Me thinks the person who wrote this is not all that clued up on Space Exploration :

http://www.boston.com/news/science/gallery/mars_rover?pg=5

"The Mars rover Opportunity was photographed crossing the planet."

Darn good camera that isn't it ?

There is an interesting article in the "Breaking News" section of today's electronic Boston Globe, which often means it will be in tomorrow's print edition.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/article...eep_on_ticking/

:wheel:  :wheel:  :wheel:

An updated NH mission background and current status presentation, replete with
some nice eye candy, can be found as the topmost link at www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb

Marcel:

I don't know those DVDs myself, but would suggest eBay is worth a look. Oh, and if you're interested in the Apollo flights and/or Saturn launch vehicles, HMV have just started selling the Spacecraft Films range - and even advertising them!  I bought both Mighty Saturns sets and Apollo 11 for £100 recently.  Great stuff, with material you won'y have seen before (like: Saturn 1 development flight footage from within the S-IV oxygen tank showing the oxidiser draining away (I never realised before that LOX looks just like water when it's not boiling and steaming away!)).

Bob Shaw

And they found themselves on the defensive, [my emphasis] explaining why they pressed ahead with the launch when the same type of potentially fatal problem cropped up during a fueling test just three months ago and was accepted as an "unexplained anomaly."

Some engineers had pushed for further testing at the pad before committing to a liftoff, but were overruled by top managers who concluded that the replacement of cables, the electronics box and the tank itself was ample.

<snip>

The disappointment came just a day after an embarrassing turn for NASA, when a plastic cockpit window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged its fragile thermal tiles before the spacecraft had even taken off.

Jim Irwin's dream about following old tracks at Hadley-Appenine might *almost* have come true, then! 

(sigh)

I recently picked up a used boxed DVD set of the complete original series. 

The word "mothballed" came up at the press conference when talking about a possible mission extension.

To Ted: both the HRI and MRI images were multispectral -- but as yet, I don't have the wavelengths or even the number of filters.  I'll continue digging.  (There is a good simulation of what they were hoping for from the HRI, when it came to observing layers in the imact crater walls, at http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/tech/hri.html .)

... Just about the only thing we actually got out of Deep Impact that such an alternative mission couldn't have provided was the data the impact may have provided on the chemical composition of really deeply buried subsurface ices -- and was this enough to compensate for the other stuff we passed up?

This returns me to something I've wondered about for years: just how did Deep Impact actually get selected?  Its selection was a total surprise to me; it muscled ahead of other Discovery finalists -- Aladdin, and a VESAT or VESPER Venus orbiter -- which were not only finalists this time but had been during the previous selection, too (which D.I. never had been).  Is it possible that Dan Goldin intervened and ordered the selection of Deep Impact as yet another of his harebrained NASA PR stunts with questionable science return (Mars Pathfinder, with its cute but scientifically mediocre rover and not-very-efficient airbag system; the cancelled 2003 miniature Mars Airplane; the proposed all-girl Shuttle flight; the cancellation of a sensible 2003 Pluto probe in favor of a far more difficult and technically sophisticated early Europa Orbiter,  with the highly predictable result thaat we got neither)?  I already know that NASA HQ virtually ordered the selection of Phoenix in the supposedly "independent" 2007 Mars Scout selection; we were explicitly told so at the first Mars Roadmap meeting.

I don't think it's that bad- the main way they planned to see what was in the crater was to watch that stuff being blasted out into space, rather than look at what was left behind in the hole- they will have lots of data on what's inside the comet.  But seeing the crater would tell a great deal about the strength of the nucleus and about impacts in general.  If they can't see the crater through the the plume, it will be a disappointment, but not a disaster.

Footnote: the reason that the radiation dose for a Jovian polar orbiter that makes 50 Io flybys would be so much smaller than that for an actual Io Orbiter is because Jupiter's trapped radiation is concentrated not only close to the planet (except for its very closest region), but also around its equatorial plane, where the Galilean satellites orbit.  This is also what allows Juno to get away with orbiting so close to Jupiter (with solar panels, yet) without getting quickly fried; during the part of each orbit when it's near Jupiter's equator, it's also very close to the planet and thus closer than the range of Jupiter's most intense radiation belt.

Juno's orbit will go from only 4500 km above Jupiter's 1-bar air pressure level (it will be even closer to the tops of the ammonia clouds) all the way out to 30 Jupiter radii from the planet.  (They need to get that close to ensure really high-resolution gravity and magnetic maps of Jupiter -- it's the same orbit planned for the "INSIDE Jupiter" mission that was a Discovery finalist twice and has now been combined with two other Jovian Discovery proposals to create Juno.) 

