No - not a 1000 sol extension - a total life of 1000 sols ( so around 550 more )

Doug

Yes - it's possible, they will be able to talk and if for no other reason that to test the ability - I imagine they'll use it if they're still alive when MRO arrives

Infact - the early aerobraking elliptical orbit will give very long UHF passes, and combined with MRO's downlink of up to 4 Mbits - the potential is enormous

Doug

I'll hold one end - and you start walking, stop when I give it two tugs so I can tie the next reel on, then get going when I give it three tugs.

That - or wait for MRO- with it's 4mbps downlink

I think MEX is about as able as Odyssey - and it would be a nice repayment of the Odyssey-Beagle 2 attempts - if Odyssey takes a few days longer that would be a very good idea - but with MARSIS antenna deployment due soon - would they be up for it?

Doug

Seing as we're nearly on Sol 450, and there's another 100 sols at LEAST to be spent in the hills - and they'll go SW after the peak to investigate the SWn side for perhaps another 100 sols....the ballpark is as far away now as ever

Doug

One 12 minute UHF pass with Odyssey = 184 Mbits
Typically done 2 times per sol, call it 300 Mbits.

300 Mbits at 8kbps DTE (on DSN antennae already scheduled for other missions) = 10.4 hrs. The most they could use the DTE for in a sol is a couple of hours, it takes a lot of power, and means that a single sols data would take perhaps 4 sols to downlink - during which time, the flash memory will have filled up - two fold

MGS uses the MOC buffer for UHF ops - and so it plays hell with scheduling of MGS ops - has to be planned quite well in advance. Odyssey was doing more than enough for relay ops - so MGS was turned back to mapping ops. They only uplink to MGS about 3 or 4 times a week - and the sequence to include fill-in UHF passes would take a week or so to write - so by the time they've written the sequences, uplinked them....Odyssey will be back on course

Doug

I think it will becomer harder to justify - but not impossible. I'm sure that given a few more hundred sols they can get even more efficient at driving these things - less chains in the chain of command and so on.

This has always been my main gripe with people pitching for half a dozen MER clones - given a few hundred sols of operation, it's the running of the things that costs a fortune

But - even at $50m/year (which is about right I believe) - they are a bargin and should be used until they die.


Doug

Thats getting on for 18 - 20km away

Doug

A typical rover day - roughtly - in local solar time....

10:00 - Wakeup
11:00 - Direct from Earth HGA uplink of days commands
11:30 - 5 min carrier only tone on LGA to confirm handover to new sequence (if driving at the same time, this is called a honk - and no, they've not observed a dopler from the rover driving )
11:40 - Sometimes a nap for a half an hour, or an hour.
15:00 - Sometimes an Odyssey Pass
16:00 - Sometimes an Odyssey Pass - usually one, sometimes 2 - about 90 mins apart
17:00 - Sleep
if deep sleep -thenskip straight thru to the following morning, otherwise
03:00 - 04:00 - same UHF as before, one or two, about 90 mins apart.

The bulk of the rovers activities occur between around 11:00 and 15:00. Very VERY little data gets downlinked via DTE on the HGA usually - as it's power inefficient compared to UHF ( on a Whrs / Mbit scale )

I imagine, without UHF passes - they might use an extended HGA pass in the morning and add some DTE after the uplink - and perhaps another short one in the afternoon to downlink housekeeping data for the day, and a very small ammount of science data - probably little more than thumbnails, and reduced navcam frames.

Doug

MSL is something like 10km - but considering MER was 0.6km...

Doug

When thinking about the distance driven - a fair gauge of the maximum traversability of where a rover is is simply to take an average - so for Opportunity - I would suggest that in it's 110 sols since leaving Endurance have had it cover around 3ish KM -so I would suggest that a fair gauge of it's traversability at meridiani is something like 30 sols/km. Yes - I know it did more than a km in less than a week- but that was a short sprint that HAD to be followed by down time for downlinking.

Spirit - on the otherhand - is a much slower proposition really - it took from sols 85 to 154 to get from Bonne to the Hills - thats around 69 sols to cover about 2500 metres - so I would suggest about the same figure for Spirit - call it 30 sols/km roughly.

So - if you want to travel 5km - thats 150 sols.

10km - 300 sols.

Give that the rovers are about 6500 miles apart, or 10 500 km

At the average 'distance covering' pace of the rovers during phases of mainly driving - it would take 315,000 sols to drive from one rover to the other - or as little as 160,000 sols if they were to meet in the middle

Even to cover the tiny distance between Viking 1 and pathfinder would take 20,050 sols

Doug

Now that's bad news. I suppose they could bring MGS back into a relay role, but it would take about as long to write and uplink the commands for that as it will to fix odyssey - any URL's with news on this?

Doug

I would head S - SW

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/0...03.gusev25m.gif

Toward the slightly different terrain and some interesting craters - and just at the edge of the ellipse is perhaps a slight hill-edge or something like that.

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/newimg/V079...JPEG&stretch=S2



Doug

The obvious thing would be to hang around rock-hounding ont he way to the summit - then as the season progresses, head whichever way best aids the power budget

Doug

You can detect the radiation from Chernobyl in plants the world over. Ditto certain volcanic events etc. Simply to maintain the validity in studying martian life - we have to be very very carefull with it. If life is there, then like our own it is probably a delicate thing that we need to be sensitive towards. How will history judge us if we render all species, if any, on the first planet we visit outside our own, extinct?

Doug

Baby steps maybe - but it was more than 100m in total - which was quite an achievment.

If you scale up from that to Spirit, at say 4km - then you've have to ask MSL to do 160km for a similar scale up

Doug

taa daa

Go to the PDS and there's probably a bigger version

Doug

No - Victoria is very big, very deep, and very much larger than Endurance - let alone viking and voyager

Doug

105mm I believe.

Doug

It isnt the backshell. It's the wrong colour, the wrong size, and the wrong distance.

Doug

It was never meant to be a complete photo-real job - I only though of it an hour before I left work yesterday I just though I'll just botch it up and whack it out for a laugh - NO ONE will think it's real - but they might go "heh..cool"



The colour thumbnail does look quite good though

I was going to do just the mast in a RHAZ shot - but couldnt get it to look any good at all and the alpha layer was giving me grief with the shadow tga - so I thought "Sod it - it'll be easier to render the whole damn thing" - and it was

Doug

We cant see the heatshield anymore - why should we be able to see the backshell?

Doug

Amazingly it took a while to get right as the one you can download and built from the Nye Labs website is VERY wrong !

Doug

The - err - sundial mast sat on the ground next to a rock

Doug

It was bad enough that two people fell for it hook, line + sinker

I was going to post this one at the same time...



But it wasnt really good enough to be fool-worthey

Doug

The backshell and parachute were observed from Eagle Crater - and look very very different to what we're seing here

Doug