Who knew that we'd need to turn up the motors to 11 to shake dust off arrays

That's the USGS HiRISE DEM work. It's amazing.

I imagine Scott would be kicking himself if a self-terminated drive resulted in aborted post-drive remote sensing.

From experience of both - I can tell you that a clean room for space-destined instruments is far FAR cleaner and the procedures and attire for entering HUGELY more involved and thorough that any surgical theatre.

Ahh - an LNB of some sort (at least, that's what it's called on a Sky TV dish)

I don't know what it is - but it

1 - Looks painfull
2 - Looks like it's designed for a small payload fairing - a sounding rocket of some sort?

Holy cow - that's amazing...it's what we've ALL been waiting for I think.

They're too random and rare to be stated as likely at X location. We're less than 25m from where we had significant cleaning a year ago. We've had them in the hills, we've had them on the slopes, we've had them on the flat.

Imagine prevailing winds for 2,000,000,000 years. Little ridges and furrows in the rock are going to affect the flow of the wind over the ground, causing little disturbances like that I would have thought. The opposite of a wind-tail behind a rock.

Just thinking - perhaps an IDD keep-out volume violation occurred to end the drive early - the bottom of the IDD turret, and the 'end' (nearest to WEB) of the Mossbauer seems quite close to the dune ahead. I'm assuming auto-nav FHAZ pairs are used to establish if the IDD is about to bash into something.

What's good is that whilst the wheels are sinking in a bit to these dunes ( see the RHAZ) - I don't think there's much wheel slippage going on - the cleat marks are neat and evenly spaced.

Clockwork? You were lucky.

One mars bar says a Jammerbugt like event. Partial dune ingress - drive self aborted - back out within a day or three

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/imag...er20060720.html

Tesh's map does stop on a large DLO running perpendicular to direction of travel.

(dune like object - geologists seem a bit prickly over what is and isn't a dune)

Doug

I had to go to a local company that sold dial up internet access for about £5/hour. Take floppy disks. Download pathfinder images onto them, take them home, and print them out on a 24pin dot matrix printer and hold it around my head

$400M. That's a nice big orbiter. EU provides a netlander like payload. Nice clean interfaces for ITAR. Brilliant. We need 400kg of paylod for 3x 100kg landers, 3 x Metnet landers, and the associated bolt-on-hardware.

I'll be visiting the 'Mars Hill' in Death Valley in March. LOTS of Photos.

I don't think they're moving 'this way'. Just more of them as the season moves on, thus more chance of seeing one that is closer than before.

EU lead exobiological payload, US remote sensing instruments, using a deep-drill on a pallet lander delivered by an MSL derived descent stage launched on an Ariane 5.

OR

Scrap the whole thing and do netlander / metnet with a European orbiter.

MER sized vehicle with an MSL sized payload in an untested landing system. I never have, and doubt I ever will like the concept of ExoMars unless it gets a significant architecture change.

THEMIS IR-night would be a good start - Sure, it's only 100m/pixel, but we're talking about 15km here.

But look at all the etched terrain to the south (and Squyres mentioned this in on of the Q'n'A's a few years back)

We are in terrain that was intentionally avoided at landing.

We left the landing ellipse before we even got to the etched terrain at Erebus iirc - that terrain wasn't considered safe for landing even.

Doug

Well - he is 4 months ahead of schedule, but the comparison between his route, and the route taken, is remarkable

I would say no.

This isn't really the best place for observational astronomy - ( http://www.bautforum.com/astronomical-obse...nt-accessories/ is very good ) - but I really don't imagine the average amateur is going to be able to see the occultation. They take instruments that measure the magnitude of the star over time, and see it decrease, very very slightly, during an event.

Doug

Maybe I've missed something - what does this have to do with Sol 180.

...yesterday.