It's on the parachute and a signal is still being recieved

Doug

Signal detected - it's survived entry

Doug

Nasa TV will be starting coverage in about 3 mins - but I'm watching multiple TV channels to see if any carry coverage - and will post any news thru the day as it happens

Doug

Right - EDL starts in about 25 minutes if you consider the one way light time. So - no more bets

Doug

I didnt know B2 went that far off course

Iron meteorite?


Doug

You know the game - pick a square - tell us what it is - and if Huygens lands in your square - you win absolutely NOTHING

The lines coincide roughtly with lines of lat and long ( see the big maps elsewhere for that ) - and so it is the lat and long which will be released in the next few weeks I'm sure - that will pick the winner

Reply with your pick - and dont pick one that's already gone. I'll try and update it with names etc later

Doug

With wind and a rock - you end up with the dust tail downwind from the rock - and an erroded area on the upside side.

Doug

It seems that the fine dusty soil is navigable - if it has lots of little pebbley things in it

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/fo...F3P1212L0M1.JPG

That looks much like the flat areas around the landing site - very navigable.

It's only when you get just dust - and no pebbles/cobbles at all - that the rover struggles.

I guess it's like throwing gravel down onto a muddy lane - it helps give you traction.

You can see the two types of surface here - http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/re...DHP1312L0M1.JPG

Further away - it's digging in a lot and leaving big black tracks - but closer - they're less brutal.

Doug

After billions of years of organic goo ( well, people and spiders and bacteria and fish and plankton and penguins and rhinos and turtles and birds and things ) - you could say the same about earth - yet land on the Derbyshire Dales and it'd be a hard clunk

Doug

I say something quite hard and icey - but with regions of sludge locally

Doug

There are parts of my throat that just dont make noises like that

Hoy (as in AHOY there) guns will do for me

I've heard Hi Gens, Ho Gens and Hi Gons in the past

Now - how do you say Scone

Doug

Seing as you're going to know that 4 hours later by virtue of the HGA downlink - there would be no quantitative benefit - and the only qualitative beneift is to satisfy an impatient mind. It costs you r/f interference that may damage relay ops, and involves using spacecraft systems that dont have to be used. When you're doing everything possible to avoid a safing incident - thats not wise anyway.

Furthermore - it's hoped that a signal ( but no telemetry ) may well be seen from earth, of Huygens - and using multiple antennae a trajectory can be calculated from the doppler shift measured.

In conclusion - the only benefit in LGA ops during relay ops would be to satify understandable impatients. The drawbacks include increased chance of orbtier safing ( very bad), possible R/F interference ( bad ) and it's duplicating what's hoped to be done on earth anyway.


Doug

Well - maybe they are having calibration problems afterall- poor focusing by the sounds of it

Doug

Maybe it's just printed small

Doug

Just as a factoid..

From a Huygens Document...
8 kbps for a nominal 137m profile equates to 65.76 Mbits - ( 8.2 Mbytes )
and a possible 43 mins of landed operations is 20.64 Mbits ( 2.6 Mbytes )
So - the maximum possible data load is around 86.4 Mbits (10.8 Mbytes )

However - I think that may be from a Document that predates the mission redesign.

According to the flyby PDF from JPL there's a total of 276 mins of orbiter relay - which equates to 132.48 Mbits ( 16.56 Mbytes )

In all - it's about the same as a good Mars Odyssey UHF pass

Doug

Found some interesting stuff

http://huygens.oeaw.ac.at/approach.html

If you find anything similarly cool - tack it onto this thread

Chute deployment is fairly high up - so compartively low pressure - and thus winds are less important.

Doug

I'd like to see MC set up as an educational project - with a bog standard imager setup in a mars yard and schools around the world can schedule a 5 sol misison with it.

Doug

Do you have a scanner

Doug

Yup - but - the orig '01 design included Marie Curie ( the sojourner development rover ) - and given that actually - almost wherever you go at meridiani, you're never far from some exposed rock - so it's APXS could have been deployed in that way. However - obviously - it's the RAT, MI, Mossbauer, Mini-TES and APXS combined that told the tale at Eagle Crater

Marie Curie at Meridiani is an astonishing thought though - imagine the distance the little thing could have covered - (a few hundred m? )and we'd have been able to watch it do it as well

Doug

Well - two obvious points.

-That image is colour - so it's not the b'n'w high res camera
- The Olympus Mons Calderra is 60km across - which at 2.3m/pixel is 26000 pixels across - and that image would be more like 31000

Give those factors - and the size of the image being 3100 across - it's a typo - there shouldnt be a . between the 2 and the 3

Doug

Victoria crater seems like the best 'cool thing' for 100's of sols of driving in any direction to me. it's likely to have 50 - 100 metre depth - 10m cliffs at the edge - and seemingly routes in, and would be a fitting end-of-mission location

Doug

MST - mountain standard time? whats that - GMT - 7?

Doug

Well - phoenix uses a combo of pathfinder heritage structure with MER heritage CCD's.

Now - if the combination allows a full MER CCD frame from the optics - then it will, infact, be slightly higher spatial resolution than MER ( 1022 x 1024 pixels in a 14.4 degree f.o.v. compared to MER's 16.6 degrees - and Pathfinders 256x248 over 14.4 degrees)

Given the fact that it will be in-situ for a long period of time, giving the time to allow a very low compression panorama thru all filters to allow super-resolution imagery of the full scene - I think Phoenix could be a much better imaging platform than MER given time Pity it's going to what might be a very very boring place visually. Interesting science - but not a sexy sort of place.

Doug