Actually- that's not true. The engineers who looked at the Opportunity heatshield did get some value out of it. If it was of no real value to the engineers - then the geologists in charge would not have stopped to look at it at Meridiani.

How would driving to the heatshield have avoided the wheel problem?

Giving the information available at the time, sprinting to the hills was clearly the right decision to make.

There's a curious coincidence regarding HRSC and Gale Crater.

They're imaged it 6 times - but never in color. I pinged ESA via twitter, and they said they will do it at some point, as the plan at this time is for HRSC to get global color coverage.

They have to be on time anyway - they have to be there for EDL UHF relay duty.

No- the battery died. It was a silver-zinc battery, and couldn't withstand the manifold charging cycles that more recent technologies can.
Estimate were between 30 and 100 recharges would be the end of it. It lasted 83 sols (not 90)
Thereafter, the lander couldn't keep itself warm at night, and presumed failures of other components quickly followed.

The Level 1 requirement was a month.

That actually nails it - it's like an orange foam, but with a sort of clear plastic cover over it. On the test-bed rover, the plastic started to peel off - and I'd expect it to have done the same on Mars.

D

You don't need a descent imager to exactly locate a spacecraft on the surface of Mars. We have HiRISE for that.

New CCD's means new backend electronics, new storage, new CPU, new radios.....basically, a new rover. It would cost a fortune. I adore Marie Curie - but bolting it onto InSight and deploying it 2001 style would be a bad idea. Moreover - without a stereo camera onboard InSight itself - you don't have the 3D terrain data on which to plan the driving.

I literally giggle at the quality of these - it's breathtaking.

Given that deck-pans are usually down sampled by 50%, that's not surprising. Pancam is slightly out of focus at that range, so downsampling to 512 x 512 before downlinking makes a lot of sense, you don't really drop any detail. . It also means you can fit 4x as many images into any given downlink session. Thus - 114 images of that size is actually only equiv to 30ish normal sized images.

Many many pointy spiky rocks have been seen - possibly the most famous http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06267

Did my own conversion from the greyscale map into something a bit more funky

And assuming they don't - then they need the heavier LV. ( plus, the 2016 window isn't as good as the 2003 one was )

And if it's ESA - make it a triple.

Anytime anyone says 'Earth Like' in conjunction with Kepler results.... drink.

Anytime anyone says 'Couldn't you use fans to blow it off?' about MER and dust... drink.

Anytime anyone says 'That looks scarey/crazy/mad/bound to fail' about MSL EDL... drink.

I used to play this with 'When can I have an iPad version' regarding Eyes on the Solar System...but my doctor told me to stop, unless I wanted a liver transplant by Easter.

We hope to - but it's entirely a matter of budgets. I can't promise anything. I will say that it is highly unlikely that such a thing would be driven by realtime telemetry during EDL for a wide range of reasons to long to discuss here. It would likely be driven by a predicted series of events, with key moments triggered manually at JPL.

From http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/41883




My understanding is that TCM 1 was only ever about backing out injection errors...and as they are so small, there's no need for it.

MSL's MastCam's can pull focus. The MER PanCam can not.

Hence the Beta label. It happens. Just don't use it too look at too much stuff before restarting it ( I know, sounds lame, but it does work ) It's a Unity plugin problem that we're looking at, but is mainly outside our control.

JPL's weatherstation reported a peak wind of only 65mph - elsewhere in Pasadena I've heard reports of 90mph+ Thursday from about midnight till 4am was terrifying.

Had a tree down infront of my house - had to axe my way to work yesterday. Lots of roof shingles down. Pasadena is a mess - hundreds of downed trees, several hundred homes damaged - I've seen half a dozen crushed cars. But - no reports of serious injury so far.

Ron - as far as I know, that article has it about right. (Apart from semantics of MLE fire up.... they're just warming up at 1% before the drop)

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/41629 was our go-to document for EDL



So there isn't a discreet avoidance maneuver as there was with PHX ( although PHX didn't actually need it's after all ) - but avoidance is part of the mix of the trajectory design from BSS to the CVP

Enough TLA's

Thanks John - the heavy lifting was Bohemian Grey - I just pointed them in the right direction. The BSS is the moment I'm most proud of...and showing it to the EDL team for the first time one the highlights of my short time at JPL so far. It involved a spontaneous high-five across a conference room table

Actually - the descent stage thrusters do start before sep from the backshell, but only at about 1%, so you wouldn't see anything.

The earlier animation was accurate at the time it was made. The decision to release the mobility system later in the sequence came between the old animation and the new one. (and during production of the new animation we were chasing the change from a hard drop, to a soft release and back to a hard drop..which is what we ended up with)

It took all the way until working on the MSL animation that I learned how TCM's are done when you're still spinning at 2rpm It's very elegant! It's like a brother on a merry-go-round trying to kick his sister each time he spins past her

It's why I wanted to have something more than '8 months later' - we cut it down a bit for the finished thing, earlier we had a burn from each cluster, at the same point in the rotation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=playe...boyXQuUIw#t=41s

Don't know if they plan to - but I would have thought they would... inflight-cal is a useful post-launch checkout. I wouldn't expect them to actuate the lens cover - but they could certainly power up the white-light LED's and take a picture inside the backshell. It would, I think, show the steering actuator for the front left wheel in its stowed position.



No - it's canned at 2rpm ( the nominal cruise spin rate) Remember, 'Eyes...' uses a combination of predicted and reconstructed data. Getting 'live' data thru from a flight project in these ITAR laden times is a mountain that even I'm not even going to attempt.



Using this image as reference:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/msl/20111110/pia15026-43.jpg

Assuming you meant the thruster at about 5 O'clock...that's not a thruster you're looking at. That's the star-tracker.

There are 8 thrusters - two clusters of 4. In that image they are at about 1 O'clock and 7 O'clock, covered with a red remove before flight fixture. They're tiny.




If you google MAHLI. The very first link takes you to the MSSS page that includes a link to 'reference material'.
Documents like this : http://www.msss.com/msl/mahli/references/E...l_MarsMicro.pdf : and this : http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/1197.pdf should fill you in. I've heard annecdotal comments that using MAHLI for DD surveys is possible, as it's the widest FOV camera (apart from MARDI, which obviously isn't going to be looking for DD's) with the movie ability. Mastcam 34 is roughly Pancam FOV, and Mastcam 100 about 1/3rd of that - whereas MAHLI is, if my math is right - about 30 x 23 deg FOV. The question would be - is it worth the large energy spend to move the arm into an elevated position for such a survey. It's not something I'd expect to see happening early on, that's for sure.

D