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Show Titrrrig nnnirfi c TiiTiWfri J Monday, January 26, 2004 University Journal (Mr?1 uV SSlKB ? MDBDDW SU theatre students organize improv group, plan to travel, compete against other teams Will I make it, I dont know, Tyree said. He said this is another effort to give students something to do. There is nothing much to do in Cedar City, except maybe a game of (Dungeons & Dragons), Tyree said. Member positions havent been decided yet, and Steadman said since it is a team, there will be a continuous gioup effort in decision-makinThe gioup will start performing Friday, and the cover charge will be $2, but it will usually be $3. "The first time is going to be a buck cheaper, Milam said. By MELISSA NIELSEN mmelsensuujournal.com Page 5 A professional improvisation group sprang from the pool of acting talent at SUU when founding members organized an audition where 19 people battled for the four remaining spots. Wendy Milam, T.J. Penrod, Richy T. Steadman and Dave and Mary Armour are the founding members of Off the Cuff and after last weekend's auditions are still deciding who will become the newest members of the troupe. We are looking for a group that gels well together, said Steadman, a senior theatre arts major from Sandy. We are looking for 'he best troupes. He said the trick to finding the best troupe is to find talented people who perform well individually and as a group. Steadman said the group will consist of two teams of four members each and a host. The two teams will compete against each other and battle other professional improv groups. The team plans to perform in a competition in March, Steadman said. We wanted to have an opportunity for students and for us to perform in Cedar City, Steadman said. There's not anything like this in southern Utah. Off the Cuff is a similar set-u- p to Drew Carey's Who's Line is it Anyway? where only the team plays the games. (Improv is a) training ground for actors to be able to improve raw acting skills and it's really entertaining, Steadman said. He said the founding members of the group bring experience from other professional improv groups, such as Kiss Off and Quick Wits in Salt Lake City. Once we have been established in Cedar City, we want to travel to places like St. George and Mesquite, do parties and bar mitzvahs, Steadman said. Off the Cuff will perform Friday nights at 10 p.m. at The Grind. An amateur group, Improv Sports, will perform Fridays at 4 p.m. but Milam, a former SUU student from Lehi, said these two groups are completely separate entities. MELISSA NIELSEN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL One is professional, and one is educational, Steadman said. Richy T. Steadman (far right), Mary Armour, Improv Sports is organized by SUU's Masque Club, Dave Armour and Wendy Milam judge the Milam said. The primary difference is that anyone auditions for the new improvisation group, Off the Cuff. New members will be announced can come and play at Improv Sports Jeram; Tilt Tyree, a senior communication major this week and the first performance is Friday from Phelan, Calif., auditioned Friday for the group. at 10 p.m. at The Grind. SACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! SUU, STUDENT WELLNESS PLAN FROM CEDAR CHIROPRACTIC g. NASA fixes rover problems, answering what went wrong By THOMAS H. MAUGH LOS ANGELES TIMES have traced the Engineers malfunction in the Spirit rover to a computer memory problem and believe they can restore the craft to nearly full operation in a matter of weeks, project manager Pete Theisinger of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Saturday. Were upgrading its condition from critical to serious, Theisinger said. Controllers were able to reestablish contact with Spirit overnight Friday and received data indicating that the problem lies in the crafts flash memory, which functions much like the memory sticks in a digital camera. Theisinger said he was confident that the problem could be either repaired or circumvented. It will take us a couple of weeks to get back close to routine operations, he said. And we are probably three weeks from driving the rover. NASAs OpporMeanwhile, tunity rover was in perfect order Saturday as it headed for its encounter with Meridiani Planum on Mars. At noon, the spacecraft was cruising at about 6,700 mph, but the strong pull of the Red Planets gravity accelerated it to more than 12,000 mph before it began the fiery six minutes from hell descent through the atmosphere. Controllers hoped to hear from the craft before midnight Saturday PST, but cautioned that contact could come as late as Sunday evening if the rover came to rest in an awkward orientation with its communications antenna pointed away from Earth. The recent problems with Spirit began Wednesday morning, when the craft abruptly stopped transmitting data to Earth. The team subsequently found that Spirits onboard computer was rebooting itself about once every hour and that the craft was not going to sleep during the long, cold Martian night to conserve its batteries. The team had some very slow communications with the craft Thursday, then got an unexpected burst of data during the Martian night via the Mars Odyssey orbitcr. That data gave them a hint that the