Umm? You mean the white box it lives in?

Why would the cameras need that?

And yes - the Met instruments were on the mast - one under a mylar bag, one under a red metal cover.

What do you mean Eoin? That mast assembly is basically finished. There no additional hardware or 'baffle' to be added.

No it couldn't. Firstly - even a healthy arm wouldn't be commanded to touch that as it's well within the keep-out zone for self-contact. For goodness sake, it's ON A SUSPENSION STRUT and RIGHT NEXT TO TO CABLES THAT DRIVE A WHEEL. You would have to actually want to kill the rover to put the rat to work over there.

Secondly - the arm ISN'T healthy - and can't reach there anymore anyway.

If you look at the kapton cable wrapping - that FR strut has done a bit of shedding since conjunction. Or maybe the fact that we're cleat-down and a pile of dust built up 'behind' it that might slip and slide overnight.

We'll see tomorrow!

I see no reason why the chart would be wrong. The aim is not to take 'natural' color photographs. The aim is to do science. Much like with MER and other spacecraft, you take those science filters and approximate a true color view using algorithms.

Not the right place for such a discussion ( I'll ban myself later ) - but basically, Cape York / Tribulation - spend a km or 2 there, then we'd end up 2km south following the rim, I'd guess.

THEMIS-IR images are 100m/pixel. A rover warm electronics box that's less than a metre in any dimension will be contributing to 1/10,000'th of a pixel.

And HiRISE doesn't image at night.

MER has three communication pathways. For the rover to be functional in a usefull way, one of those would have to work anyway.

In that context, the 'configuration' of the rover means things like different transmitters etc, not changing it's orientation etc etc. that might be visible from orbit.

Just about the only thing that would be visible from orbit would be driving (but you need to get it out of power fault safe mode first, which you can't do with any confidence without proper downlink) or folding up solar arrays ( motors that have not been actuated in >7 year, and would likely compromise the power situation of the rover, and the power-fault safe mode caveat still applies

Nope - Boffin really means adult geek/nerd. Normally middle aged, preferably with patched elbows on his jacket.

The terrain wedges from surface stereo pairs make it to the PDS - but they're notoriously ugly data.

And the state of the battery. And the avionics. And the battery control board. And the clock. And the transmitters. And the solar arrays. And, indeed, many many single-point failure places within the MER design.

Phil - you're right - things are very very grim. But it's still wrong to state, with certainty, that Spirit is dead. Quite simply, we do not know.

On what basis do you make that absolute assertion?

(The answer is 'none' by the way)

Currently - we simply don't know. Moreover, given that DSN and orbital assets are being commanded, daily, for Mars ops - the overheads in continuing to ping and listen for Spirit are negligible.

It would be foolish to give up while there remains reasonable doubt to its demise.

The boilerplate press blurb is on overtime as well I think

Time to say goodbye.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-094

Tomorrow night, PDT.

I have this catastrophically unhealthy urge to shout 'POWERRRRR' in a Jeremy Clarkson Top-Gear kind of way.

But with < 500whrs, it seems a bit rude.

That very subject has been discussed in this very thread already.

Remember - Petes chart is from a HiRISE derived DTM - probably three orders of magnitude better than any MOLA gridded product.

It's in Eyes on the Solar System as well - complete with the change of attitude, and the engine burn http://go.usa.gov/4u1

(shortcut works great in Firefox/Safari/IE - but there's a bug that we need to sort out about Chrome)

Please do - hope everything is OK - and yup - Centsworth's link is the place.

You could have north any way you want

I learned today - it's not an official NASA account.

I was giving the writer a demo yesterday or the day before - no idea whatsoever that she was 'media'

The Kudos goes to Jon, Paul and Anton for the programming work, Brian, Christian and Chris for the 3D work. I'm just lucky enough to get to show it off.

And did the arrays get blown off, did they drop of, was it actually a problem?

No.

Your concern is totally and utterly unwarranted, and the inference that engineers would be so dumb as to build solar panels that would be 'totally destroyed' by a dust storm is frankly, insulting.

Have you forgotten just how thin the Martian atmosphere is?

Why not?

I think that's excellent advice.