We held our SOWG Meeting this morning-same time, same place. My household has become used to me getting up in the middle of the night-the younger cat uses my actions as an excuse to begin his daily destruction of my office with impunity. It's clear that the RST is becoming more adept at using the software tools to work through the data. And we are more focused, more at ease with the process of analyzing them, too. Still, fitting everything into a two-hour meeting is a challenge.

We didn't have a lot of data to analyze from yesterday's EVA, and since we had been having an ongoing discussion about how best to photo document a sample site, we began our meeting by working through the current methodology, changing or adding photo documentation perspectives to better reflect our needs. The idea behind the methodology of photo documenting sampling sites is that, since the RST isn't in the field, the crew will need to guide us, via photos, to their sample sites. This is accomplished though a set of photos, taken by the crew, which start with a wide-angle view of the outcrop that holds the sample and ends with a close up of the sample in place, right before the crew collects it. There is an additional benefit in that this methodology will allow future crews to go back to the same sample sites, thus allowing for repeatability of the science.

One thing we noted about the data is that it is very challenging to associate one piece of data with a site or with another piece of data. For example, although Abby had recorded a voice note that clearly led us along with her as she descended into Lithe Canyon, we were unable to assign a single photo to her voice note. She gave descriptions of three walls-the west wall, the east wall and the southwest wall. For each she gave a brief geological description. Two of her location descriptions did not match the single photograph we had, and we almost ascribed the third description from her voice note to the photo, until Melissa pointed out that the direction in the description would have put in under the ledge in the mouth of the canyon, which, from the photo, it clearly wasn't. We see a need for each photo to be associated with a voice note.

Surprisingly, with so little data, we were able to get quite a bit of analysis done. With the methodology working relatively smoothly, we moved on to hypotheses. We had talked in our planning meetings in the months prior to going to MDRS about the need for mission hypotheses. We didn't come up with any for Pooh's Corner, mainly I think because we were still working through exactly how to collect, organize and analyze the data as a team. For Lithe Canyon, Brent had put forth the hypothesis that the east and west walls were both part of the same unit. We started with that, and then Stacy added the hypothesis that Lithe Canyon was part of an ancient meandering channel. In the middle of our discussion about this hypothesis, we lost Stacy due to a dead cell phone battery. What was really cool about this was that Melissa picked right up where Stacy left off, and between the two of them, the hypothesis was complete. It was a textbook example of teamwork!

Another SOWG meeting accomplished! Then this afternoon, the data from today's EVA came rolling in. There were still some problems, and not all the data were downloaded, but it was an impressive amount, and we will be very busy tomorrow morning.