As a pilot friend of mine once told me, the average 747 flight taking off from London to New York has NEARLY enough fuel..... to get half way back

I wonder why they can't fly out from LHR at, say 8,000, get west of Ireland then accelerate up to M.81 and FL350 from there. I understand the need for safety first, but it does seem a little bit like they've thrown their hands up and said "Ok - Volcano - you win" rather than trying every possible route in and out in the mean time.

If the sun were directly 'behind' the spacecraft, it could happen - can that happen, however, with that landing site?

Unlike normal DVD's, this one was actually a glass disc that is more analogous to being a master from which normal DVD's get stamped than a typical DVD-R or off the shelf movie DVD. It's a fairly robust thing.

Making anaglyphs from stereo pairs - it's almost impossible to claim vertical accuracy in terms of exaggeration. We've had this discussion before with HiRISE or maybe CTX images. We're looking at a geometry when your eyeballs would be several km apart, 50 km above the lunar surface, and you can't back out of that to a more 'human' perspective without generating a DEM, and then re-rendering that as an Anaglyph.

Don't read too much into how and when images make it online - it is far far more likely that we're seing the downlink split across two of the batch processes that put the images online, rather than two downlinks.

It's not like this is the last flare expected to occur during SDO's lifetime. There will be dozens, hundreds, thousands over the next decade.

Thomas and the MEX VMC team - the nomination I (and a few UMSFers in Europe) made for this Europlanet outreach award.

Well - they didn't win - but they were given a special mention (I just heard via Email )

The post previous to yours - with added rover for scale and perspective - is EXACTLY that.

Pity. Anyway - it's two priests in a caravan, one trying to explain to the other that whilst the toy cow on the table, and the real cows outside might look the same size....it's because these cows are small, and those cows are far away. It's from Father Ted - legendary channel 4 comedy here in the UK.

These cows are small....those ones are FAR away
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25N-4zrk390

It's a see-how-we-go situation.

If the thing gets cleaned to 800Whr+ come spring, can you really imagine them sitting still and not trying to get out?

Clearly it was taken down for a reason - and that reason holds as true here as it does on Emily's blog.

I'd say it's a very very very very very very very very very very very good candidate.

If it's NOT Luna 18, then someone else landed a replica Luna spacecraft at some point.

I noticed it as well. It's more like an Earth-Jupiter ratio than an Earth-Sun ratio.

I can almost convince myself that the crash landing has caused the ascent stage to fall over to the north.

Oh my word - you've reproduced? Now that's a terrifying thought!



Congratulations!!!

(is it wrong that I saw the mass and size in the subject title and thought 'that's a damn small asteroid to have been detected!' )

Because a 'smoother' turn would involved ploughing straight thru the dunes. Remember, Opportunity has a stuck FR steering actuator - so turning in place is not idea.

Did it not occur to you that they might already have imaged those areas?

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/mo...andtimeline.mov

From
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/ani.html

Looks like an MI image of a concrete cast block that might have been taken during an MER ORT. Very nice.

It's AN image taken AFTER shipping to JPL. There will of course have been many many test images taken previously to that.

Double check for yourself here : http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/merweb/mer_edr_counter.pl

Why not back them up, try it yourself, and report back. The message MH has given regarding how much time he has to work on MMB couldn't be any stronger.