Here's what I was able to get out of it.

The only flight-like rover testbeds in the wild are Marie Curie (Sojourner testbed rover, at one point destined to fly on the cancelled 2001 lander) and 'Dusty' ( MER testbed ) which are both now at the Air and Space museum. There were others 'driveable' MER and Sojourner testbeds that were significantly lower fidelity - more like the 'Scarecrow' rover used for Perseverance and Curiosity. The Perseverance and Curiosity Vehicle System Test Beds are both in the garage at the Mars Yard at JPL. Perseverance and Curiosity also share an avionics testbed (MSTB) which is more analogous to what testbeds are usually like for missions that are not rovers/landers - the 'flat-sat' Mike mentions above.

This is Marie Curie, Dusty, and Maggie - the Sojourner, MER and MSL testbeds...
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/3792/three-...s-in-mars-yard/

I don't know if Voyager has an equivalent to the MSTB functioning right now. I would be surprised if it does. I will say, keeping our testbeds up and running is VERY non-trivial. Having spares to fix them when things break gets harder and harder with age - and can reach a point where it's simply not possible to get the parts to do it. Older missions get parts poached from their testbeds in support of newer missions etc etc. If there IS a Voyager testbed, I suspect in terms of technicians certified to maintain it or operate it, the engineer trained by the engineer trained by the engineer trained by the engineer who built it probably got laid off 2 weeks ago.

Today
https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/2023/09/2...lid-is-removed/

(Editing the URL gets you the full res version of the image included in the article https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/wp-conten...2023e054550.jpg )

There wasn't expected to be any sample at all as the mechanism to induce a sample into the capsule never activated on the spacecraft during sampling. It's also a very very different sample collection mechanism, and a very different sample container.

There's extensive video of some of the preparation and rehearsal for sample processing here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kolmuSXFSw

5 miles from the center….still well within the ellipse itself.

Your problem was here - sometimes if you end up at UMSF through a google search it will default to the 'Outline' viewing mode.

If you get it again - just change to 'Standard' and it'll fix it.

3 mm/sec a week out from landing is a ~1.8km change.

3 cm/sec 4 hrs from landing is less than a 500 meter change.

One of my pet peeves...it's horrible.

UMSF was born in a time before Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Mastodon, Slack, because back in '04....dedicated forums to a specific subject were the only place discussions of reasonable quality happened.

The manifold options for discourse today have inevitably fragmented communities of this kind. That can't be undone. People aren't going to come flooding back ( nor would that be a good thing ).

I handed the keys to TPS ~13 years ago after moving to the USA to take a job at JPL so as to eliminate any possible perceived conflict of interest. Back then - Emily was still at TPS, I was a member of TPS, it felt the right place for it to call home. But it's never been clear to me what TPS's intent was regarding UMSF specifically - or their online presence more generally. I let my TPS membership expire long ago for that (and other) reasons.

I question how realistic it is to expect TPS to invest any meaningful technical effort into a new platform when they failed to do the very basic things that would reasonably expected over the past 13 years like....leveraging the modern features of IP Board.....keeping on top of things regarding server maintenance....moving the URL to the new one proposed over a decade ago etc etc. I have it on reasonable authority that one competent SA with a day of work could complete the migration to the new URL with ease. If TPS couldn't even find a way to make that happen, expecting something far more significant seems, at best, ambitious.

FWIW - I find the interface to be snappy and sufficient as it is. The vast majority of modern Web UI just ends up being clunky, slow and gets in the way of the content. NASA is AWFUL at this, TPS has been heading down the same path to the detriment of their own website.

If TPS is happy to keep paying the bills with the help of donations they should just keep IP Board updated, look at some of the more modern UI options, expand attachment limits if the server capacity allows and leave well alone. This place is 6 months shy of turning 20 years old. Is it a massively popular website? Nope. But it still just about does today what it was started for in 2004. There's still nowhere else like it. It ain't broke. I don't think TPS should try and fix it. If they're insistent - then UMSF should simply move out from the TPS family, find more affordable hosting options and be a place of its own once again. To be frank - I simply don't trust TPS to do the right thing based on the choices they've made regarding their own online presence.

Finally - a massive thank you to nprev. That UMSF is still around at all right now is thanks to his dedication to this place and I can not begin to thank him enough.

I once heard someone describe InSIGHT cruise as "Farting all the way to Mars"

Different temps, different atmospheric density.

Best test environment for it is a high altitude balloon drop test (see things like LDSD, viking parachute tests) but even then you're not launching it from the surface using the VECTOR mechanism, the atmospheric profile isn't what you would get at Mars, the IMU is going to be getting very different info etc etc etc.

You can't test something like the MAV end to end on Earth. You can test lots of piece of the puzzle (some larger than others) and then you bridge the various tests together as an assemblage of tests in simulation.

Same as for Skycrane.

Same as for the Chopper which had gravity offload tests in the the 25ft space simulator ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMCJGfwj3rY ) but it wasn't taking off from the surface, wasn't turning or flying, it was using outside in tracking and cables in to the chopper to tell it what to do....then there were much lighter engineering models that didn't have to be gravity offloaded but had external power cables etc etc.

Test what you can. Model what you can't. None of it is perfectly flight like.

None of the engineering models flown in the 25ft space simulator could be considered flight-like in terms of flying. Martian vs Terrestrial gravity precludes it.

The MSL / M20 Descent Stage / Skycrane was never "fully flight tested" either.

Your link isn't to the same image you posted - but both have CR hits. The aliasing of the streak strongly suggests a grazing CR hit rather than a real optical phenomenon. Your version where you have vertically compressed the image doesn't show a contiguous streak - one could draw many such lines based on hot pixels elsewhere in the image, many of which would go below the local horizon.

