Good call!

Of course, the other way to get a greyscale USGS one...

Is to print the Topo one in black and white

Does anyone know of a not-topographic version of something like this?

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Gallery/MapsA...oon.html#Globes

I need something I can cut-out and assemble using a 10cm sphere as a former.

Any pointers much appreciated!

Cheers

Doug

Two seconds, to 75m/sec?

Orbital velocity at the moon at 100km is about 1.6km/sec

Getting from 1600 to 75m/sec in 2 seconds is 762.5 m/s/s - or 77.7G.

Langauge barrier alert - I think they meant slow it BY 75m/sec (which, in 2 seconds, would be roughly 4 G, a small solid motor would do that fine).

Slow the orbit BY 75m/sec - from 1630m/sec to 1555m/sec - would result in an impact about 20 minutes later, at a velocity of around 1650m/sec - with a vertical element of approx 140m/sec (all simualted using Orbiter, the free space flight simulator)

I find it a little unlikely that the probe will, in any way, survive the process.

Bingo. That's it. The wires are so fine, I bet for a future design, one could put something like that over the front of a Mastcam like Hood. The wires would be totally out of focus and not noticeable ( like the heating element in a heated front windscreen).

It certainly beats wipers, rollers, blowers etc.

Doug

We're one cleaning event from a couple of hundreds metres of driving.

Site 93, Drive RI, Sequence P1994

Doug

(looking at watch)

We're waiting James.


tap tap tap tap

I tried to 'be like Opportunity' and walk around around with my arm outstretched- but it gets tiring quite quickly

I make this the last RAC image 16:05 on Sol 149
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._20870MDM1.html

This is the last MI image at 14:26 on Sol 149
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._207A0MGM1.html

This the last SSI image that wasn't a solar observation on sol 151 at 5:31 am
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._20900R6M1.html

And your colour image was about 15 minutes before that - 5:17 am,

Even if she hits a low power fault, the environment Spirit is in ( Spring, equatorial ) and the design (off the ground, well insulated) - means, I think, that she will probably not 'break' quickly.

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/38695
and
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/39897

are you home-work reading for today.

The fun starts in a months time when the data hits the PDS

Between now and then, we have the wrap party

Doug

I was thinking 180whrs bad - not 90. That's shocking. That's 30 less than Opportunties record low in the '07 storm.

Doug

Tesheiner already adds about as much info as we can easily get our hands on, when that data is available ( from the Pancam database)

There used to be more complex mobility data available from the MER workbook, but it was removed some years ago.

Doug

You still have to render the entire box air tight. That means seals of every access panel, seals for every cable in, every cable out. That pressure is going to go up and down with thermal cycles. It might change the thermal properties of the box itself. Then you've got to have valves, flexible pipe work out the box, up the past and to the front of the lenses. Pipework that's going to bend with every camera movement. With all due respect, a $1.X billion dollar rover is just a tiny bit more complex than an R/C sub.

AND - at the end of all that - if you've got a CRT monitor or an old TV - go and blow on it. The dust doesn't move very much, if at all. I know - wind has cleared arrays etc before, but we don't know the mechanism by which that occurs, nor do we know the mechanism by which it sticks.

If we really really want to have dust-removal - the best way is with the thin-film technique I blogged about at Valencia '06. Tiny power, low mass, low complexity. Turn them on for a few seconds - dust gone. Gas tanks, wipers, rolls of film - they're all very heavy, complicated, and have their own failure modes.

DOug

When someone writes a post that ends with "But that's probably not a subject for this forum"....they're usually right.

Two posts deleted.

Making the entire electronics box a pressurised body? Given that it has to travel thru a vaccum? How do you engineer in the insruments and their openings to the sample collection mechanisms. That's an epic engineering challenge right there.

Hitting fast reply gives you a limited options way of posting. not smiley icons, no attachments, not extended formatting etc etc
Hitting reply at the bottom of a page is a full new post to that thread
Hitting reply on someone's post is a full new post to that thread with the entire contents of the post you hit reply on, pre-quoted.

The point is - if your post is going under the post you're replying to - you do not need to quote it. That's called inline quoting and it's un-necessary, grows the database, slows down the forum, and generally makes threads unnecessarily lengthy to scroll down.

Doug

Richard Cook mentioned a naming contest in his Von Karman lecture (see the JPL website). It'll happen, just not yet.

Now I know what Buzz meant when he said "Neil - we missed the whole thing"

Doug

Now that's a solution I've not seen mentioned before, and it might make a lot of sense.

From the Archive PLan PDF I've seen - http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/...rchive_Plan.pdf



and



4 different flavours of AFM data in the plan, including calibrated topographs.

I don't know. Why don't you ask them.

All the data will be on the PDS before too long anyway.

Sad topic to start - but it marks the end of a great mission.

Barry :

Sol 151 - had a bit of a problem. Executing the last high power science day. Dust storm on that day (out of the blue). Were expecting Tau of .3. Planned for .5 - it went up to 0.8.

For a few sols it kept communicating.

Became harder for the vehicle to wake up as the dust has hung around.

Nov 5th - was the last time they heard from Phoenix.

At this time pretty convinced the vehicle is no longer available to us.

Declaring an end of mission operations at this time.

Going to keep listening with MODY and MRO - but no one has any expectations of that happening.

Wheel diameter at the face is 250mm, and at the cleats, 260mm (the wheels are slightly domed across their width) I would expect cleat-marks to be 78.5cm apart.

Wheel width is 160mm - and the distance between the insides of the wheels is 900mm for the front and rear wheels, 790 for the middle wheels. Including 2x 160mm wheel width - the total width between hubs of the front or rear wheels is 1220mm

Roughly.