That periapsis will wander somewhat in latitude, although I haven't got specific figures yet -- but I believe it's enough to theoretically allow flybys of any mooon out to Callisto.  PI Scott Bolton tells me that there are currently no plans for flybys of any of the moons (although, during our previous conversations, he had expressed some interest in the idea during the extended mission); but the description in Space.com says that Juno's camera may be used for longer-distance photos of Io and Amalthea.

It's important to remember that this mission has radically different goals from any mission to study Europa or the other moons -- its purpose is to study JUPITER, by God, and specifically its composition and the size of its rock/ice core, which are extremely important in answering questions about how the giant planets actually formed.  (This is one of the most important questions for planetary scientists right now, and there are two radically different theories.)  Also Jupiter's polar magnetosphere, which the NASA's Sun-Solar Systems Directorate -- separately from its Solar System Directorate -- has also declared to be an extremely important short-term goal for its own researches and worthy of a mission.  To achieve all this, it needs an orbit completely different from those that would be used by a moon-studying orbiter -- and since such a mission is also simpler and cheaper, they decided, entirely logically, to fly it first.

As for the Europa mixup, John Rehling doesn't mention the biggest villain of all: Dan Goldin, aka "Captain Crazy".  NASA's science advisory board recommended officially -- and entirely sensibly -- that a Pluto mission, which required no new technology at all, should be flown BEFORE the Europa Orbiter, and specifically in 2003.  Dan Goldin, however, was determined to reverse their order because of his personal obsession with astrobiology at all costs -- "Nobody gives a damn about Pluto", he told his staffers.  (His repeated urgings that NASA should use radically new technologies, entirely unnecessarily, to build a teeny-weeny Pluto probe --"the size of my fist", to quote one disgruntled researcher -- were, as he privately told his staffers, just a cover for the fact that he intended to kill the Pluto mission completely.) 

The result, given the very real and major new technological difficulties in flying a Europa Orbiter, were that we didn't get either mission -- or rather that the Pluto mission was delayed until 2006 and finally rammed through by Congress over the dead bodies of Goldin, Sean O'Keefe and President Bush, which means both a more expensive Pluto mission and a distinctly scientifically inferior one to what we would have had had it been launched in 2003 or 2004.  The case for such a mission, both scientifically and fiscally, was so strong that even the GOP Congress was finally firmly convinced of the idiocy of not flying it.  (To my continuing amazement, I myself ended up playing a significant role in getting that decision made -- largely due to a SpaceDaily article I published in 2000 pointing out that either the Stardust or CONTOUR comet probe could be easily redesigned to fly a Pluto mission cheaply -- which is why I have a free ticket to its launch next January.  No doubt other people had come up with the same idea; but Goldin, it later turned out, had been threatening to cut off their grants if they didn't keep their mouths shut.  They had no such leverage over me, and so I ended up -- entirely accidentally -- belling the cat.  But I digress.) 

Anyway, as a result of Goldin's monomania, we ended up getting both a Pluto mission later and worse and more expensive than we could have had it, but also probably some unnecesary delays to Europa Orbiter -- which were then made worse by the fact that O'Keefe, due to his total lack of engineering training, fell for the cretinous JIMO scheme to fly a nuclear-powered battleship to Jupiter, even though the science community had officially stated that it didn't want it.  (In this respect, as in many others, he got rolled by his unscrupulous NASA underlings; but one scientist has told me that O'Keefe's nuclear-enthusiast brother also helped talk him into it.)  Now -- years later than we could have been -- we're back to Square One where Europa Orbiter is concerned. 

What Ed Strick says is also true:  the first version of Europa Orbiter was cancelled becuase it had a $1 billion cost cap, which simply could not be met.  Now NASA's new Solar System Roadmap calls for it to be the first of the new class of "Small Flagship" Solar System mission -- costing between $700 million and $ 1.5 billion -- to be launched at 5-year intervals.  Europa Orbiter is recommended for launch in 2014 (and it looks more and more as though the ESA will collaborate with us on it).  The second Small Flagship is likely to be to Titan in 2019, and the third to Venus in 2024.

I think it is easier now. The main outer planets competition is now safely in the bag.

Mariner 5 was the Engineering Test Vehicle for Mariner Mars 1964.  It was never intended to fly, but was perfectly good hardware left over from the Mars mission.