That doesn't back stuff up. That pays for a server. What it takes to back stuff up is TIME. Could you give the admin team (and it's a team, not a person) some of that?

UMSF is not a for-hire personal photograph storage site.

"Aaaargh"

I endorse that message, and clearly some people totally missed the message behind my LMGTFY link.

Yes. What you have to do is go to this thread - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6438 - and then look at all the pictures in it, really quickly.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=society+of+literary+pedants

That is all.

New software is great - but a big fat radio source getting in the way of a spacecraft can't be avoided with a software feature. Typically, the rovers park up for about 10 days, and conduct a pre-programmed schedule of in-situ science and/or remote observations. To plan a drive, you need data. With the sun in the way, you can't get it reliably.

Lovely photos guys - but that's 11 meg of attachments in a single thread, and nothing to do with UMSF.

Someone has to back this stuff up you know.

MSL has many things. Awesome cameras. A frickin laser beam. A sense of terror and awe, frankly. One thing it does NOT have is an abudance of power. Floodlights and night time operations have been mentioned by the interested public, but only because they see the RTG and think 'unlimited power'. It's not. It still has a power budget It still has to stop and recharge batteries. A year or so ago there was a story suggesting that auxiliary solar arrays might be added to MSL, such was the power budget. MAHLI is qualified to work at night (it's White and UV led's would probably make night time imaging the best type of imaging.)

With MRO and MODY - there's no opportunity for mid-day downlink of enough data to plan another drive.

And this is me drawing a line under that debate


-----------------------------

L1 pans are often done in conjunction with orbital observations for albedo obs.

Not done that - I'm not clever enough - I would simply use photoshop to lay HiRISE over CTX

It's fairly easy - just follow this from end to end :
http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisWork...rbiter_CTX_Data

I guess you would want to do it, for operational purposes, at a nice fraction of the 24 hours.... 18, 12, 6 hrs perhaps?

I found myself trying to explain these aero-passes to someone with both arms stuck out like a windmill the other day

Firstly, why not just link to the image at JPL or Expl. ?

Secondly, we've seen that layering in the Meridiani dunes a LOT.

Soil mechanics experiment to combine with the previous study of driving cross-ripple that they did. That's my guess.

A stall would result in a dramatic change in the current signature on the motor would it not? Something that would almost certainly flag up a drive fault.


Have we ever heard of a motor stalling, but the drive continuing regardless? I know that Spirit was using a cautious automatic system to recover from stalls within a sol, but for a drive motor to stall on Opportunity and yet the rover carry on driving would be highly unusual.#

I think we're just seing something of an NPE (Near Purgatory Event)

Note, in FredK's image - the 100% perfect track's just outside the churned material. The Front and Rear wheels have similar track width, but the middle wheels are slightly inboard of that. That clear track mark infers the FL wheel turning normally at that time.

http://planetary.org/programs/projects/spa...lanradlive.html




Anyone else got their ticket reserved? I'll be there!

For reference, the word 'nice' was said like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TebUMhJAKSM

The way HiRISE DEM's are made, generally speak, is via BA's 'SOCET SET' software, which runs to about 5 figures in price.

Ames research centre are working on a free version that bolts into ISIS - http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/

Oh - I think MastCam is so different to Pancam or Navcam as to be irrelevant really. MastCam can do a few frames per second. With these MER observations, we're talking about one frame per drive

What do you mean?

Umm.

WOW

Or people might go ( like I did a while ago ) "Meh - not much point looking through a telescope with pics like this available"

Well, the UK is getting back into the skies, just seen my first contrail in 6 days!

From Scott

~250W-hr/sol as of last downlink.

The shift form Vidicon tubes to CCD's.