Richard Cook
Richard Cook
best confident landing learn pick send
We're going to be able to learn much more from orbit. And I'm confident that in the end we'll pick out the best MSL landing site. If you only have one to send, you send it to the best place you can on Mars.
christmas light looking power signal tree
The signal we are looking for is very, very weak, about 1 watt of power -- or like looking for a Christmas tree light on Mars,
continuing draw extremely forever likelihood plus remote sort spend works wrong
The way it works is that you can spend forever continuing to do things. It could be this thing went wrong plus that thing went wrong and another thing went wrong. But the likelihood is extremely remote and so we sort of draw the line.
associated descent landing risk
Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly. That's just part of the risk associated with the mission.
both fit lab smaller tend tight
Both are super-complicated...taking very sophisticated lab experiments and compressing them down smaller to fit into a very tight space...as all rovers tend to be.
factors several team tension
The tension on the team is up by several factors because of what happened.
belief everybody goes less signal telling time
As time goes by, and I'm not telling you otherwise, we're less confident. At this point, though, we still have a lot of things we can try and we're doing that ... Everybody has the belief that we can still get a signal from the spacecraft.
knowledge trajectory
The trajectory didn't change. Our knowledge of it did.
arms issues looked technical
We've looked at a lot of the technical issues and, hopefully, have our arms around a lot of them.
ahead decent effort landing risk validation
Obviously, the entry, decent and landing is a very big challenge. I think we're going down the path...retiring a lot of the risk in the technology. But there's still the whole validation process...and still a lot of effort ahead to make that work.
amazed both capability certainly chemist circles drive fairly people point size speed
MSL is like a chemist on Mars. From a technological point of view, people will be fairly amazed by both the size and the capability of MSL. It will certainly be able to drive circles around MER to a certain extent. Not speed wise. But from how long MSL can go every day...it will be able to do much more.
below breaking certain concerns level pieces spacecraft
When you get below a certain level you have concerns about overheating the spacecraft or potentially breaking pieces of it off,
hear period
There is still a very real possibility that we may not hear anything during that whole period of time.
hoped signal
We didn't get a signal at 8:30 p.m. We hoped we would.