That way, the OM analysis would provide some data to analyze. Everything worked beautifully. Today is MECA Wet Chemistry Cell (WCl) delivery. I'll let you know how that goes next time.

Well, it's 1 a.m. (3 a.m. Maine time), and ORT 8 is off and running.

Thursday was a training day, so the science day is pretty light. This test starts off on Sol 20, meaning the 20th "day" on Mars. A Mars day is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so that really throws off the scheduling: every Earth day, we receive the data 40 minutes later. All the scientists and engineers (well, most of them) are at home asleep. Nothing happens on Earth while Phoenix is performing the day's science activities, i.e. imaging, digging, weather measurement and so forth.

As I said, today's science is pretty light, weather measurement of pressure and temperature, Lidar atmospheric measurements and standard SSI imaging of the environment. We'll take optical depth images of the Sun's intensity, which is needed to determine power status (we're a solar powered mission).

I'm sure things will get more exciting later in this seven day test.

Hello from ORT7. We are well into this training, and things are, as always, quite interesting. This test started with EDL, so the action started at JPL with separation of the cruise stage all the way to the surface. With the exception of a dust storm, the landing went as expected. Once on the ground, we started the solar array deploy, which partially failed. The first injected fault. It has taken a couple of days, but the science and engineering teams finally determined from the SSI images that the array is approximately 70% deployed, being blocked by a rock.

SSI has been pretty busy taking images of the instruments and solar arrays, as well as the landing area. The other instruments have been pretty quiet; a TECP and RAC checkout, MECA check on the wet chemistry cells and a TEGA software update are about all that has been run. There was a problem with the bio-barrier bag deploy, which the spacecraft team is still try to characterize before we unstow the RA.

I'll have more on the ORT in my next entry.

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.

As I said last time, these ORTs are an interesting look at how surface operations will run. I worked the midnight to 8AM shift again, but this time, I stayed later a few times and shadowed some of the leaders so I could learn about surface operations.

The ORTs are designed to find the bugs in the system, on an operational level. Obviously, the power supply issue, but there were a few other errors that cropped up; pointing was off on some pictures, other parameters on instruments were set incorrectly which results in undesired effects (<- very diplomatic of me).

That's why we have these tests. The point of this one was nominal ops, getting to a TEGA delivery. We had some issues with that, above the power one. As I shadowed the ops team, I got to see decisions made on a flight-like basis (how they would be handled in actual surface ops) and test basis. This last basically meant that when the RA was unable to acquire a sample and get ready to deliver, and instead of fixing it as they would in flight, they declared a test-ism, sprinkled some "magic dust" and declared the Arm ready to go. My team that was running the model had to fix the arm and make it ready, something that would be impossible on the real spacecraft.

Well, the latest round of Operational Readiness Tests/Training is over and we finished with moderate success.

The aim for this round was nominal operations, meaning no one was intentionally causing hiccups to test the science team's ability to react. This all centered around a sample delivery to TEGA. That didn't happen. The trench came out beautifully, with multiple layers and different colors; brown, red, brown, yellow and brown. This may not sound interesting, but very few people knew about this, and the team was able to get nice color images that match up very nicely.

From that trench, the RA was able to acquire a sample and get into position to deliver to TEGA. But twice, as TEGA was prepping to receive the sample, it faulted. So last week was dedicated to debugging this issue. It only took a day, but we figured it out. Current limit was set too low, a change from the default that someone made. Quite embarrassing. But we were able to test both sequences from the ORT and show that both worked. Or would have, anyway.

Stay tuned as I have some other stories from the ORT. If you have a question about any aspect of the ORT, please ask. It's a fascinating look at Mars Mission operations.

Starting last Wednesday, the RA team was in town digging the trench I mentioned in the last blog. We didn't quite get down to 20cm, however. The Arm was giving everyone a lot of trouble, by faulting out on an over torque-limit error. The motors that drive the joints are quite large, and when changing directions the torque can get quite large, and thus the failures.

The trench is about a meter square, and the arm takes about a centimeter or so with each tier it digs. Each tier takes about 50 minutes to dig and we did actually get through two tiers with no problems. But each fault took an hour or more to recover from. Actually getting the RA powered back on only took a few minutes, but analyzing the data from each fault and then rewriting the sequence to continue the dig took a lot of time.

A few late nights and several headaches, but we managed to get down over 10 centimeters. The science team will certainly have some interesting pictures to analyze, after all the time we spent prepping the digging area. But I'll tell you more about that over the rest of the week. I'll be working the midnight to 8AM shift.