INSIGHT

I asked him if he knew where I might obtain information on the equipment used, for the navigation cameras, on the rover opportunity. He told me that if I send him an email that he would forward me a PDF file with the information that I wanted. He also told me that if this did not answer my questions, that he could forward what I was looking for to one of the engineers who had worked on assembling the camera system. This concluded our conversation.

Second Phone Call:

I left a message for and was promptly called back by Henry Kline of NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

Henry was kind enough to chat with me for several minutes about trying to obtain a higher resolution image that has the anomaly on it. He asked me if I had tried to zoom in on the anomaly yet, and before I could answer he said that he would try since he had Adobe Photoshop on his computer (it did not occur to me until after I hung up the phone why Henry dealing with the raw images from the rovers would need sophisticated photo editing software). He said after zooming in on it with Photoshop that it was still blurry when zoomed in. He told me that he did not think that it was what we had all hoped it was, and that he thought that it may just be some dirt on the lens.

I also asked Henry if he knew who Jim Erickson was and if the press statement he made was true about “someone or something cleaning off the rover at night”. He said he did know who Jim Erickson was, but had not heard about that news article, and that I could contact Guy Webster about it. I told Henry that I had just got off the phone with Guy Webster and I would email him about it.

The phone conversation ended with Henry stating that if I came up with any other information on this topic that he would like to know about it.

Henry

I must say that the people at JPL were much more helpful than I thought that they would have been, and spent a good amount of time talking with me during their working hours (I phoned them after 6pm my time, so it was 3:00pm California time).

NASA/JPL Communication - Day 2

Email response from Guy Webster is as follows:

From : Guy Webster
Sent : Tuesday, January 11, 2005
To : Peter Arvo
Subject : Re: Mars Rover Camera PDF

Peter,

Here is that article about the navigation cameras and other engineering cameras. It ran in the Dec. 2003 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Planets).
I did not hear or tape Jim Erickson's interview by the reporter for the New Scientist. The quote sounds like something he might have said, but the Reuters article may give an impression of more "mystery" than he or other engineers on the project would consider appropriate. The uncertainty is which of two good possibilities -- ether wind blowing off some dust or frost causing dust to clump up -- let the solar panels start getting more sunshine. There's a little more info about that in an October press release at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2004-261 .

-- Guy