2010 Annual Research Report

           Knudson's research efforts this year were mainly focused on operations and data analysis from the Mars Exploration Rovers. This was her last year working with the rovers directly through Arizona State University since the optics of the Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) have become coated with dust on both rovers. The Mini-TES on the currently functional rover, Opportunity, has suffered major (if not catastrophic) electronics failures as well. Knudson assisted in designing data collection strategies and mirror dust mitigation procedures in the testbed and on Mars. Scientists shook the mirror with vibration of the motors at off-nominal current settings and then opened it on a regular basis to try to allow wind to blow off the dust. She also assisted in assessing the failure mode(s) of the instrument.  As of September she is no longer a paid member of the MER team, due to dwindling funding and a lack of operational need at this time. She will assist in any efforts to revive the instrument if and when the opportunity presents itself.

            Knudson continues ontinue to work on data analysis of the Mini-TES datasets for both rovers as she has time, and she is in the process of finalizing the work on Spirit soils that I started at the beginning of the mission. She continues to work on a mirror dust correction for the Opportunity dataset and is pursuing funding through MDAP to continue that research.

            Knudson participated in a small way on a project with Dr. Mark Sykes to produce a thermal model that was available and produced consistent results between multiple programming languages. Her participation was limited and involved testing and updating the PASCAL version of the code.