2010-10-18

Opportunity Sol 616 (Spirit Sol 637)

It's 06:30 at the start of a tight sol, and Beth Dewell is as bleary-eyed as I am.

"I think the rovers were missing you guys," she yawns, reciting the litany of things that went wrong while most of us rover drivers were away at the conference. Opportunity underwent another mystery reset during the AM science block, then missed a crucial part of the uplink, so that she ended up doing nothing but runout science for a couple of days. And we had ground system problems, with a crashing file server among other things. ("I think you can say that Friday was legally a nightmare," as Brenda Franklin puts it.) There's more, but I'm too tired to remember it.

It's not a terribly difficult day, just a Sunday -- er, Monday -- drive, hunting decent ripple-crossing spots as we trend west around Erebus Crater. The only hard bit is that we're on such a tight schedule: we need to be done by about 13:00.

And, what the hell, we make it. Man, I need a nap.

[Next post: sol 639, October 20.]

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