16 April 2000 Since I last wrote to you, many exciting things have been happening with MISR and Terra. The April issue of Scientific American magazine contains a nice article about Terra and its five instruments. The robustness of MISR's data processing system, both at JPL and at the Atmospheric Sciences Data Center, is improving daily. The MISR instrument continues to return exquisite imagery, and we are making substantial progress in debugging and tuning the software that turns these pictures into geophysical attributes. The Terra spacecraft and all of the intruments continue to operate well. The MISR team has done a superb job in preparing the materials to presented at the first Terra press conference, to be held this Wednesday, April 19, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC at 1:00 PM EDT (10:00 AM PDT). It will be broadcast on NASA Select TV. Coincident with the press conference, a new set of MISR imagery will be made public on the MISR web site. On Wednesday, you will be able to view these images by visiting the MISR web site at
http://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov. A sample set of actual MISR data will also be made publicly available through the Atmospheric Sciences Data Center following the press conference. We believe we have isolated the transient increases in motor current associated with the "south" calibration panel to interference between the edges of a thermal blanket and a metal shield on the goniometer (a scanning mechanism that is part of the on-board calibration system). We've been able to reproduce the effect with good fidelity on our engineering model. Additionally, the flight data are indicating that we can mitigate this interference by repositioning the goniometer during the panel deploys and stows. We are uploading and testing a new set of instructions this week to enable this repositioning, and expect to resume use of the south calibration panel the week after. You can see earlier status reports by checking the "News" link of the MISR web site at
http://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov.
David Diner