Despite clear skies but with a nearly full Moon, I could not see Panstarrs today.

I saw the comet briefly, slightly brighter today, but some high cloud came in and obscured the comet after a minute or so.

I just saw the comet, we had rain all day and the stratus again was about 6 degrees above the horizon. The comet appeared half as dim again.

US restarts PU-238 production ( well a test really ).

http://news.yahoo.com/u-restarts-plutonium...-013110181.html

More evidence of water at Yellow Knife.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21340279

I was very lucky to see the comet today as there was a deck of stratus that finished about 8 degrees above the western horizon. The tail is pointing slightly to the right now. It was probably the same brightness as yesterday, there was some thin cloud or haze in front of the comet. Viewed with 8x40 binoculars.

I saw PANSTARS on Thu, Fri and Sat. The best view was on Sat. Also on Sat it was just barely visible as a point of light with the naked eye. This is in moderatly light poluted Orange Park ( NE Florida ), but we do have a nice view of the western sky.

He also said that the primary objective is to complete the work at the Bay to fully understand it, then move on to some other targets they had bypassed on the way, then to generally head to Mt Sharp. After all they have confirmation of a habital enviroment, the clays at MT Sharp no longer have the importance they once did. I suspect we'll arrive at MT Sharp at the 2 year mark and the mission will continue, as the life of the rover is percieved to be decades rather than years, barring of course a series of critical failures.

Not ISON but I saw Comet PAN-Starrs briefly today through 8x40 binos. It was pretty dim, but a tail was discernible. It does not look like the images you see on the web though.

Yikes, poor Curiosity, hope the young girl will be ok...............

I find that the images are too far apart in that glyph.

It's amazing what the designers had to think of to cover as many bad situations as possible and for the general day to day use.

No point in taking photos of the rover everytime, we came here to explore Mars not photograh Curiosity every day like tourists !

Is the reason for the reaction wheels failure available to the public ?

Thats very nice.

Lol, that depends who you work for, last week was a 2 day break......Also I worked New Years eve too, as I am sure millions of us did.

The Weather Channel just said the weather on Mars is unpredictable, which as we all know is not really true.

The ones they have now don't need to be anywhere near the impact.

RIP Sir Patrick. I first remembered him from way back when I watched the Moon landings. The Sky at Night was an awesome show.

My understanding was the small team was not setup to do a lot of imaging, the system will record the earthquakes, if any, and send the data to Earth once every month or so. They only need a Navcam mosaic to record the local area, and help deploy the 2 experiments.

Steve said the Mössbauer is dead, they ran out of Cobalt a long time a go.
He skirted the question about the APX time, but it's working pretty much as normal, as other people have pointed out the half life of it's source is 18.1 years.

AGU videos are at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

Why the sigh, they report accurately in the article the current situation. Everyone needs a headline, that is what pays their mortgage......

Whats the link again for today news briefing ?

I found it.

http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

I am on FF17 and still have the problem.

Are they not required to release it all to the PDS eventually ?
Also I would imagine from all the instrumentation they'll have a really good and precise EDL reconstruction. As they want to be able to sell/re-use the guided entry and Sky Crane for other missions.