February 9^th 1999

Well I woke up a bit earlier today. Thinking that they were going to have the Rover out in the field, I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Well unfortunately the Rover is in the shop, so to speak. The pan tilt head had some problems. One of the motors needed to have some brushes replaced and some soldering needed to be done on some other parts. I set up the video encoder when I got here. It is playing at a higher stre am rate at the moment. So you people in your homes or schools probably won't be able to get anything. It is meant for the people at Ames and any other people with higher bandwidths of Internet service. It is nice here at the moment.

It is 10:30 in the morning at the moment. It is a bit windy and it seems that there will be some cloud cover later on today just by looking at the sky. I hear that in the bay area at the moment it is raining and very stormy over there. I guess right now I would r ather be here than there. Mark and Damien are planning on leaving earlier than scheduled. Apparently there is a school in Los Angeles that needs some help with their robot in the First competition. They are gonna go down there and see what they can do. It might be awhile until the Rover gets moved out of the truck. Sergey is testing the clam shell unit at the end of the arm and they were talking on walkie-talkies and I pointed the Camera at the unit and since we put a monitor in the RV they can see t hings a lot better than before.

Other than that the spectrometer people are out in the field looking for certain rocks. Hans is getting frustrated with one part of the Rover that deals with the pan tilt head. Nothing else seems to be happening. I am starting to get hungry. I didn't eat breakfast yet and it is almost lunchtime. Well I will report again tonight on what has happened.

I am back. I went to lunch with Mark and Damien. They have left to go to LA to help a school down there. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out why my camera is not working with the wireless video transmitter. I didn't leave the site till about 7:00 at night. One of the more spectacular sites I have seen this whole trip has been tonight's sky as the sun went down. We all sat there and watched the sky as it turned into different colors and shapes. I should have taken a picture but I was too busy enjoying the moment. Tomorrow I hope to fix the problem involved with the video. I also will be tr ying to contact one of the schools here in this town to try to get them interested in the program. Well that is all for now.

Seth