The Eyes on the Solar System EDL module is now live. We've moved the URL as well.

http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov ( or just eyes.nasa.gov )

It's kind of cool

Some more tweaks (like 1-way-light-time getting folded in ) are on the way, but as a beta, it's live for you all to break

D

A heads up for people - the large JPG is a bit too large for most programs, it will freak them out and they'll report it as corrupted. OpenEV was able to do it, but Photoshop, ImageJ, IrfanView - all refused.

The fun will be finding ALL the hardware

Probably to the East
6 Entry Ballast Mass impacts (which could be a meter or so across, each. 25kg of tungsten. They accelerate forward from the entry capsule when jettisoned, and it's doing 400m/sec+ at the time)
Heatshield

Could be anywhere
Backshell and Parachute

To the W / NW / N
Descent Stage

And, of course
Rover
(without the shadow of an upright mast)

The hardware to the east may end up on the far side of the thin dune field that crosses the east end of the ellipse

Don't expect a panorama until late on sol 2 ( 48hrs after landing ) as the Mast isn't even deployed till then.

Infact, to be honest, I'd expect a HiRISE image of hardware on the surface before we get a panorama to nail it down.

A MARDI frame or two on Sol 1 might narrow things down a bit though.

Yes - the UHF bent-pipe telemetry at 8kbps via Mars Odyssey. That provides information about the state of the flight software and the attitude/location of the vehicle - at about 1hz or so.

The tones are just a status report.

No - they wont be doing that - that's not what I said. High rate IMU data will be recorded on the vehicle and downlinked later.

The location and orientation of the vehicle during EDL, live, via Odyssey, updates at about 1hz or so.

Just the bent pipe telemetry.



There will be IMU data that will be a far far better means of reconstructing events than the Doppler shift. For Phoenix, for example, this was done at 50hz I believe.

Doppler can be seen on the DTE tones, and in the waterfall display of the MRO canister mode recording ( of course, they are two different Doppler shifts)

And with that awesome news - that means there should be a real-time visualization of EDL on NASA TV.

It's a beauty.

No idea why - but that reminds me of Homer Simpsons head.

The one HiRISE DTM I helped make ( with Pete Grindrod, of the Pathfinder site ) it's my understanding that the workflow involving SOCET SET reprojects orthphotos onto the HiRSE DTM itself. Biggest giveaway I think is the fine granularity of the distortion one can see over larger topographic excursions along the Orthophoto edges.

I seem to remember that the MPF DTM we made had only one MOLA point in its entire coverage (and that's not uncommon, especially away from the poles) That point ties it to the global frame, but the DTM itself is used to generate the Orthophoto

I think.

A polar would be really good.

Tanya's mosaic is CTX, not HiRISE.

There will be no tone for that. Once the descent stage ( and the hardware is descent stage - the maneuver is 'sky crane' ) begins it's fly-away, it is silent. There could be no descent-stage impact tone.

Moreover - as has been mentioned in this thread, and on the landing press kit - the Earth sets behind the vehicle shortly after parachute deployment - so all the likely tones thereafter will not be heard - they're academic.

I've not seen one publicly available.

No. MRO will still be in place to listen to and record all of the realtime EDL telemetry that Odyssey would have been relaying in realtime. If Odyssey is not there, we will still get everything MSL will transmit - simply delayed by a few hours as MRO downlinks and the ground team process and decode that recording.



As the press kit describes, there are direct to earth X-band tones, just like Pathfinder and MER. However - the Earth sets behind the vehicle somewhere between chute deployment and heatshield deployment, so they will be lost at that time.

From the west, travelling east.

The press kit includes that info
"While descending from that altitude to the surface, the spacecraft will also be traveling eastward relative to the Mars surface, covering a ground-track distance of about 390 miles (about 630 kilometers) between the atmospheric entry point and the touchdown target."

Astro0 just linked to it - I'll link to it again - http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/pdfs/MSLLanding.pdf

There would be DTE tones until the Earth sets ( after chute deploy ) and MRO relay later. That would be it.

We would probably see an ODY pass at landing +2hrs that would tell us everything is fine. Infact, we'd get that data back before the 8kbps data transmitted during EDL.

Oh - the MARDI dataset is 1600 x 1200 x approx 500 images and will take several weeks to download in full. A thumbnail preview and a few full resolution frames will be available in a couple of sols - but it'll take several weeks. Pete certainly didn't say it would be take 2-3 days to get 'all the pics'

What nprev is talking about is the live 8kbps telemetry that Odyssey was to bent-pipe relay straight to the ground. If ODY is not in place, this will now not be on the ground until MRO dumps it, which will take about 4-5 hours. it wont be lost, we'll just get it later.

We'll also probably have an MODY pass at L+2hrs or so anyway.

The baseline plan was...

X-Band DTE
Tones up until just after 'chute deployment in the MER stule

UHF
Bent pipe relay 8kps via Mars Odyssey
Store and Forward from Entry to Landing 8kbps via MRO ( that we would get at about landing +4 to 5hrs or so )
And partial carrier only via MEX

Now - the only change is the bent pipe 'live' 8kbps telem via MODY is in jeopardy.

I bet they'll find the time between now and landing to re-tweak MODY's orbit, burn a bit of prop, and get it back in place for bent-pipe relay. There's several decades of prop margin onboard.

21 x 7km is the size I used for the artwork

Yes, it is.

Not too bad. The killer is the heating requirement to get the rover ready to drive. That's something on the order of 600 Whrs.

MSL has a battery, just like MER. Don't think of the MMRTG as MSL's power source. Think of it as solar arrays that always see the sunshine. It charges the batteries and then the batteries drive all the stuff on the rover. The battery can be recharged overnight.

Peak consumption is > 110 watts - especially when heating things before driving or using the arm.

Where did you see the 4kw value for the 'X-Ray instrument' ? Only thing I can find suggests that CheMin's XRay source uses about 42 watts.

About a year ago, a bunch of us were swapping you-tube-doubler links that tied the MSL animation to different sound tracks. My colleague Jon ( lead dev for Eyes on the Solar System ) found the inception soundtrack worked perfectly. EPO folk couldn't use it, obviously, but they were certainly inspired by it.

An awesome piece of work by the editing folk.