Yesterday, NASA’s rover Curiosity made history as it touched down on our dusty neighbor, Mars.
After a 36 weeks in space and a well crafted 7 min fall through Mars’ atmosphere, this miraculous droid touched down and kicked off its mission to answer a number of questions about this alien landscape. For more information on the mission check out nasa’s web page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
While all of this excitement was unfolding, Silbo continued to struggle with his conditions back here on Earth.
As seen in the image above, Silbo got caught in a very strong northward current. This current was recorded going over .3m/s, which poses quite a problem for our little droid. The current proved to be so strong, that even with the way point to the south, Silbo flew west north-west.
Silbo lately has also been hurting. If we look at the figure above where the average speed between surfacings was plotted, Silbo has been roughly moving only about .11cm/s, where .10cm/s is typically not considered good.
To try and help Silbo out a bit, we have proposed to try the at depth inflections that we successfully tested on Ru29 last month. Seen below in the images from Antonio and ULPGC, the current is strong in a general northward direction for the first 30m while deeper than that point, the current weakens potentially allowing Silbo to better fight these currents.
As of this afternoon, we were flying two yo’s per surfacing between 25m-1000m. However this afternoon, we switched to single yo dives and we will begin implementing the low power mode. Instead of the glider computer running constantly, this setting will turn the computer off for roughly 30 seconds at a time to further conserve power.
Stay tuned for further updates throughout the week.
Force Wind Sea & Honor
Nilsen & Antonio