Yeah - take away all the limitation of conjunction, comms, science, restricted sols etc. If you imagine 50-100m/sol, every sol, 5 days/week for 3 months. That's 6km right there.

Mini TES works - but the mirror at the top of the mast is totally dusted over, so the only thing it can see.....is dust.

They routinely open and close the shroud, hoping that it might clear.

Sorry - thought you were talking about the crater. My bad.

John already answered that : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=169237

Basically - as it's superimposed onto the rim of Santa Maria, it has to be younger.

Ask nicely, ask politely, no one would object to a polite email about the science they're doing.

The very worst he can do is ignore you, and you're no worse off.

Hmm - can you export a mesh derived from HiRISE DTMs?

URL to the files in question?

You put the word 'very' infront of the wrong word there.

If you have a problem complaint or query about a post, please use the Report button - found bottom left of every post at UMSF. This will bring it to the attention of the entire UMSF Admin team who can then take action if it's considered necessary.

What you did by moaning about it in a thread is start a rather tedious debate about language standard semantics in a thread about an 80m wide crater on Mars.

Issue closed.

They are - but no, you wouldn't get stereo with the rover - it's too small.

And now from above as seen on New Years Eve

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/releases/oppy-santa-maria.php

Don't worry - keep going. Text uses almost no forum resources at all.

It reminds me of NEAR and Eros. Long orbits, very slow etc etc.

Yup - doing demos of Eyes on the Solar System for almost the whole conference.

That's out.

It's been a hell of a year for me personally - and in no small part because of the places UMSF has taken me and the people it's put me in touch with.

Happy New Year everyone - this next decade should be legen...

wait for it

dary.

Seriously - this year alone... Stardust NeXT, Messenger, Dawn, Juno, MSL, Grail, Endurance Crater...the list just goes on and on.

Oh - I don't doubt that whatsoever. I'm just scratching my head on the fact that all the observations go sub-zero.

Progress is downlink limited at the moment, not Xmas break limited. There's a LOT of data to collect on the rim of this thing - PLUS, we need to be basically empty going into Solar Conjunction in a few short weeks.

Note - the day you wrote this, there was a drive.

Where did it come from?

Actually - I would urge caution on the crater observation. It's a goal, but it's not a certainty. The mag-curve of the nucleus is double bumped, and using the shape model you can match it very well in both bumps - so basically, we may get the crater, or we may not.

If we get it - awesome. If we don't - we get to map the other side of the Nucleus which is also awesome.

The spacecraft bus is basically 6ft x 2ft x 2ft - and the high gain antena is just short of 2ft across. This is a small, light (<400kg all up), cheap spacecraft.... but it's still not a desk

I must be a mathematical dunce - how do you get an average of less than zero, when none of the sample values can ever be less than zero.

I must get up there and Gigapan the place. It's a bit of a trek off the road but I think two Gigapans 12 months apart could be really interesting!

It's not that small really - http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/sc.html - if my desk was that big, I wouldn't fit in my cube anymore

I'm changing the thread title to be more appropriate.

I also had a hell of time time driving up some very well cleared roads to temporarily enjoy some lovely snow fall over 6kft behind Mt Wilson, before returning back to a sunny 20C/60F Pasadena.