Myself and Ian O'Neil ( aka @astroengine ) will be on Radio 5 Live in about 15 minutes to talk about our memories of Sir Patrick
http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/

No doubt many of you have heard - Sir Patrick Moore passed away earlier today.

He presented the BBC's show 'The Sky at Night', every month for 55 years straight ( with one bout of salmonella causing him to skip 1 episode in more than 700 ). He wrote dozens of books and articles, and typed out replies to just about every letter that he received....

I know Stu and I were both much influences by Patrick's infectious enthusiasm.

Many old episodes of the show are online ( in real-player format unfortunately ) including the hour long Mars special from February 2007 - where yours truly was interviewed by the great man talking about what we amateurs do with imagery from Spirit and Opportunity
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/skyatnight/proginfo.shtml


Pete Grindrod, Chris Lintott and I sat with him during the Phoenix landing - his enthusiasm defied his old age and poor health. A true memory of a life time.

He may well have been the only man to have met Orville Wright, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong. He even accompanied Einstein's Violin playing on the piano. He outlived them all.

The worlds of astronomy, cosmology and space exploration have lost a gigantic ambassador today.

Next time you go out and see the night sky - have a drink for Patrick. Wherever he is now...that's probably what he's doing

The point regarding Europa is moot.

I explained why earlier in this thread and even linked to Casey's amazing article that explains it so very well
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreie...in-context.html

And the payload was competitively bid after the mission was selected. And MER was entirely focused on fitting in Pathfinder EDL and fitting what science they could within it. You're using very rose tinted programmatic glasses.

The payload will do what the mars science community want it to do. They will want it to do what the Decadal asked. You will get what you are 'looking for' - but not yet. Is it an ideal situation? No. Is it the best we can hope for given the Mars program budget profile - arguably, yes. Given the funding profile - it's simply not OK for HQ to flat out state this is step one of MSR. The payload has to be competed - the science community must decide what it's for. HQ are giving them the blank canvas that they can fill in how they see fit. If sample return is really what they want - then this vehicle can do it. If this were the other way around - we would see people complaining about HQ dictating the science goals of a mission rather than letting it be determined by the community's suite of available instrumentation competed for the ride.

Note - this decision doesn't come arbitrarily - it comes after the report that followed the summer long process of looking at the Mars program (engineering and science) with invited contributions from the full spectrum of the Mars science community.

This mission is an absolutely perfect enabler for MSR phase 1. The science community simply have to make it so.

The planetary science community produced the Decedal survey

The planetary science community will choose the 2020 payload

If the motivation to do caching was in the Decadal, it should end up on the rover by the same means. Peer review and community consensus opinion.

I see no reason in griping about a payload that hasn't even had an AO released yet.

There will be no sharp cut off of gravity - why do you mention that?

Pancam on both MER's took many color sequences of the sky. I'm fairly sure Pathfinder did as well.

Correct - although I think margin could be found elsewhere as well - The requirement was to be able to land 1000kg - which the system could easily have handled.

To be honest, I think Curiosity's system is doing so well ( and requiring so little heating ) that they probably will not ( and ought not to ) bother.

What would you call this?
http://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/GIF/v1la.12m.gif

The heatshield? No. Phenolic Impregnated CARBON Ablator. Moreover, it was very well instrumented using the MEDLI suite so it's performance can be measured and understood already.

Backshell? It did it's job - that's enough. parachute? We saw how well it did thanks to HiRISE, and, moreover, the deceleration performance that will have been recorded via IMU's

Skycrane? Well - there's not much point as it's just a football field sized debris zone - and lots of Hyrdazine lying around.

Just a cursory google or NASA tech reports search will show that actually, sealed caching mechanisms and a return capsule have all had significant design work and are far more mature than you're suggesting.



The earth return capsule will not be part of the ascent stage - it would be carried by the orbiter that will rendezvous with the ascent stage in orbit.

Science Results in 9 minutes live at
http://live.projectionnet.com/agupress/fm2012.aspx

No - specifically - cache samples for later collection for return to earth. SAM can't do that.

