Totally off topic for the thread and UMSF generally - but I will second a vote for AVAST. It's on my home desktop PC, and 6 machines at work. Touch wood - never had a problem, nor seen a significant performance impact when working.

The altimetry data I'm really looking forward to - as, believe it or not, MOLA means we know more about the shape of Mars than the Moon (and as an animator - it's almost impossible to do a nice animation of the moon with the current elevation data out there)

Doug

Yup - the top of the LGA is in every other pan.

Oh yeah. We're at 'cleaning time' in terms of season - we're less than 20m from the last SIGNIFICANT cleaning event location. All the signs are positive.

Doug

In some places less, in some places more - I think we're seeing redistribution rather than clearance here.

You're right James - just two Navcam shots before deployment.

And that episode has aired here on National Geographic - but is also available from P2P etc.

For those still in the dark - Opportunity drove to the rim, turned 90 degrees left, drive about 5m, turned 90 degrees right to try and leave, and then got stuck. So they turned back around, back to the point where they turned left in the first place - straight on - and left. They had it leaving after going back to where it truned left, and then turning left again.

What it did is in green - what the movie suggested is beige. You would have to be a space geek beyond words to have spotted it


I have to say - the work the MER team did in getting animatable rover actions to Dan to be able to document things like the Tartarus escape was just BRILLIANT.

No - they got that bit right. It was the exit of Eagle crater that was the problem

Bingo - it worked - cheers Mike. PDS navcam + PDS Danovision

I spotted one error in one of Dans animations. Anyone else spot it (it's a fairly small one - on a wide shot, showing the route driven)

Doug

All of a sudden, I'm getting a "No images found matching the specified parameters" when trying ANY panorama. Swtich with the same settings, but to Slideshow - and I see everything.

Any pointers?

Kudos to Card-Carying lurker Pete He pointed me toward Surfer.

Next step - doing it greyscale - for the two different frequencies sampled. Then merge as R and G in a colour image to highlight differences.

Actually http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/...plotTV_001.html - using THAT data set is probably a sensible next step.

This is what I've managed so far

Using LS003RLA_00896474226_10DCM0.TAB
It's basically one very tall tab - that repeats every 500 rows - the 500 rows being 500 10m altitude samples.

I cut and pasted each 500 cell chunk, so they were in a grid, not a line.

Then used conditional formatting with Excel.

And I got this - it worked WAY better than I was expecting.

261 seconds left to right. 5000 metres bottom to top.

I have to use Excel 07 on a PC to do it though - Excel 08 doesnt do conditional formatting like that. A bit annoying.

I've got a few .tab's from the PHX Lidar

Basically - after playing with it for a while, I'll end up with a spreadsheet of values. Each column being one sample 30s apart - each row being a different altitude.

Does anyone know a means of taking a CSV or similar, and turning it into a small image with pixel brightness representing the values from the CSV?

I've thought of one technique using conditional formatting in Excel - but it probably wont work very well

Lots of posts about Autographs deleted. Totally off topic for the thread, and the forum.

That's Gnomedex

Steepest NORTH FACING slope.

Doug

I tend to describe it as a puppy dragging a broken paw -it gets more 'awwwww' from an audience.

Significant testing and experimentation shows that dragging is the better driving method.

She did get onto Home Plate with 5WD after the Silica / Innocent Bystander etc. campaign

Doug

She did that with 6 wheel drive. She can't get up the slope she's on now with 5 wheel drive - I doubt she'd get up the 755 slope with it either.

Whilst straight over home plate would have been preferable - going the 'long way round' has benefits, a trench that will depict the distribution of more silica, if it's there, down one length of home plate will be interesting.

Try shaving, using kitchen foil as a mirror

Backshell & Chute for me as well. It would have been a two week excursion JUST for pretty pictures (wouldn't get close enough to do the analysis we had at the heatshield)

The self portait would have struggled - I might be able to fudge a simultion from the MER model and the terrain wedge of Navcams from there.

Doug

What if ANY component on a near complete spacecraft fails? It's a huge job. At least with this design, you can simply drop in a replacement block rather than go in with a soldering iron. Modularizing the whole thing is actually, I would have thought, a good thing.