Not too bad a drive that - it's the slightly cobbled surface that they got good traction on before, not the deep sand that bogged them down for a month

Doug

I can see WHY people might go "puddle" - but that's not what it looks like to me.

It just looks like fine wind blown dust.

It's everywhere, lots of nice smooth dunes, nice downwind tails from rocks, these are nothing different to me.

Doug

That's what happens when a PI tries to become a program manager

Hey ho - I still think there's scope to fly this instrumentation in a slightly larger package, and definite scope for a mission of this Genre w.r.t v.v.small

Doug

I see wind blown dust and not a lot else.

Doug

And of course, a couple of days worth of IDD work minimizes the loss caused by restricted sols or weekends

Doug

When you make a post on this forum - there's a 'File Attachments' section just under the main text box - browse for the image, and then when you post - it'll get uploaded

Doug

Follow the recent flash-memory DUMP that resulted in year-old images of a trench in Eagle crater being downlinked, I saw this thread and was all ready to go "NO, ACTUALLY, that was AGES ago"

but um

Yup - new trench - they'll probably IDD it over the weekend.

Doug

They've done one of those 6-brush patterns to then aim MiniTES at.

They did it on Humprhrey approx Sol 50ish iirc, and again on a rock on the rim of Bonneville

Doug

There's <2 years before final ATLO ops - there isnt time to fart, let alone bolt wheels on it.

Doug

Liquid water can not exist on mars given the temp and pressure. It's that simple.

Dust can do very very strange things in low gravity environments The things you have on your site Aldo - seem like classic wind errosion to me.

Doug

imho - aerobrake Cassini into Titanian orbit and do radar obs for the entire moon - and hope that it's still functioning for an 8kbps relay from a follow on blimp mission - but design the blimp mission with the capacity for say 500bps DTE via a MGA or similar - use MSL heritage power supply on the blimp - badda bing badda bang

Doug

No, I mean any HGA worth having would act like a sail on a titan blimp and blow it around quite a lot so you'd have difficulty pointing. It'd be hard anyway - but even worse with a big HGA. The only way to go is with an Omnidirectional + relay

Doug

Who know

There is a crater or a couple of 'medium' sized ( eagle<crater<endurance ) craters out east - so you may well be right

Doug

HGA + Titan Atmosphere = big sail = hard to get good earth pointing

Doug

I think it's a technical term known as "FLOOR IT"

They've got a few science targets on the way - so there's going to be science-data-rich sols for a few sols at a time, then thin days on a long week of driving.

These long driving days are good because they give a great chance to REALLY dump out the flash ( images from 12 months ago getting dumped out at the moment) - because you get nice long drives with not THAT much science data going on. You can also turn-in-place to optimise UHF passes without any trouble and thus get really good downlink volumes.

I think they're emtying flash RIGHT out ready for a big colour pan at Vostok so they can take it in, say, two sols ( instead of the 4, 5, 8, 10 odd sols that some pans have taken ) and then get moving again if there's nothing interesting, and spend the next week or so downlinking it while they're covering ground.

On a good day - they could get 250Mbits down in a couple of Odyssey passes. At 4:1 compression - thats 600 odd pancam frames. (bear in mind however, that a 4 filter panorama required 264 frames and a lot of housekeeping data, and Pancam is only one of 5 instruments onboard

Doug

I'm sure it'll get that funding - a pre launch press conf mentioned that they have several follow-on candidate targets.

Of course - the spacecraft may get damanged during the flypast, who knows.

I think they're planning to use Genesis for training, and to measure some solar wind features as well - if nothing else, DI could be used for that.

DI will only be 6 months old when it's primary mission is over. For most spacecraft, they've barely finished checkout and have 8 years ahead of them at that stage

Doug

Rim of Victoria and the outcropping of Vostok??

Doug

Actually - that I havnt found...

i.e. this has something in it
http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator...rover=B&sol=180

and this doesnt
http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator...rover=B&sol=181

ditto

http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator...rover=A&sol=180 is full and
http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator...rover=A&sol=181 is empty

Doug

Yup - Odyssey will go roughtly North South, so if the rover is facing North South then the PMA and LGA could easily obstruct the UHF antenna.

Turning 90 degrees in place and there's less obsctruction and infact, you can turn during the pass to make it even better.

Doug

If you're cunning - you can find almost all of the pancam imagery anyway - just none of the usefull navigation pages, or the other usefull stuff.

Doug

I can download the file - but it wont play

Doug

Ahhh - THAT makes sense - I thought it was looking SW - but it makes obvious sense now...duhhhh

Doug

I dont think we're as far along as http://img136.exs.cx/img136/386/slopemap7fp.jpg would suggest. Infact - I dont think that's even west spur. West spur is the one in the background



I may be totally off - but I think thats much more accurate.

Doug

Time it right and I see no reason why it couldnt be done at a similar approach speed as say a Mars entry. The atmosphere is very very 'tall' - so a high, low angle entry might not be so bad. The entry speed of Huygens wasnt THAT bad actually - and I'm sure a system could be built to handle say, double that. you just have to dedicate more mass to EDL. Might be scope to try an entry balute in this situation perhaps - I believe the Russians tried it in LEO once, not sure how succesfull it was.

Doug

DEEP rat hole....

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/mi...HPP2957M2M1.JPG

Doug