May 13, 1993: MO Runs @ Homers

In the absence of an opposing team, the Homers held a practice last Thursday for almost two hours. Attendees were Jeff, Richard, Tim, Doug, Monica, Holly, Amy, Ron, Don C, and Jesus with a special guest appearance by Dwayne Chong, Richard's and Amy's teammate on their other team. Following batting and fielding drills, the team practiced baserunning, particularly in going from second to home on a single to the outfield. Richard demonstrated the head-first slide wide of the plate while Amy emulated her hero Pete Rose and went shoulder first into the catcher's stomach.

After practice, the team members present voted to increase the salary of the manager and the editor of the Homers' Report

Our next game is Wednesday, May 19, 4-Play @ Homers, at John Muir High School, which is on Lincoln, close to the main lab, closer to the 60x buildings. Unfortunately, neither Jeff nor I knows where on the John Muir campus the softball fields are, but that shouldn't be too hard for anyone. If we get a map before Wednesday, we'll distribute it.

In case anyone is interested why last week's team, composed of Mars Observer people, bailed on us...

From: KELVIN::BAALKE "Ron Baalke" 13-MAY-1993 21:42:28.14

Richard,

Here's the latest MO status report. I guess a win is a win, but I'd feel better if we really win a game.

Ron

MARS OBSERVER STATUS REPORT May 13, 1993 2:00 PM PDT

Flight Team members are finalizing plans for recovering the spacecraft which remains in Contingency mode since early Sunday, May 9. While the capability to recover sooner has been available to the team, the opportunity has been taken to better analyze memory readouts to determine specific causes, and develop a permanent solution.

The Verification Test Laboratory (VTL) has been successful in replicating the events leading up to the Good Friday (4/9/93) occurrence of C Mode Entry. Flight Software and Attitude Control subsystem engineers have proposed a solution which will prevent future occurrence of entry into C- Mode as a result of the same set of events. That solution, which involves a relatively minor parameter change in celestial body sensing software, is being tested on the VTL, modified Realtime Application Interactive Debugger, and Flight Software VAX. Depending on the results of that testing, commands to recover to Array Normal Spin could be sent as soon as tomorrow, Friday, May 14, or on Monday, May 16.

The MO Navigation Team Chief advises that the spacecraft trajectory has not yet been negatively affected by the effects of solar wind producing a "sailing" effect on the solar array while the spacecraft is sun-coning, so as to require an additional trajectory correction maneuver (TCM). No TCM-4, provided for in mission schedules but predicted to not be necessary based on the accuracy of previous TCMs, appears to be required at this time.