This is one of them, tuvas:

solar panel

-the other Doug

Yeah, my only thought was that it must be looking past the solar panel into Phoenix's own shadow. But I downloaded the picture and blew it up, and saw no detail in the black area at all, which I didn't expect.

Still -- lots of reflected light plus the shadow is the only explanation that makes sense, I think.

-the other Doug

Yeah, that was my thought, Doug. I thought about lens flare and cosmic ray hit, too -- but the thing casts a shadow. Lens flares don't cast shadows.

-the other Doug

Anybody have any ideas as to why the background behind one of the solar arrays appears to be completely black? Nothing, including the sky, ought to be completely black up there right now...

-the other Doug

Whatever that light-colored "splinter" is in the one horizon view, in the mid-to-far field between us and a bump on the horizon, it's real. It casts a shadow that is plainly visible beyond it. And it really does appear to be as skinny as it looks.

My bet is that it's the heatshield, which sliced into the ground edge-on.

-the other Doug

I was really impressed -- I had the UofAZ site up and, within just a few seconds of when the images started to show up on NASA TV, they started populating on the Images from the Lander page.

I'm really happy right now...

-the other Doug

EEEE DEEE ELLL!
EEEE DEEE ELLL!
EEEE DEEE ELLL!

-the other Doug

I opened my peanuts a couple of hours ago and have been munching them slowly. I'll have plenty to last through the landing.

Honey-roasted, m'self.

-the other Doug

The EDL timeline graphic shows the landing at 4:53:36 pm. Column heading says "Eastern Time (Estimated)." The PAO person just corrected it, but...

-the other Doug

Whichever NASA TV gets ported into my cable system had been running to no-commentary views of the control room, and now have a "coming up" slide for the beginning of commentary at 5:30.

Video has popped in and out for me a couple of times over the past half hour, I figure at this point that this is just NASA getting their feeds straight.

-the other Doug

OK, good. I almost endng up spending the next little bit of this time on the phone to Comcast. Just after NASA TV here started the no-commentary coverage at 5pm my time, the screen went blank. All other channels were working, just not NASA TV.

I was actually working my way through the Comcast phone menu when it came back up just a couple of minutes ago.

-the other Doug

And as for my fave YouTube offering:

Red Rover

from which comes the line we definitely do NOT want to hear today:

"How many feet in a kilometer? HOW MANY FEET IN A KILOMETER???!!!"



-the other Doug

I'll be killing time waiting for this evening by, among other things, participating in a great American Memorial Day tradition and watching the Indianapolis 500 motorcar race.

Which just started.

-the other Doug

And I'll be watching just a few miles from you, Mike, from the living room of my house in Minneapolis.






-the other Doug

Well, Phil, I can tell you that there are no such animals for Apollos 11 and 12. The DAC failed to run during Apollo 12's lunar liftoff, and Apollo 11's DAC wasn't started until after pitchover.

I'm still amazed that, with the number of times the movie cameras failed during Apollo, that they worked fine during every single landing. There are no lost landing approaches from Apollo, all are safely recorded for posterity.

-the other Doug

I was calling out the time based on the NASA Phoenix site. So, NASA are ERT kind of guys and Tucson are SCET kind of guys?

Besides, I still insist that nothing occurs until someone is aware of it...

-the other Doug

In exactly 24 hours from this moment, I'll either be celebrating, or feeling incredibly sad...

-the other Doug

Not yet! 24 hours and five minutes, as I type this...

-the other Doug

Actually, no, it's right now just a touch more than 24 hours to landing.

Landing time tomorrow is 4:53 pm Pacific Daylight Time. PDT is 7 hours behind London time, and two hours behind my time.

So, the landing tomorrow will be at 6:53 pm my time (CDT), and it is 8 minutes until then -- 6:45 -- right now. So, we're 24 hours and eight minutes away...

-the other Doug

Well... just because a body generates more heat than it receives through insolation doesn't necessarily mean there is something tremendously unique or exotic creating the heat. The original compression of a gas giant generates an enormous amount of heat, which takes an *awfully* long time to percolate up through the planet and out into its less-dense layers (and thence into space).

The heat Jupiter generates may be nothing more than the residual heat from its original accretion.

-the other Doug

That was an excellent episode. However, this clip doesn't contain my favorite exchange from it.

The Galileo V mission being presented is a barely fictionalized version of the MPL debacle, complete with the DS2 penetrators. Someone is explaining to Josh how the penetrators were supposed to work -- falling unrestrained by braking systems to smash into the ground at hundreds of km per hour and penetrating into it, after which they were expected to work perfectly. At which point, Josh says something about how he didn't think NASA spacecraft depended on the Acme school of physics...


Me too, Stu. Me, too.

-the other Doug

Honestly, I doubt it. Cable news isn't as reflective of public interest as you might think. I'd be more tempted to believe CNN will cover the event with a certain interest because Miles O'Brien, their science correspondent, has a major interest in the landing and has been effective in selling the coverage to his superiors.

O'Brien has been a worthy successor at CNN, overall, to John Holliman, the late science correspondent who was at the top of NASA's list in its informal Journalist in Space considerations many years ago. It was (and is) a tragedy that Holliman was killed in a car accident, but O'Brien has maintained CNN's committment to carrying major space events. (And no, I don't think it's because he happens to share a name with a major Star Trek character...)

-the other Doug

True -- but of the five successful, 60% (three) were airbag landings, and only 40% (two) were of the rocket descent variety. And the one failure out of six was not only a rocket descent, it was the progenitor spacecraft to Phoenix.

Obviously, Phoenix has been tested and its EDL given more scrutiny than any other Mars lander to date, precisely because of that one failure. And Phoenix has been changed in many fundamental ways since its original construction as MPL's sister ship. So you can't read too much into the fact that Phoenix started out as MPL's near-twin. There are still many similarities, but this design has evolved a lot, at least partially due to the 12 MPL failure scenarios the review panel came up with (one of which had 12 different sub-scenarios). A fair amount of work went into redesigning the spacecraft and its operations to avoid each of the MPL failure scenarios, so you gotta think that increases Phoenix's odds.

But looking at the larger picture, if you look at all American unmanned rocket descent landings on all bodies, you get a success ratio of eight out of 11 (five of seven Surveyors, two of three Mars landers, and -- possibly stretching the point a bit -- NEAR), or roughly 73%. Add in manned rocket descent landings (six of six Apollo Lunar Modules), and you get 14 out of 17, or just over 82%.

So... all that said, my gut feeling is hovering somewhere between 65 and 75 percent. The one thing that concerns me is that the best terrain for Phoenix's mission seems to lie in the uprange and midrange portions of the ellipse -- the downrange portions seem rockier, with more vertical relief... i.e., generally less safe. I would guess this is because the downrange end gets into the pretty rubbly-looking ejecta blanket from that nearby big crater.

And if you look at the results of the three direct-approach American landers that succeeded (MPF and the MERs), each one of them landed at least somewhat long.

This time, anyway, if anything goes wrong, we'll have a lot better chance of knowing what happened than we did back in '99. For some reason, that unclenches my gut a little bit.

-the other Doug

Mine will likely be the honey-roasted variety.

-the other Doug

Actually, the Foster's we get in the U.S. is brewed in Canada by the same people who brew LaBatt's Blue. I doubt it bears much similarity, other than in packaging, to what's available down under.

Beers vary not as much by brand name as by where in the world they are brewed, I think. For example, when I visited England 11 years ago I fell in love with Caffrey's Irish Ale. I've found something with the same name here in the States, but nothing with the same flavor.

-the other Doug