flash memory was involved. When controllers made contact with the craft again, they ordered it to go into a cripple mode, which bypassed the flash memory, and then to reboot. After it rebooted, d they had a communication session with the craft with no apparent problems. reboots did not Significantly, occur after that, Theisinger said. The team then ordered the craft to go to sleep, so that its batteries could be recharged. T The rovers have three types one-hou- r, low-spee- of RAM (random memory: access flash and memory), EEPROM (electrically erasable y programmable memory). RAM is similar to that in a home computer, and is used for temporary storage of instructions and data. Any information in the RAM is lost when the system is shut down. Flash memory provides longer-terstorage and is used for the rovers scheduling daily activities and storing scientific information until it is transmitted to Earth. Information stays in the flash memory until it is deliberately erased. EEPROM is similar to flash memory, but its information is harder to erase and serves as a more permanent form of memory. The rovers core programming is contained in EEPROM, and it does not seem to be affected by the current problem. Once Spirit's batteries have been recharged, the team will wake the craft up and place it in a task that cripple mode again must be carried out each day. d They will then set up a communications link, probably through he Mars Odyssey orbiter, to download the contents of the flash memory so they can figure out what happened. The teEm has not yet discounted the possibility that a hardware problem might be the root cause of Spirits ailment, Theisinger said. The whole episode began while the craft was adjusting the mirror on its thermal emission We still do not spectrometer. know why that happened, he said. Spirit can function without flash memory if necessary, Theisinger said. The most important effect would be that scientific data collected during a Martian day would have to be beamed back to Earth before the craft entered sleep mode, or else the data would be lost. That might reduce the amount of data collected somewhat, but would not make the mission a failure. Spirit is halfway around Mars from planned Opportunitys landing site in Meridiani Planum. that site Geologists taigcted because it boasts a feature seen nowhere else on Mars, or on Earth an Oklahoma-size- d deposit of an mineral called hematite. A shiny crystalline ore, hematite is most commonly produced in water, and scientists think that the massive deposit in Meridiani was laid down by an ancient lake. That suggests there once were large quantities of water on the surface of Mars and, where there was water, there very well could have been life. f The surface of Mvl'rs is desolate, read-onl- m high-spee- i not an cold, dry and barren enticing environment for life, said geologist Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator on the rover missions. But places like Meridiani offer hints that it could have been a very different sort of place in the past. The mission of NASAs twin rovers, as well as of Britains failed Beagle 2 lander, is to look for evidence of whether there was water and whether it was favorable for life, said project scientist Joy Crisp. Meridiani Planum is within a large region that has been known as Meridiani since the earliest days of telescopic study of Mars because it lies near the planets arbitrarily designated prime meridian, or line of zero longitude. The hematite outcrop is right on the equator . . . and it just kind of called to us to go to it, said geologist Ray Arvidson of Washington University, the deputy principal investigator. On Earth, hematite is most often formed in association with water, either in iron-ric- h lakes or in hot water percolating underground. If Opportunity finds sedimentary rocks of the type found in lake beds associated with the hematite, that would be strong evidence that a lake once existed on the site. Alternatively, the presence of certain characteristic minerals in conjunction with the hematite would indicate that it had been formed by hot water circulating in the soil. The instruments on Opportunitys flexible arm will be looking for the presence of those minerals. A third possibility and the least desirable one, from the is that scientists viewpoint the hematite was produced by the direct oxidation of volcanic rock without the presence of water. If Opportunity finds only volcanic rocks at Meridiani, that would support this possibility. fnm 15 WEEKLY CHIROPRACTIC VISITS FOR i..j r .'., Tf,4.J a. A f 4-250-.00 INCLUDES INITIAL AND EXIT EXAMS THATS A SAVINGS OF THIS PLAN IS VALID ONLY WITH A CURRENT SUU STUDENT ID ENROLLMENT ENDS JANUARY 30, 2004 DON'T DELAY! 8S5 CALL TODAY! Jffo Cedar Chiropractic Waters, D. C. Jir)S 555 South Sunset Drive CfClCoUCTIC (435) 865-911- Cedar City, UT 84720 chironetutah.com 0 I Castro & Co. Jewelers 68 N. Main Cedar City With over 435-586-24- 22 styles to choose from... two-hundr- ed There's a little something for everyone. 11 Platinum ,t v ;V) v ij V ii X Two-Ton- e i Celtic Bands v . '- - ' N j V i "V A X. V r t ' x ' A . Yellow Gold j f X,X .. i! White Gold , - meat kealtk alt semester! Promise Ring 2V : 4 v ' . 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