NASA is legally prohibited from collaborating with China in any way.

ESA has already given ground station time for downlink and ranging/tracking to this mission and Mars Express will be conducting relay.

Reading between the translation...

So far only 16bps on X Band DTE

They're expecting to return 20 Megabits through UHF daily starting on Sol 3 with a single 8-10 minute UHF Pass.

The 50 megabits per sol through DTE X-Band seems a little big.....if they can handle 10kbps DTE it's probably doable. Doing it every 3 days seems reasonable as well.

I was talking about relay. I specifically mentioned the likely DTE performance later in the same post.

The resetting of the site index is usually triggered by an accumulation of time on the rover's IMU and thus an accumulation of inaccuracy in the rovers attitude knowledge - not some geographic or scientific reason. On MSL that IMU time comes in to something like a couple of hundred meters of driving.

You will see this site increment accompanied by a Navcam solar image used as part of that process - such as https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...PP00601_00_2LLJ for M2020 or https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/m...SAPP07612M_.JPG on MSL

Neither MOM nor Hope have relay hardware.

Exomars TGO does - but it's not clear to me that it's compatible with Zhurong given that it's an Electra radio supplied by NASA-JPL.

In early operations - Spirit and Opportunity survived with just MGS and Mars Odyssey. One could quite easily design a concept of operations that works with a single relay asset in a longer period elliptical orbit. Infact- depending on link budget and pass duration, you could get a huge amount of data back with a spacecraft in a more elliptical orbit. MAVEN and TGO return the lions share of data from MSL, for example.

Even if the orbiter were to fail for some reason - the size of the high gain antenna on this rover would suggest something around 1 - 20 kbps of direct to earth downlink if required - you could return a few tens of megabits per sol that way if necessary.

Galileo operated with around 0.1kbps of downlink. This is not going to be 'Galileo but one planet inward'.

Both Viking Landers were also deployed from orbit around Mars, like Tianwan - but I think what's unique here, and is more similar to ExoMars-TGO with Schiaparelli, Mars Express with Beagle 2, Galileo and Cassini Huygens compared to Viking - is that in those 4, the 'parent' spacecraft put itself on a collision course before deploying the lander and then doing a divert maneuver. In the case of Viking 1 and 2 - the landers themselves did their own deorbit burn to being entry into the atmosphere.

I think the only unique corner of all those boxes to be ticked yesterday is a parent spacecraft already in orbit putting itself into a trajectory for landing before deploying the lander and then doing a divert maneuver.

Phew.

It's just possible something happened....

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/2839.pdf

"Survey mode. Initial observations will be performed on an abraded patch in survey mode. The laser will fire raster over a 7x7 mm area with 200μm spacing to gen- erate 1225 spectra arranged in a 35x35 point grid. A Raman/fluorescence spectrum is acquired within 1 sec at each point. These spectra can be averaged together to get bulk organic/mineral abundances over the entire scanned area."

The Amsat DL team with their large antenna in Bochum are tracking it live - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEfAxmkBagg

That's 100% a mosaic stitching artifact.

Also clock drift. Wouldn't even know when to slew.

You answer is right here Steve

It's worth noting - the Wright Flyer didn't end its flight test campaign with grace either

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer#...s_at_Kitty_Hawk

"Taking turns, the Wrights made four brief, low-altitude flights that day. The flight paths were all essentially straight; turns were not attempted. Each flight ended in a bumpy and unintended "landing." The last flight, by Wilbur, was 852 feet (260 m) in 59 seconds, much longer than each of the three previous flights of 120, 175 and 200 feet (37, 53 and 61 m). The landing broke the front elevator supports, which the Wrights hoped to repair for a possible four-mile (6 km) flight to Kitty Hawk village. Soon after, a heavy gust picked up the Flyer and tumbled it end over end, damaging it beyond any hope of quick repair.[3] It was never flown again."

Page 15 of https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32...gy_Demonstrator says

The link is designed to relay data at over-the-air rates of 20 kbps or 250 kbps over distances of up to 1000 m.



If flight 5 ends successfully I wouldn't be surprised to see an adventurous flight 6 out in some direction ahead of the rovers path and maybe again beyond that - but chopper ops are not free for Perseverance. Chopper flights = time and data volume taken away from Perseverance doing its own science, and it incurs planning complexity overhead that I'm sure they'll be glad to be done with once they get into full arm and sample caching checkouts.

5

You would still have to run power and comms cables up to it ( which on the RSM or arm is very very non trivial ) as well as survival heaters.

And then you have to get the data back to Earth - which is also non-trivial.

In the raw images - even without processing - there is a large downwash at takeoff and landing. It's subtle - but it's there.

Frame rate ≠ exposure.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32...gy_Demonstrator suggests.....

• Navigation (NAV) Camera. This is a global-shutter, nadir pointed grayscale 640 by 480 pixel sensor (Omnivision OV7251) mounted to a Sunny optics module. It has a field-of-view (FOV) of 133 deg (horizontal) by 100 deg (vertical) with an average Instantaneous Field-of-view (IFOV) of 3.6 mRad/pixel, and is capable of acquiring images at 10 frames/sec. Visual features are extracted from the images and tracked from frame to frame to provide a velocity estimate

Don't even need GIMP. Irfanview's batch conversion output format options have a crop section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_eEKD8AJz0

None.

Because it's highly compressed.

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1382399592449314816

That series of QnA explained what happened. It wasn't a hardware failure.

Have you compared it to the original images?
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/p...1_110050J01.png

Small pebbles/gravel/sand from the blast of the skycrane engines. The landing site is to the 'right' of this image so the teardrop shapes would strongly infer they came from that direction

I heard 3m.

Importantly for this crowd - there was a strong commitment to keeping the flow of raw images going - and a shout out to the creations people like those in this community are making.

Sol 46 Selfie with chopper