Well - NASA's committed to not sending any orbiter without Electra UHF radios for relay....so even though MAVEN's orbit isn't great for relay - it still has one (and it performs well). That said - a dedicated relay orbiter fleet is clearly a must-have before humans head that way.

The problem with Cubesats for relay is power and downlink capacity. The MarCO cubesats top out at 8kbps - and can only do a few hours of downlink per day (using the rest of the time to recharge). The power situation would be worse in Mars orbit due to occultation/shadowing etc. A modest MRO UHF pass with Curiosity might be 250 megabits - and that would take almost 9 hours to downlink via a MarCO like spacecraft. Even an order of magnitude improvement over what MarCO can do would be significantly worse than Mars Odyssey is capable of. I think MarCO is generating around 15W at 1.5 AU. When Earth and Mars are at their most distant, they'll probably be down to 1kbps or worse for downlink.

That said - there's huge scope for spacecraft like MarCo to have a use out beyond LEO. Exploring Phobos and Deimos, for example.

We've been slowly pulling down the best of the images MarCO B took during its flyby - each little 752 x 480 image takes around 10 minutes. It was more like 20 before we asked the gumstix camera board to start GZipping them before downlink

A spacecraft would probably need something over 10x the ammount of delta-V that the MarCO spacecraft had to enter orbit. I can’t imaging a 6U cubesat being able to pull that off.

Once could imagine a scenario where a ‘parent’ larger orbiter delivered one or more Cubesats into Mars orbit after having put itself into orbit, however.

I think the aim is to be parked at a head of 0 deg for the Red Jura drill site - so that would put the future path in the background of a selfie.

That’s not how the landing works. At a certain altitude you’ll hear the EDL commentator say ‘constant velocity phase’’. At that altitude the radar starts to become unreliable and the spacecraft continues to descend at a constant velocity using the IMU. Once the three landing legs detect a touchdown the engines shut off.

The thermal inertia of this landing site precludes the sort of light fluffy dust that one might interpret as ‘quicksand’

The ICC cover has been opened. The current dust is on the lens.

It will probably dissipate with time. It has already begun to in just the single sol since it was deployed.

The IDC moves. That range data would only be valid for that pose, pointed at that terrain in the test bed.

Curiosity's arm is 67kg before you add 33kg of hardware on the end of it
See http://esmats.eu/esmatspapers/pastpapers/p...011/billing.pdf

That's pretty darn restrictive.

It's more than 1/3rd the weight of an entire MER rover.

There are huge number of reasons that would cause there to be no images for a given sol. Spacecraft issues, DSN or Relay issues, to just straight up not commanding the acquisition of any images on a given sol.

The InSight raw image page is probably the best version of a raw image pipeline I've ever seen. There is no reason to suggest the pipeline is down right now.

In the IDC image there is exactly one rock that could have caused a landing issue. There's nothing else out there that looks like it could have been an impairment to landing, or instrument deployment.

This is exactly what was expected.

From https://sharad.psi.edu/~ibsmith/pubs/Golombek_SSR_2016.pdf

"Rock abundance in the smooth terrain averages ∼2.5 % (well below the 10 % requirement)"

Seems we got what we ordered.

That's probably only a few tens of meters away - if that. The landing ellipse was 10's of km across.

In short - the spacecraft was basically just as likely to land where it did, as on top of that large rock in the middle distance.

Should be a few more - not many - but a couple on the way in and a couple on the way out. A few from MarCO A as well ( this is from B )

I got similar results. Good news is - this image was heavily JPG compressed to get on the ground quick. A raw uncompressed version should be down....hopefully....tomorrow. I think Mars should look a LOT better without JPGification. Hopefully

False negatives are also a thing. Very often. All down to the antennas and how they report their status back to the subscription services from which DSN Now generates it's status XML file that drives the web-page.

Because that Odyssey pass happened and the data is VERY much on the ground...

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/insight/multimedi...0&end_sol=0

For those trying to figure out the geometry.......Martian north is basically 'down' in this image.

What point are you trying to make?

That we should be able to invent some impossible simulation technology in advance of EDL in complete defiance of chaos theory?

Or that a spacecraft swinging under a parachute should expend fuel unnecessarily to control it's attitude?

The vehicle knows it's attitude at the time, and conducts an appropriate heading change during the powered decent stage so it lands at the correct orientation. Phoenix executed the same EDL method well. I'd suggest reading several of the post landing reconstruction analysis papers such as this one http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downl...p1&type=pdf

This landing system has no common heritage with ExoMars.

It doesn't actually matter. The s/c will be swinging backwards and forwards under the parachute. It's 'angle of attack' isn't really a thing any more. The s/c uses the IMU at this point to interpret RADAR data, but the actual angle really doesn't matter.

And then some...... Spoiler alert - I'm helping with planning and processing of pics from their tiny camera. Trying our best to estimate reasonable exposure times in the next 48hrs before committing on Sat AM.

The cruise stage enters Mars and burns up (maybe a few pieces will survive to impact)

MarCO A and B each get a little gravity assist that changes their trajectory - so they start getting further and further apart from one another.

From an engineering perspective, I believe the intent is to keep in contact with them for as long as they hold up. At some point their prop systems will be exhausted and they'll no longer be able to maintain pointing for solar power and comms - and they'll go silent.

(InSight, MarCO A and B are all in Eyes on the Solar System......there just isn't a landing module for InSight like there was for Curiosity)

They have cameras. They'll be flying by Mars. Fingers crossed...there will be pics.

Not a statistically likely event. For InSight, the cruise stage separates before the turn to entry - it's not directly following InSight into the atmosphere.



Both the image and the URL are missing...

The requested URL /space/exploration/insight/screenshot1.png was not found on this server.

The requested URL /space/exploration/insight/insight-edl-simulator.html was not found on this server.

Not really....

From https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/302/302C.pdf the half power beam width for Xband on the 70M antennas is 0.034 degrees

Using Eyes on the Solar System - currently the InSight-Earth-Mars angle is around 0.56 degrees.

It will drop to 0.1 degrees at about 30 hrs before landing, 0.034 degrees about 10 1/2 hrs before landing,

"Today http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html showed what looked like a signal from @MarsRovers Opportunity. As much as we'd like to say this was an #OppyPhoneHome moment, further investigation shows these signals were not an Opportunity transmission."

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1063204394596937728

I'd also refer people back to this : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=241237

There's no difference.

Yes. All of the above. Sometimes they are reconstructed. Sometimes they are predicted. Sometimes updated very regularly. Sometimes not. Metadata is usually included to explain the source of the data used.

Not going to happen I’m afraid - there just aren’t the resources to pull it off.

As mcaplinger said - they're hardwired.

When we swapped from the A to B side after Sol 200 - we found the stereo data we were getting out of the NavCams was quite different to the A side cameras, and had to execute an investigative campaign of characterizing the stereo data over a wide range of temperatures. From that the team derived temperature dependent camera models. (look at the same patch of ground....all day - https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/ra...amera=NAV_LEFT_ )

We don't THINK that's a problem on the A side ( the B cameras are sort of on brackets hanging off the bottom of the A side cameras, and they're oriented differently ) - but we're going to do the same thermal characterization to make sure - generating the sort of data volumes usually reserved for our friends from San Diego . Keep an eye out for Sol 2209-2210 NCAM, FHAZ, RHAZ.