Richard Cook
Richard Cook
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,
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.
certainly five lasts thinking
If it lasts for five times that...I wouldn't be all that shocked. But we certainly don't want to go into it thinking that way.
hoped signal
We didn't get a signal at 8:30 p.m. We hoped we would.
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.
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.
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.
hear period
There is still a very real possibility that we may not hear anything during that whole period of time.
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.
paths wait
There are a lot of different paths that you can be on. We just have to wait to see which one.
ideas less plan
We're sprouting new ideas as we go along, and the plan is more or less the same.
quite state sure
We're in a state where we're not quite sure what's happened,
begin midst next opportunity planning
We are in the midst for proceeding with our planning for our next communications opportunity, which will begin tomorrow.
arms issues looked technical
We've looked at a lot of the technical issues and, hopefully, have our arms around a lot of them.