His company has done excellent work to make instruments (HDTV based) for RMS Titanic expeditions - no harm in him being onboard.

Missions are often critisized for not making things accesable enough to the public - he's the top man to rectify that situation I'd have thought.

He's not an out and out scientists - but he's got the skill sets in himself and his company to make a genuine BIG contribution to MSL imho

Doug

He's part of the MSSS team working on the MSL instruments ( particularly Mastcam and the Des imager I believe )

Doug

I think actually - that's highly unlikely. The Voyager/Ulysses funding is a totally seperate pot of cash to the Mars Program - and if nothing else - having two rovers on mars is an excellent way to train people for future missions w.r.t. planning, operations, communication, colaboration, long term planning and so forth - some excellent modes of practice are being put in place that will only benefit ( and save money ) future missions

They only shut down one of the viking landers iirc - and then only by accident The other just died.

FWIW - I think we'll find that the public outrage and turning functioning probes off will save Voyager, Ulysses - and the others.

Doug

All the Donington stuff was done straight in PTGui - infact those panoramas are what taught me how to do the whole mosaic stitching 'thing'.

I've never been able to get Navcam to stitch well - it's just too wide an angle - the camera bar moves so much between frames that there is a different perspective at the overlap of frames

Which gives me an idea - why not have your mast mounted camera so that the camera used most often for imaging (i.e. left with MER ) - is over the rotational axis ot the mast - that would reduce parallax effects to a degree

doug

The atmospheric opacity goes up and down like an excited puppy anyway. Regional and local dust-storms give it trends - but it jumps about from .8 to 1.5 over a period of sols as it is.

But - looking at the Navcam imagery - Spirit's obviously had a cleaning event much like opportunity - that that is BRILLIANT news.


Doug

Essentially the whole things enters in an aeroshell as usual - drops the heatshield, drops the backshell and enters a viking like terminal des. phase - but comes to a hover about 5m off the ground. The paylod ( rover in this case ) is then dropped down on cables, the cables are cut, and the crane flys off.

Some people think it's stupid and will never work

10 years ago - people thought the same thing regarding the three-body chute-backshell-airbag mechanics for MPF and MER

Doug

It's a good read

Doug

MRO's swath width is ENORMOUS!



6km width - which is 4x that of MGS

Doug

If I ban myself - lots of strange things happen and anyone who's reading the forum has a small event horizon appear on their monitor as the screen shrinks to the size of a stamp, then vanishes down the hole in the middle.

Somehow - with finishing a big project at work, seing a dust devil - then another one - then seing the powerhike, I'm in a really odd party mood. I really want to have MER party !!

Doug

OK- so how do we GET these meshes - they'd make cool VRML thingies

Doug

I used the 4,5,7 ( from the "oh right- if I put the right sort of numbers in that URL then I get the RAD or RAT files... place )

Doug

wooOOoooowoooOOoooowaooowooo AT THE CAR WASH......

I've just wrapped up the biggest chunk of a huge animation project at work which I've had to do on my own that's involved a LOT of late nights and the client loves it - then Spirit spots a Dust Devil. Then another one. THE gets a doubling in power budget

Today = good day.

Doug

As a drunken student at boarding school in the late '90s - a favorite cotswold past time of ours was cow-tipping.

Go out at about 2am and start making cows fall over.

It was cruel, it was unfair, it was naughty.

But my GOD it was funny!

Doug

You're joking.

are you?

Actually - looking at the 'darkness' of the cells on those navcam images, I dont think you are!

Doug

What we need is one to come OVER HERE.....HELLOOO....YES YOU....GOT SOME NICE DIRTY SOLAR ARRAYS FOR YOU

Likes buses - you wait 14 months then 2 come along at once - is it likely to be the same one photographed twice that far apart in only 80-something seconds? Theres a couple of km between the two locations, and MOC has often captured two or more devils in one image from orbit.


Doug

http://www.djellison.plus.com/don_pan/

Some pans I did up at Donington Park

Sadly, my Minolat Dimage 5 is beginning to get thru batteries like anything - as one last hurrah I'm going to make an external battery pack for it


Doug

For what it's worth ( which is sod all )



Thats the Sol 295 from Oppy.

At LAST - they've actually GOT one

Nice find

Here - have a mars bar

Doug

PhotoshopCS - and www.ptgui.com



Doug

Thats just internal reflection/refraction on the camera optics

Doug

The US involvement including - as it does - DSN support so we can talk to the bloody thing

I'm not going to get anti-manned flight on everyone - and I do think there's value in the ISS if for nothing more than the very experience of working in space and working internationally - but there's a LOT that's wrong with it and a lot that should be done differently.

The proposals for the follow on are just a farce - so complex and un-un-necessary. So many diferent modules and launch vehicles - it's a joke.

Doug

You know something - I always thought "well - they're running Voyager till they're totally dead - they'd NEVER turn off working rovers"

Now there's just a hint of doubt in my mind. I still cant imagine them doing it - but it DOES set a dangerous precident.

Doug

A bit of light driving over rubble probably rattled the dust off

Doug

I dont have the raw processing power to do full 360 pans with 60+ images in them. I thikn 13 x 3 is my record - and that was plenty big enough.

BUT

give me a dual 3.4G Xeon workstation with 4gb of Ram and a load of SCSI hdd's - and I'd do this stuff all day every day.



Doug

I'm all out of mars bars now

The crater I'm talking about is just outside the landing ellipse about 15-20km away

Doug