There's lots of them in this rock. If you can't see them, you're just not looking. Stu's highlighted a bunch for you. Did you not see them before? Do you see them now? If not - I can't help you.

I've asked for a pricelist from Kaymont on balloons. Their largest ballon if used at spec, goes to almost 38km.

It's something of a bell curve, but yet - the performance of the balloon, the inflation level etc etc - they all determine to a reasonable level - where it'll burst.

But, the same rule applies as for your glider concerns. at 10 mb it's going to be at a screaming velocity to generate that glide ratio. I've actually seem them try to do that - the parafoil return. It's damn hard because you have almost no means of 'hanging' the parafoil in a way that allows it to reliably inflate after balloon sep. It's a very very hard thing to pull off. You HAVE to do a cut-down, not a burst, because otherwise the burst balloon ruins any chance your parafoil had.



Zero Pressure Balloons are very big, very hard to find, very expensive, and take a lot of very very expensive helium. PLUS - you HAVE to have a cut-down or you're never returning to the deck. It's an idea worth looking at though



Environmentally, politically, legally even, ..... no. Moreover, the sort of place this is likely to occur, they would never germinate.



Yup - internal temp, external temp, pressure, maybe humidity, UV flux, IR flux, etc etc.

Gravity scales as over the square of the radius. 6,378km^2 compared to 6,410km^2. W're talking 2.4583 against 2.4338 (both x10^-9) - It's a change of barely 1%. I doubt there's a means of measuring gravity that accurately within the mass and volume constraints....and given the 'entertaining' ride things get up the hill and down the hill, that 1% gets lost in the multiple-G bouncing around in every direction.

And that's the flight model. The flight-spare is sat on Titan

I'd say yes - and using an HD HERO, we could film the whole thing in 1080P

The new HD-HERO cameras really do open up a LOT of posibilitied. I'm astonished that the ones they flew yesterday to watch the Shuttle launch were totally un-protected. Full HD video or sequential stills - and the results are genuinely stunning. Their very large FOV, great image quality...they make a LOT of posibilities available.

If and when we narrow down on some sort of manifest - perhaps the way to get it done is to get people to buy pieces of it that contribute to the project, but then they get them afterwards in the event of a successful flight

Gliders scare me.... BUT...if it could be done WELL...... we could actually command it to try and fly back toward the launch site and hopefully, safety.

We've had this exact discussion before in previous balloon threads. You WANT the turning - just like Huygens turned - you want a payload turning so that whatever is onboard gets a view all the way around. A pole wouldn't help because whatever was at the end of it would turn into a small sale with a long lever arm to rotate the payload.

And launching far from hills and mountains is a pre-req. They have unpredictable low level winds that just don't help when it comes to launching.

We've basically got 3kg (6lbs)

I very much doubt it would be worth-while ( there's nothing within 20km of you, and even long baseline stereo's not going to reap benefits there ) plus, the mass and size of such a pole rigid enough would be very prohibative.

So - now I live in the USA, I've been researching what's possible over here regarding balloon flights.

Firstly - the laws for ham-radio are much more relaxed, so instead of having to use bespoke 10mW transmitters for tracking... you can use an off the shelf 10W APRS tracking device ( http://www.byonics.com/microtrak/mtaio.php ) . You don't need to contact the FAA if it's below a certain mass. There's a lot more country to land it in, rather than the north sea.

So - I'd very much like to start thinking about what unique project we, as a bunch of spacey people, could use a high altitude balloon flight for.

Here's some of the things that have been done recently in the field of amateur high altitude balloon flights :
If you want to be blown away - a cinematography group used the HD-Hero action cameras to record some genuinely breathtaking footage - http://www.youtube.com/user/kevinmacko -
They also used a ShadowBox - a sort of data-logger-of-awesome - http://shadowboxlive.com/
You can now get fairly cheap back-up tracking using the SPOT locators http://www.findmespot.com/en/
There's now an almost off the shelf APRS tracking system including data - http://www.rpc-electronics.com/rtrak-hab.php
These guys have pulled off a number of flights including panoramas being shot as they went - http://sites.google.com/site/ucsdnearspaceballoon/

SO - what, if anything, might we do that's new, unique, interesting, given the options that have opened up in the last couple of years?

And simple unshaded greyscale 16 bit images (png/tif or similar?)

The discontinuations look like classic collapsing lava tubes.

What's the source image.

Sol on the X axis, Altitude on the Y axis.

Import the TXT file to excel, scatter plot of sol v Z. Boom

The Z values in these documents also represent the delta in height from the landing site

http://an.rsl.wustl.edu/mer/pages/osu/MERA...ol%201-2340.txt

No its not. It's comparing unadjusted rover telemetry with bundle-adjusted rover telemetry

That's not why he was sent a PM by an Admin.

Mars is in it...

Full size version from that link from Stu
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/517613m...system_full.jpg

Better link is probably Messengers own page

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/scienc...mp;image_id=399

The jets are only visible on a couple of images - not all of them. The exposures were set longer on a few certain images to try and catch them.

The scan is complete. Read the figure caption:

Think of a sand dune.

Put a foot-print in it.

Following day...sand dune's still there...but the foot print isn't.

They're beautiful - utterly beautiful - I wasn't expecting the camera to perform quite so well.

It's not. It's Mac or PC. I'm sorry it doesn't work for Linux, but that's just a symptom of the Unity plugin not being available for Linux. For 0.3% of the audience, I can understand their reluctance to develop one.

We have a predicted trajectory for both spacecraft and comet - and then just like the spacecraft itself, Jon (lead dev for EotSS) programmed autonav - the spacecraft rotated and the mirror tracked to keep the comet in the middle of the field of view.

And as for geometry/lighting etc - we did our best to match this : http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GgFZHEkOXh4/TVk-...0/planned_1.jpg : and I think we did quite well. There's an adjustment we've made here to the timing (15 seconds early) - so the 5 images will be more like -21sec to +51sec rather than centered on C/A

And thanks for the kudos guys - a lot of fun tonight, and it seems like the technology for EotSS, and our faithful old spacecraft...has held up.

We're in for a slightly longer wait for the images, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

That sometimes happens before your GFX card has finished initializing - give it time. If it doesn't clear after a few seconds, then...er.....it's still a beta.

NTV will be cutting to Eyes... live during the flyby