I heard today that the announcement should be 'a week to 10 days' away.

I think the point Stu was making in post 133 is that this isn't the time or place for such a discussion. Period.

And with that the Imperial\Metric discussion is closed here. Any further comments around Imperial vs Metric measures in this thread will be deleted. Admin.

Out of the camera doesn't mean on the ground. They have to be pulled from the cameras own memory to the rover before getting downlinked.

And are you sure they were talking about MARDI and not the rest of the MastCam mosaic?

That would be news to me. It's going to take a few weeks to get the whole thing.



They're working on something exactly like that right now.

D

In the new MRO image, that has color over Curiosity itself - you can not only see the plume impingement dust removal - but also a bias to the ESE as a result of the descent stage turning to flyaway WNW

(added an anim gif showing the various parts of the impingement)

It's right here http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

Michelle Viotti

It's that angle so it fitted inside the aeroshell, and could be accessed for installation thru the rocket fairing.

This one is PICA. Phenolic impregnated carbon ablator.

Clue's in the title really. I wouldn't want to see a MER like approach.

Just a few examples....
There were only two FHAZ's
The descent stage prop tanks had gold insulation, not silver.
There were only 4 EMB's not 6
There was no RTG thermal cover
Glass window over the MastCAMs (when there isn't one)
No glass cover over the ChemCam (when there is one)
Cruise stage was just enlarged MER with 4 solar arrays segments, not 6.
Parachute colors pattern is 3/4's missing
Powered Descent Vehicle dances left and right. It's actually a rock steady divert maneuver.
Descent stage flyaway is to the right (it could only fly away foreword or backward)
Descent stage flyaway is straight towards the science goals ( intentionally - it would go which ever way, fwd/bwd, was most away from science)
Entry animations had it being about 6am local time, not 2pm.


BUT - like I said - that doesn't matter. They painted an accurate picture and told a real story. Discovery just told the story they wanted to, regardless of how much that did or didn't have to do with the actual mission.

D

We wont need to visit it to see how it performed - MEDLI did that for us. It would be a nice visit though - I agree

Having now seen Mars Landing 2012:The New Search for Life ( from Discovery ) And Martian Mega Rover ( from NatGeo ) - I am appalled at Discovery, and Mark Davis just did exactly what I expected for Nat Geo.

I could sit here and type 50 things wrong with the animation in the Mark Davis documentary - but it doesn't matter..the story they told, and how they told it were real, accurate and fascinating.

Discovery were treating it all like a reality show - and got the story itself wrong, and told it in a patronizing, superficial way.

So - full marks for NatGeo. Discovery...yeah - not so much.


Also - Gentry was not in it a lot - not at all. And what others have said about him is right. He is sharp, quick, and finds holes, errors and gaps in engineering very very very quickly. He is, in short, brilliant.

I thought this might be the case based on Navcam, but it looks like none of the hardware is visible in the first full frame MastCam images. Hopefully we'll at least find a local topographic high to get a shot of the descent stage before heading East and South to the science!

D

Yup - they're currently back to one. Or one and a half. With an opening dance routine. (the situation is 'dynamic')

I think there's two conferences today - a brief mission update, and a lengthier EDL one.

Just thought I'd tell you - I showed this to Adam Steltzner - he LOVED it - absolutely loved it! Much kudos

MER's have white columns at the left and right side.. The MER and the Curiosity Navcams are clearly orientated 90deg differently to one another. The saturation bleed in MER is up/down - but Curiosity it's left/right.

Bingo. "Is it somehow a Java wrapper for native code (Unity in non-plugin form?) that is platform-specific?" is exactly right.

The team uses Unity to develop (so we can continue to offer the legacy browser plugin version) but as yet, there is no Linux support within Unity.

Linux support is allegedly appearing in Unity 4 - at which point we will try and support it.

Surface ground pressure for Curiosity is about the same as for Spirit and Opportunity.

Nahh - Chris Leger

Registration marks for 3D positioning/calibrating things etc.

I asked Justin Maki about that. Sadly we're not going to get that rear hazcam at higher res than 256x256. It had to be processed very quickly by the vehicle in a hope to make the end of that first UHF pass and thus (much like the DIMES images of MER) was downsampled at acquisition. A full size version never existed in rover flash memory.

It makes perfect sense to me. That they are so focused shows just how stable that descent stage was during the terminal descent.

No - you're not accounting for the stack reducing in weight from 2200kg or so, down to 300 or so after the powered descent vehicle dropped out of the back shell.

It would have landed much much slower than 200mph.