Almost certainly unrealistic. Nothing like optimism, but please don't do the 'X metres per sol x Y months = Z kilometres'. It only ever worked once - when Spirit went from Bonneville to Pot-of-Gold in 45 sols.

yes.

They don't. Even if you chuck a hole in one - they just go 'pleuh'

Doug

Sshhh - I was going to just put a bit of black card over the camera for 20 minutes, then come back and say "Did you see it go? It was amazing!"

Pin-the-landing-on-the-google - this is my guess.

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=5...mp;t=h&z=17

Doug

"We're launching tomorrow morning' says Ed.
"Shame I can't make it, I have to be at work" says I.
"At 3 am" says Ed
"Hmmm" says I

Long story short - hopefully a reflight of the HAPS1 A560 tomorrow - at dawn - with recovery in time for me to get back to Leicester in time for work. Ed will fill you in on the rest of the payload. He's an engineer - I'm just a temperamental artist.

Obviously - anyone with half a brain will be fast asleep, so may not be any/many live updates. Possibly live tracking, maybe uStream while we're setting up.

The real problem is the toxicology involved in staying up all night with caffeine based beverages.


(For people just finding this thread...

Movies from the Nova 8 camera

http://vimeo.com/1628664 Ascent Part 1
http://vimeo.com/1628493 Ascent Part 2
http://vimeo.com/1628497 Ascent Part 3
http://vimeo.com/1628414 Descent


Movies from the HAPS-D camera

http://vimeo.com/1628947 Ascent Part 1
http://vimeo.com/1628809 Ascent Part 2
http://vimeo.com/1628810 Ascent Part 3
http://vimeo.com/1626812 Descent


http://vimeo.com/1628991 All of the still images at 6fps from the HAPS-D camera
http://vimeo.com/1629086 All of the still images at 6fps from the Nova 8 camera
Download the MOV from bottom right on these - and you can essentially scrub your way thru all the images at quite a reasonable resolution.

I think they're going to go south and look at more rim.

But exploring the entire rim in the same detail we have done so far would be a 2 year long process, and at some point it just becomes stamp-collecting rather than science.

Technically, Canvey Island is visible in the images, I think. Foulness Island almost certainly is.

The Mars flyby is mainly about changing the orbital inclination of Dawn iirc.

Yup - exporting at 5fps (or the full 15 for the really fast moving after burst )

Tell you what Nigel, there might be enough movie-generated 360's to get sideways stereo (as if you head was at 90 degrees).

I've not aligned these movie-pans to be the same orientation as one another - but a quick tweak would sort that out.

Doug

These work so well!!!! Screw stills - just do HD movies like this and you're sorted

Mars24 says that Sol 98 is the first day with an actual sun-set - so we get a funky week of partial sunsets

I was so disappointed to learn that. I wanted some sort of drum-bursting shock-wave.

I'd make some sarcastic comment about how amateurish that must be.....but James and Ed are both registered at UMSF. Not that I'm saying I thought I missed a launch a few months ago as a balloon headed up shortly before I arrived only to find that they were still getting ready.


Doug

Believe me - watch the utter chaos that is involved in one launch....and you wouldn't think of saying 'can we do two?' - and to be honest, I can't imagine the statistical chance of two independent balloons pointing in independent directions on independent trajectories framing something from a stereo baseline is very high. As for two balloons - you would never be able to fill them the same, thus one would overtake the other and you would just have two cameras, one above the other - and the strops would rub on the lower balloon causing it to fail quite quickly.

Good work James....now do all the movies - like this

Bingo. I wanted a 50% buffer on capacity. From when I turned it on, to landing, used just over half the card. I wasn't 100% sure what the average image size would be at altitude ( taking a photo of a photo from altitude doesn't work as a test ) and there's a HUGE question mark over flight time (2hrs 50 we got - could have been an hour longer, or an hour less without too much being different)

So - I was cautious, but as a result, we got the entire flight fairly well documented instead of most of it very well documented or some of it brilliantly documented

Doug

Given the fact that you could almost walk from Cambridge to Norwich without being more than 20ft from an RAF base at any time, I was about to say 'Wow - a bit of Norfolk without an RAF base' - but actually, there is one hiding in there. Great work - why on earth would anyone ever hold back with their pictures and not let people do this sort of thing.

That is something I'd like to do, and I think I can for about 50g - getting a fish-eye lens to do it, though, is quite hard. A Vistaquest 1005 would do the job ( google Catcam ) - but a wide angle lens is hard to find that small - infact, I'd like two - one up, and one down

Doug

We didn't arrive for another 2 1/2 hours.

I think people are missing a point here. The payload is stable to the point of images being, on the whole, not blurred ( which is down, mainly, to a single payload 'deck', and a very long balloon-to-payload line ). Beyond that, you don't want a stable payload, because otherwise you would have a thousand images of the same direction. You don't want that. You want it moving around a bit to fill in the panoramas - and to be honest, all the ideas we could possibly come up with add things for lines to get wrapped around at launch, flight, and burst ( bad ) and mass ( very very bad ).

Look at the movies just before the burst. They're astonishingly stable, and have a nice gentle rotation. I think the trick I've missed is not doing enough stills sequentially. I think next time I'll do an imaging minute, then a movie minute ( so 20xstills, then a gap, then a 15s movie, then 45sec, repeat) . What we need is an imaging strategy based on the sort of dynamics we see with this flight - to get better mosaics out of it.

Incidentally, no one has started making mosaics from the movie frames yet... It sort of works, but will take some work.

Doug

Anything from 0 kph to more than 100, and it can change very quickly as we rise thru different layers. Sunday there was almost no jet-stream - but sometimes it can be >100kph - and you could go from 0-100 in a mintue or two.

WE go up at about 10-15kph, BUT, anything you put on the payload to use that 15kph to rotate ( like the fins on Huygens) is going to influence the payload via the cross-winds far far more than the wind of ascent.

Doug

http://www.inquisitr.com/2614/space-has-a-...-scott-maxwell/

AWESOME lecture. The MER engineering version of Squyres as far as public speaking.

UMSF makes a cameo

Without risking under-exposing the other images - no. We could bracket-expose images, but that trebles the data volume and probably wouldn't get the range anyway. It's just one of those things. Take enough shots such that yeah, you'll get loads of over exposed dark images, but you still get enough good ones.

Doug

I'd be interested to see what people would change in terms of pointing, orientation, and image sequencing with just the one camera for future flights - and if they could have a second camera, what they'd do with it.

Doug

Get the **** out of here. That is INSANE.

QTVR of it attached:

For our foreign friends, it's probably worth mentioning that The Wash ( that U shaped bay ) would appear to change a lot from altitude, as it's almost all very very shallow and produces large sand-banks at low tides. It's the venue for the story of King John's Treasure ( probably false ).

Doug