Note the wording of the press briefing has no certainty whatsoever that any XXM might be approved. This burn simply preserves the option.

AFAIK - an XXM is yet to be approved..

Exacly like fine flour, cornflour, talc, exceptionally fine grained dry material.

Contour - no - but there is this - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16158.jpg
You could have found it by going to the first page under 'Mars' on the photojournal.

Yes - the full size is here : http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/692127m...9-full_full.jpg

I find the NASA HQ websites very hard to navigate so I tend to use the photojournal where you'll find it also

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16159

(PS Base map from Fred Calef, annotation by me )

Look identical to similar exercises at Gusev and Meridiani.

I used to maintain one at CafePress - but the quality of the products wasn't something I was especially happy with so I culled it. The effort in setting it up really didn't justify the tiny tiny revenue it generated.

I want to thank Helvick for his hard work. The new server is breathtakingly snappy and should be a great home for UMSF for many many years to come!

Beautiful work mshell - that you very much ( and GREAT first post!! ) - that shows the tiny wedge so very well.

There are FOUR HUNDRED scientists on the MSL team. Four hunded of them. There are spectroscopist, biologists, sedementoligists, meteorologists, geologists, mineralologists, hydrologists and dozens of other disciplines in between.

'outside their area of expertise'? I can guarantee you that for several of them - that's exactly their area of expertise.

Count me down for some pink Tutu action

Yes it would - and on that page you would see that at these very low pressures, the temperature difference between melting and boiling is very small.

Quite- we''re dancing around a tiny tiny wedge at the low pressure end of the liquid part of the H2O phase diagram. Even with dramatic salt content, that end of the diagram doesn't change much.

It would boil, would it not?

The Sol 50 one should be caught in that Sol 50 aft M100 panorama.

This is the kicker. Are there conditions where liquid water could exist on the surface of Mars today. Yes. Two problems, where does it come from, and it would so very quickly evaporate away that its existence could only ever be transient.

So we are extending the GRAIL/MoonKAM Eyes on the Solar System interface this coming week to include the extension, but even we don't have details in the final decommissioning. There's a big +/- in there, and no detail on the finality of it all yet.

Seems like a lot of mass/complexity to do something that the winds are going to do to you anyway, right? I wish we had the budget to do TiME, CHopper and InSight.

Why must it have been water? The theories I have seen suggest wind.

Everything I've read suggests the lakes are ethane/menthane - not longer more tar like hydrocarbons.

Some of the SAR Topo passes have shown the surfaces to be mill-pond smooth.

Your options basically are 'SAM may or may not have detected methane'. Isn't that fairly obvious?

If some startling revelation were found, they would have a press conference about it when they were confident in the results. If there were something up with SAM they would ( as with REMS ) let us know.

No news isn't bad news or good news.

On what basis are you saying it's 'jamming'. You don't know how long AEGIS has been worked on at JPL for MSL deployment. You don't know when it started, what the schedule is like, what the testing plan is etc etc. You're talking as if the flight software engineers are morons.

They are not.

What latitude would suit observers? McNaught was very much for our Southern Hemisphere friends.

Note that the thesis concludes that " in less than a month a large part of the blue, green, yellow and red areas just above the embedded magnets on the MSL calibration targets will be almost completely obscured by dust" - 48 sols in and I don't think we could say that they're 'almost completely obscured' so we already have reason to question its conclusions.

Note - you're not using calibrated data - you're using JPG's on a rapid release raw website. You're not comparing apples to apples at this point.

Calibration targets get dirty. It happened on Viking, MPF, MER, PHX...and it's happening on MSL.

Let's see if Mars behaves the same as that wind tunnel test.I'd be surprised if it does- Mars rarely plays by the rules.