Magellan wasn't designed for it either

Each launch opportunity, within the launch window, is calculated to the second, years in advance.

Anyone wanting to debate the sol on which we 'arrive' at Cape York....please go away and find another forum.

At some point there will be a new thread. Anyone who actually cares when that is or what it means....probably should seek urgent therapy.

An interesting subject - but I would remind people to be wary of the no-politics rule.

There is http://missionjuno.swri.edu/

For the general public? Not really. For most space enthusiasts...there really isn't much to talk about.

People are not excited because it's not exciting. One defines the other

And gets there 5 years from now. What is there to be excited about right now?

The water/beer/vodka theme is a repeating joke by Ken.

Anyone who wants a superb primer on Gale should read Jim and Ryan's paper about it

http://marsjournal.org/contents/2010/0004/

Go read the Gale documents ( and there are many ) and the MSL Landing site website. ALL that info has been available for a very long time.

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/...op/program.html

Data volume, power budget, time constraints....all of the above...who knows...we'll probably get them tomorrow.

And its........


Gale

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/news/whatsnew/ind...amp;NewsID=1141

A precautionary admin note before the announcement tomorrow. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' site. There was no consensus for scientific preference over 5 landing site selection meetings that included hundreds of scientists and hundreds of presentations. Moreover, none fail any qualifier for landing safety.

Any cries of which ever site gets the nod being the 'wrong' choice or that some other site would have been better or that the choice is a mistake or any other such discussion will be dealt with swiftly and firmly.

If you want to bitch and moan - make your own blog or find another forum.

You have all been warned. Myself included.



It's 10 a.m. EDT (1400 UT) for the announcement. 7am our time.

Already being discussed for a page of this thread - first cited here

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...mp;#entry175945

No. There's at least one asteroid with three moons - a quadruple system.

http://www.oca.eu/workshop/Pise/slides/Pisa-Colas.pdf

Seriously - after 7.5 years of rover operations - have you not gained a single ounce of patience with which to deal with the intricacies and challenges involved in exploring another world?

I don't think anyone has an avatar that suits their forum persona less than you

Why is it being done at all? If (as we have been told) there is a constraint on the teams time in producing images for outreach...why waste some of that precious time in un-necessarily enlarging these images?

Take a tiny topographic feature.

Take prevailing winds.

Apply a couple of billion years.

You'll get patterns, lines, features, streaks and all sorts of things that look like they're interconnected.

Yup - to stop people attaching garbage, the attachments are limited to certain extensions. We've added a few in the past - and I just added KMZ to the acceptable list.

And what it is...isn't post 835

They show lots of albedo changes, but stereo HiRISE shows you just how much vertical relief there is - and it's only a handful of meters over quite a large area.

Yup - that's all it will be. Ambitions of hills and hillocks are going to be somewhat smashed to pieces.

Why? One is about 20x taller than the other.

Would you rather he took it during the year long Vesta encounter....or would you rather he just went without a vacation for 18 months?

If you had been paying attention, you would know.

They've been making progress as fast as practical and possible.