One hopes that Spirit isn't seeing some wear and tear from the computer doing very many reboots at the start of its mission. Didn't Spirit just have some computer issues before the latest software upload?

And how does this effect Oppy. Does it stand down to see if a common software bug could effect it?

Brian

Same here. "Live from the moon" gave me goose-bumps. And the launches in those days were adventures. Fair failure rate.

SOL 1675

What does the winner get? I already have several Bentleys.

Upon looking at sol 5 pictures of "sliding rock", I think it should be renamed "rolling rock". Or am I drinking too much Pennsylvania beer?

Thank you ustrax! I'd never heard of The Arcade Fire before. I'm a richer man now. Sleep well and dream of a smooth landing.

Brian

To make this a practical tool, we need laser com. to earth. How close are we?

Brian

Note: I just got a high speed line and so could watch this video.

If you are a fan of pink floyd and 2001, this is a must see video. Go to a quiet dark place, turn off the lights and fire this thing up!
It's amazing the sensibilities of the two works mesh perfectly and it held my interest more than the original movie ending.
that was a wonderous era.
R.I.P Stanley kubrick and Arthur Clark

Brian

Be warned - I just just woke up everybody in my home tonight I laughed so loud.

Brian

I just got an e-mail from my parents who live just south of tampa bay florida. The shuttle produced a large sonic boom there as it came in. The house shook! There were lots of 911 calls to the police. COOL!!

Brian

Check out all of the launch photos on SpaceflightNow. A breathtaking time exposure of the rocket arching thru orion with the solids twinkling down around it!

Isn't it sweet when you stumble across such cool things!

Is the thing some kind of device to measure thrust without use of a robust test stand?

I was 11 years old living near Chicago. My family huddled around a black and white tv, watching Walter Chronkite (who else) and I believe Wally Shirra do comentary. I was scared listening to the static filled com watching the animation of decent with a countdown clock below. This got worse when the clock reached zero and the animated LEM landed but Armstrong was still flying over a boulder field looking for a place to put down. Then they landed and Chronkite lost it- tears welling up. I tried to hide it but I did the same. I took some Polaroid pictures of the screen (fading now) which I still cherish.

If anyone doubts that the thing actually happened, go visit all the many remarkable (remaining) facilities built for the project, and skim the voluminous and detailed nasa tech journals in library repositories. If they didn't do it they spent enough money and did enough research to actually have done it!

Thank you very much for this thread.

Yikes! Thats a spectacular and unique amount of dust accumulation. I wonder what percentage of total erosion and deposition occurs during these periods of near global dust storms?

Brian

Even though Married With Children IS one of the greatest shows ever made, it can't be Big Bertha. A large rock at a previous lander location had its name changed from big bertha to big joe because the former was seen as sexist.

Perhaps a two word name; the first being an innocuous human name and the second some kind of snake representing the long set of wheel tracks it leaves.

That thing looks huge - like it could run over a mer and not even notice it! I sure see why the mer landing system wouldn't work. How much faster will it be than mer?

Thanks for the great pics.

Brian

Just to clarify things for me, we are proposing winds comming generally from the south and scouring or depositing material. So these winds are running parallel to the dunes we (oppy) drove thru. So those dunes must be at the moment fossil dunes, as I wouldn't expect dunes to line up parallel to the wind.

If the wind occasionally shifts to move the dunes, would we see evidence of old streaks? Just what relative ages do we put on these features?

Brian

Wow. Thanks. I can hardly wait to get my MANOS on that!!.

Maybe rocks can be brought to the surface in such a regular pattern by a frost heaving sort of effect which mimicks, for my lack of a better analogy, Hadley cells - the process which gives zoned planetary atmospheric circulation. The surface cracking may come from a more recent era where the area dried out, the circulation stopped and the top layers cracked.

Brian

Has anyone suggested that a future rover have strings or wires intentionally attached to the solar array deck so as to swing around and wipe the deck of some accumulated dust? Maybe around the circumfrence to push it off the deck sides? These wouldn't be powered, just loose but tied down at one end.

I'm 47, a dialysis tech in Iowa.

I still have reel to reel audio recordings of some gemini flights I recorded off of the tv as a child, and still get a charge out of watching videos of the ranger probes hitting the moon.

Spent most of my formative years with my rock collecting father, trudging up mountains, down rock quarrys, and thru road cuts collecting minerals - so victoria crater fascinates me.

One of my fondest memorys is of the voyager 2 neptune encounter when I spent many hours with a hand full of strangers at a local college watching pictures trickle back to earth. We marveled at how far technology had come, discussed (and solved!) all of the worlds problems, then went our separate ways. I never thought I would find a place like that again until I found UMSF!

Brian

Doug, that building complex is gorgeous. If I ever win the lottery I'll build a copy and donate it to UMSF!

Brian

[quote name='Nix' date='Sep 27 2006, 03:02 PM' post='70140']
This look right?

If the horizontal blockiness is the pre-impact stratigraphy, and the 45 degree angle layers are shock effect or angle of repose mass wasting, is the finer grained lighter colored stuff on top of the bluff the total thickness of the ejecta blanket of victoria?

Or have I been bashing my head with bricks too long?

Brian

The MER team is being aggressive and the sailing looks smooth. Sol 869.

And thank you all for this wonderfull ride!

Yes. I was thinking along these lines, while driving (roving) home today. I'm really obsessed by these dunes!

I can't picture how a dune flows over a crack in bedrock without filling it in. So maybe these are old dunes which "cracked" when the bedrock shifted or settled (sink hole effect?). Could rocks be tossed up in one third G. ?

I really hope this isn't to stupid but are these dune depressions being formed by wind vortexing off of some feature upstream of them and scouring out a pothole in a location where the vortexes are sent by local topography? I think these dunes are really old. I see rather large rocks sitting on a few of them.