The most likely failure as the investigation concluded, would be an early shut down of thrusters. This means, on the surface, there should be a heatshield, like Phoenix, a Backshell and Parachute, like Phoenix, and a crashed lander.

I'm still looking at the PHX landing sites HiRISE images of the new season, trying to find the landing site - and can't.

Others I follow:

ulalaunch
NGLLC09
chrislintott
ProfBrianCox
DrLucyRogers
AlanStern
astro0_umsf
lorddrayson
therealBuzz
HiCommander
marssciencegrad
SPOTScott
dr_david_w
Nancy_A
martiansoil
jetlab
aggieastronaut
marschronicler
Astro_Mike
EuroSpaceAgency
BLOODHOUND_SSC (ok - not space - but it's rocket powered )
Gyeehill
nivnac
mars_stu
HiRISE
milesobrien
MarsScienceLab
MarsRovers
marsroverdriver

As a guidance - if you have to prefix your post with "I hope this isn't sailing too close to the wind..." or " I hope this isn't over stepping the mark..."

Save us all the trouble, and just assume it IS.

AND AGAIN - more posts discussing the legal issues of the Titanium issue. Anyone who posts on the subject again will be suspended.

McCool Hill was found to be SLIGHTLY higher

Given the litigious nature of US law and pending court cases of those involved, several posts that someone could consider potentially libellous have been culled.

ExoMars is accelerating into the future, remember. THe 2004 plan was for a 2009 launch. Since then it has slid 9 years, in 5 years.

http://www.marspages.eu/media/archive4/exo...ichtSep2009.pdf

Two rovers delivered to the same place?

I'm at the shaking-head-in-disbelief stage now.

Really?

Where?

We've seen rover tracks nearly vanish overnight.

We've seen blueberries re-excavated after being burried by rover wheels within a year.

You underestimate what the wind, and time, can do.

On what basis do you make this claim.

Almost everything we see at Meridiani is the result of what the wind has been doing, given several billion years to do it.

Wind combined with the tiny tap of dust bouncing along the ground in high wind speeds would, over time, move small metal pieces like that. Why wouldn't it.

There have been two since spring - but I've not had enough chance to really hunt for Phoenix in them.

That story says

ESA EDL test 600kg battery only short life lander in 2016 launched on Atlas V.
THEN
ExoMars landed with Skycrane Atlas V launch in 2018

This makes no sense whatsoever to me. None. Exomars will have to be scrapped and started from scratch to justify a skycrane landing (ExoMars was about 200kg. MSL is more than trebble that)

And you could make this 600kg lander LIGHTER by giving it solar arrays and have a longer life. What thought process justified an Atlas V's launch, for a week of 600kg lander?

Furthermore - a 600kg lander is neither a test for a networked lander system (to heavy) nor appropriate for landing the orig Exo Mars.

At this point - I actually want the entire plan scrapped. It's utterly nonsensical. For the mass budget of the 2016 launch - you could do Netlander (which is what ESA should have been building since 2004)

Were 5 years into this plan - and they've just thrown away the two elements that appeared to make a tiny bit of sense and started again.

A complete and utter mess. An embarrassment. I'm clinging on to the hope that there's just a lot of lost-in-translation and bad reporting going on here.

I just can't help thinking of the old chestnut "Let's work the problem people, let's not make it any worse by guessing". I don't need to tell you where that comes from. I could site other references - but they would be in breach of the forum rules.

This is - without a shadow of doubt - the right way to be doing this. Impatience is not an option.

I've got another potential nominee as well (call it a surprise guest appearance) - as long as all the nominees are happy, I'm happy to share the finished application with everyone here once it's submitted.

So a battery powered EDL tech demo in 2016, followed by an entirely unrelated landing in 2018.

What's the demo for, exactly. What future payloads are planned within the performance envelope of the tech test.

The entire ExoMars project is a mess. It needs properly ripping up and starting from the beginning again.

Since it's conception - it's not just stayed a static distance in the future like most doomed projects - it has accelerated further into the future and now, after 5 years, lies further away than it ever has before. http://twitpic.com/lacef

But riding to the ground with 600kg of rover using Skycrane isn't an EDL demo opportunity.

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:qtGkY...=clnk&gl=uk

We're looking at 140 Watts at 1AU. That's 65-ish-watts at Mars distance - so 1 kg of Solar Array would give you perhaps 360 Whrs PER SOL. (assuming 1 W turns into approx 6 Whrs over a 12 hr day)

I can't imagine any scenario other than a DS2 type mission where you would just take batteries and die when they run flat.

I assume battery powered is just an inappropriate phrase to mean not RTG powered.

It's two years old - and for some reason Spaceref decided to feature it a few days ago without explaining why. Quite odd.

Helen thinks it looks a bit like the deathstar

Right - Nigel, Stu, James, Joe - send me an email ( djellison@mac.com ) and I'll send you the draft application and what I need from you.

Doug

It would also be a lot lighter. Beagle 2 used a wide angle mirror that would pop up infront of its camera to get a complete 360 very quickly and dirtily.

That's the idea I got as well - and is the figures I used when estimating just how useful it might be.

We actually had, at the 1:10,000,000,000 scale - on the info sheets, the Earth and Moon, Saturn + Titan, and Jup + Galileans at the scale sizes and distances.

I was going to take my 40cm earth and 10cm moon that I can place 12m apart for scale - but I was worried that the scales would be confusing for the general public, and my experience on the day actual confirmed those worries and I'm glad I didn't take them. People were looking at the images on the info sheets (which were, 50x, 100x, 10x scale size) and thinking THAT was the scale, several times I had to correct people and show them the actual scale on top of the black cane.

A scale Saturnian system would be brilliant - but having two different scales at the same venue would, for the general public, be confusing.

Check the bottom of http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/team.html

The Sky Hemisphere is the unlikely-to-ever-happen idea of doing a full pan of the sky, with Pancam.

All those words and 'sky hemisphere' didn't get mentioned once. Good work Mike.