What does it tell you about the scope and scale of the design problems and the challenges these unique environments present that - across different agencies, different contractors and both public and private sector projects.........problems of this kind emerge from time to time.

Fascinating reading here - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2021002...nal%20Paper.pdf

It just seemed an odd comment to make - it appeared you were trying to infer there was something about the target that had something to do with the issues.

Why?

There isn't a spacecraft out there that hasn't had a failure with workarounds. These things are incomprehensibly complicated. Thousands of components.

Cassini had a reaction wheel go out super early. SOHO was nearly lost 20 years ago. Galileo's HGA. MGS's solar panels. MEX concerns over MARSIS deployment, MRO Ka band going down etc...etc...etc.

They all have their problems. And their teams work around it.

If you look at the file names on the Smugmug page you'll see I pruned the start of the file name for the first image of the mosaic - but it contains a time stamp

i.e.

SCI_N_20210603090152_20210603090152_00020_A Panorama.jpg

That's June 3rd 2021 at 09:01:52

I've posted details of the 800 image drop here : https://deepspace.social/@doug_ellison/110291433371702521

I literally ended up using a mouse-record-and-replay tool to hit 'download' on each of the 5 products per page, then hitting next page and let it repeat for ~160 pages

Seems like ~14 360 mosaics over ~5 months were taken - with 3x1 mosaics for drive direction for a few steps in-between each 360

Attached - a bunch of them at ~1/3rd res - full size I've posted here : https://dougellison.smugmug.com/Zhurong-Panoramas/

The tubes being deposited here are a back up of other samples in duplicate being carried onboard the rover.

Under a nominal plan - SRL will be landed many many km from here, next to Perseverance such that Perseverance can drop the samples right infront of the lander (and perhaps assisted by the fetch helicopters)

In that scenario - this cache would be far far away and unreachable.

This cache is a backup for the scenario that Perseverance is no longer capable of handing off sample - the SRL would land near this location and the fetch helicopters would do the out-and-back to pick up these tubes.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publication...AA2018_0023.pdf

"The SnapdragonTM processor from Intrinsyc® with a Linux operating system performs high-level functions on the
helicopter. The SnapdragonTM processor has a 2.26 GHz Quad-core SnapdragonTM 801 processor with 2 GB Random
Access Memory (RAM), 32 GB Flash memory, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), a Serial
Peripheral Interface (SPI), General Purpose Input/Ouput (GPIO), a 4000 pixel color camera, and a Video Graphics
Array (VGA) black-and-white camera. "

I believe this largely constitutes the previous generation Qualcomm Drone Dev-Kit.


While the M20 main avionics are, I believe, the same 133Mhz RAD750 that MSL has, M20 also has a small Intel Atom board for the EDL camera suite ( https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.10...020-00765-9.pdf ) and the 'vision compute element' that was used for the landing and since handed over to accelerate visual odometry / autonav. ( https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/presen...Maps_LVS_v0.pdf )

I was literally just on a media call for the doc with Ryan White (the director) and Jessica Hargrave ( his producing partner ) and they said they did have some of my personal story edited together but it ended up on the cutting room floor ( as did the science results of Spirit ) as the movie was just getting too long. I'm very pleased that Bekah, Abby, Ashitey, Vandi and Jennifer's stories all are a part of this movie - my story is out there in a few ways already, but I hadn't heard theirs told before

To their credit - every time we're on a media call together, they go to great lengths to make sure that my story is a part of what we talk about.

FWIW having been on both MER and MSL - there’s nothing like as much…for want of a better phrase…..identifying with or attachment to the rover on MSL like there was on MER. It’s very different.

I'm proud to have been a tiny part of MER right near the end, especially of realizing that ridiculous dream of an MER selfie that I think I first thought about in 2008.....but thanks to the policy that Steve and Jim put in place right back at the start to release all those images....all of us here were a small part of MER from the very beginning.

My screen time in the movie definitely outsizes my contribution to the mission a thousand fold - but I'm still really happy with how the movie came out. This is not NOVA PBS / Nat Geo etc etc - it's not the detailed scientific/engineering story that some might be searching for. But it IS something no other documentary has managed to be - a very accurate look at the emotional story of the people involved.

It takes plenty of creative license in doing it - things are out of order, the VFX for solar flares - personifying the rover a LOT - but at the service of telling that emotional story accurately.

I will credit ILM with doing a lovely job in making some nice patches of Mars. I was on Zoom with them for several hours showing them how to get into the PDS data, how to use HiRISE DEMs, Pancam RAD .img files and they did a beautiful job of bringing all that together ( a few screenshots attached )

Ryan White has done something really rather special - he's put the emotional closure on to the end of the mission that I think many of us have been missing since Sol 5111. As a movie it has the power to show the world that despite being robotic spacecraft, these was a very very human project.

Spacecraft get cheaper once you launch them.

Look at New Horizons, MSL, OSIRIS REX, Juno etc in the amazing TPS Google Doc.

The moment you launch them - the cost plummets by a factor of about 4+

The two years of prime mission for MSL averaged ~$80M
The six years before that averaged >$300M.

Put another way - the ExoMars rover is going to be more expensive now than when it's actually operating. It's going to be more expensive over the next 5 years than had it launched on time and was operating in the same time frame.

But again - I agree - the cost of operating MEX is in the weeds compared to the new costs for ExoMars. I fully expect MEX to keep going. Remember - we've had the same "The budget goes to zero in a year" for many other Mars missions that have carried on for year and years thereafter as the budget was found. MSL, Odyssey, MER...all saw similar fiscal outlooks at certain points.