Errr - obviously. They said as much yesterday.

Fred - thank you.

And Other Doug.....I've never had a visit to the dry deserts of California when I didn't see dust devils. They're very very common here on Earth. Far more common than you think.

However - the value of >70 is small compared to >0.5

It's risen from only 2 to 2.3
Whereas the >0.5 has dropped from 25 to about 2.3

i.e. - the amount of particles between 0.5 and 70 has dropped to essentially zero.

We're (I think) in the area where the HP, HTIF and LTIF all meet - that three way junction at Glenelg. I'm guessing we landed on LTIF. Broken up fan deposites with lots of sand/fines etc would show up as low TI I would expect ( which is what we've seen) The brighter material to the N/E of us is the HTIF I believe. When we head south, we'll be on HP.

You can not scatter 'basal' on the surface. Basal is a descriptor derived from location. The basal unit is the bottom unit. It's not a type of material - it's a placement.

The basal unit IS visible from space. How do you think they mapped it and characterized it from orbit. Read the paper. Heck - just read the description I cited above.

You know that Basal and Basalt are not the same thing, right?

Not visible? They've already seen it (and attempted to characterise it) from orbit!

From Page 105-106 of their paper ( for those unfamiliar - it's available here - http://www.marsjournal.org/contents/2010/0004/ )
"Light-toned basal unit
The light-toned basal unit is distinguished from the crater floor units by a sharp drop of ~10 m (Figure 34a). The light-toned basal unit has a CTX albedo of up to 0.20, and is primarily composed of fractured rock that in some locations has a subtle texture suggestive of layering (Figure 39b). It has a moderate thermal inertia ranging from roughly 500-540 J m-2 K-1 s-1/2. Mesas of mound- skirting unit are common on top of the light-toned basal unit (Figure 34b), and much of the basal unit is covered by dark-toned mafic dunes. The light-toned basal unit slopes upward in a series of poorly-defined fractured, light-toned layers to form the northwestern side of the light-toned ridge unit (Figure 36a).
Dark-toned basal unit
The dark-toned basal unit (Figure 39) has a higher thermal inertia (~780 J m-2 K-1 s-1/2) than the light-toned basal unit. It has an albedo of 0.15-0.16 and occurs to the southwest of the landing ellipse and the light-toned basal unit. The transition between the light and dark-toned basal units (Figure 40) is sharp and the dark-toned basal unit appears to be topographically lower than the light-toned basal unit. This suggests that it is either stratigraphically lower or that the dark-toned unit is younger and fills a depression that had been eroded into the light-toned basal unit."

Plus - the paper goes on explicitly define a location to visit to help in characterizing it is an important stop on any MSL traverse.

What would you call Phobos geology. Deimos. Venus. Europa. Dione. Our own Moon. Titan. Nix. Hydra. Tempel 1. Itokawa. There are hundreds and thousands of worlds out there for us to explore, study and understand - and the science we will be practicing is geology / geomorphology / geochemistry etc etc.

Having a different word for the same scientific discipline just because it's a different place is nonsensical.

They will not. I was right - you don't know what bedrock means.

I'm going to repeat Emily's excellent words from earlier... this sentence proves that you just don't know what you are talking about. I suggest you stop talking about geology, and just listen instead. You could really learn a lot here.

I don't think bedrock means what you think it means.

The definition I've found
"solid rock underlying loose deposits such as soil or alluvium."

We have clearly already seen that at Gale crater - from the surface and from orbit.

Yeah - the same words were used by Maki et.al. in their 1999 Pathfinder paper
"Although Mars has long been called the "red" planet, quantitative measurements of the
surface color from telescopic and surface observations indicate a light to moderate
yellowish brown color. The Pathfinder camera measurements presented here support the
claim that the red planet is not red but indeed yellowish brown. "

Oh - I agree - I was just showing that MastCam data can be made to look just like PanCam data if one so chooses.

I'm also totally in agreement on the color. The best words I think to describe Mars are ochre and butterscotch.