See attached - about 1,150 meters.

Really. To be specific, we are commanding 5 minute beeps when we believe every fault window opens.....the expected behavior is thus just 5 minute beeps to preclude a lengthy power hungry DTE.

The fault modes open a comm window - you have to Uplink to get a response as Paolo said

As a heads up to people watching DSN Now - you may, quite often, see what appears to be MER 1 transmitting to the ground for a few seconds, maybe half a minute. That’s not Opportunity. That’s the DSN getting a false lock on noise from MRO.

Were we to get a response from Oportunity - it would more than likely be a complete 5 minute beep.

"The Martian dust storm has grown in size and is now officially a "planet-encircling" (or "global") dust event."
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7164

It doesn't. Assuming a loss of clock fault - it simply boots up when 2 amps are on the array. The IDD heater is not a significant concern when you're at 2 amps.

People should think of their TV screen. It has dust on it. It's vertical. The dust just sits there.

This mosaic is from Opportunity
https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/182691m...er-20070719.jpg
during the 2007 storm.

They were able to execute simple Pancam observations briefly during that storm. However - even if the tau were the same now, Opportunity would be in worse shape for all sorts of reasons (11 year older batteries, on a slope, it's not high summer ).

However - the tau is a lot LOT worse right now. We've seen both record high tau's, and record low power. The vehicle is facing conditions we just have no experience with.

That's a rather simplified view of what really occurs

Papers like this : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/esp.1272 : go into it in more detail.

Moreover - the rover itself presents a topographic feature to the oncoming wind, whatever angle it comes from.

They wobble - yes - and that's caused sand to slide down them driving on dangerously steep slopes in the past.

The sort of slope that represents a threat to vehicle safety can cause some kinds of coarse dust, bordering on sand, to rattle down the rover deck.

This is all academic - we don't know how long this storm will last, nor what state the vehicle will be in when it ends. We may find we come out of it with hundreds of watt hour to burn.

Remember - dust on the arrays is not the problem right now. It's dust in the atmosphere. A brand new rover with clean arrays would also be in trouble right now. We went into this with a pretty clean rover. A dust factor of 0.772 ( see https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/mission/statu...tml#opportunity ) is remarkably clean.

Other than taking occasional tau measurements of the sun - no - there simply is not enough power to do so.

If you look at the MER raw image page and PanCam tracking database - you'll see the only imaging attempted since Sol 2107 has been tau measurements of one sort or another.

Moreover - it's not dust 'fall' that hits the arrays - it's just blowing around and sometimes you get some. Tilting at a large angle may actually put your arrays facing upwind and cause more harm than good.

By continuing to leak out of the rover in temperature/pressure dependent ways.

When you have skies this dusty - the single best strategy is to be flat. You're getting your power from the diffuse glow of the whole sky.....anything other than flat hurts you.

Expect a quiet few sols - http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mars-tau-b.html
SOL TAU
5097 0.65
5098 0.64
5099 0.67
5100 0.64
5101 0.60
5102 0.60
5103 0.61
5104 1.55
5105 ****
5106 2.12

Fun fact.......5083 I was on shift - and not only did we conduct the first NavCam 360 in a single Sol that I've seen in >a year of Ops - but it's in part thanks to a ExoMars TGO pass on which some of these frames came down!

Still trying to sneak in an upper tier to get a proper 360 without a Horizon cut-off. Hard to convince the science team to spend what bits we have on that.

Yup - visible in NavCam as well - https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...NCAM00309M_.JPG

https://eyes.nasa.gov could do it as well. If you use the shoulder camera on Mercury then lock the camera to the sun you could watch it all day.

So - as I understand it - MRO could, kind of, do a semi immediate store and forward approximating a bent pipe. It's not a mass problem. (TGO and MAVEN have basically the same UHF antenna and Electra radio system).

BUT - the choice has been made to record data in an open loop canister mode. Not immediately decoding the 1's and 0's - but recording all the Electra can hear. This entire data set will then be dumped back to Earth enabling a deeper analytical dive into the data if something goes wrong, and to throw computationally intensive analysis at it that MRO couldn't do in real time.

Back when MSL landed - MRO was doing the same thing, but Odyssey was also overhead doing the bent pipe. If you could only have one - you would take the recorded data because while it lacks immediacy of bent pipe....it makes up for it in potential to have more useful information after the fact.

The relevant facts start on page 28 - https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/MRO_092106.pdf

The MRO - MSL Mode is discussed on page 108 - https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Des...MSL_Telecom.pdf

"MRO cannot provide delay-free (bent-pipe) relay, as it first records the return-link relay data as it
is received from the descending spacecraft during the overflight and then sends the data to the
DSN. Both telemetry relay (specifically, unreliable bit-stream reception at MRO for EDL and the
Proximity 1 protocol [6F26] for normal relay) and open-loop recording (known as canister mode in
CE505 radio terminology) are being considered for the relay reception onboard MRO. The
current baseline is open-loop recording on MRO during EDL. However, open-loop recording
was successful during Phoenix EDL. MSL will choose either Prox-1 unreliable or open loop for
EDL in 2012 based on the predicted link signal level and variability.
"


This... https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-197/197A.pdf appears to discuss it after the fact on page 6
"The UHF signal emitted by MSL was received by MRO’s Electra radio. The in-phase and
quadrature components of the signal were recorded on board MRO in open-loop fashion.
These signal data were relayed to a NASA DSN antenna on Earth over MRO’s DTE X-band
telemetry link. The spectra extracted from the open-loop data as a function of time were
examined and processed at different bandwidths to extract carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) and
frequency estimates"

A shift in when to deploy the parachute.....but not a shift to the entry time and entry attitude. The landing time will remain unchanged to within a few seconds.

The TCMs between now and entry are not only designed to reach the appropriate target - but to do so at the exact right time. If you're targetting the landing ellipse at the wrong time, they your entry angle will be bad. If you target the right entry angle, but at the wrong time...you won't be landing in your ellipse...and so on and so on.


Timing is also crucial so that MRO will be in the right place to record UHF telemetry during EDL (MRO can only store and forward that data - no realtime bent-pipe)

Hopefully, if they make it, the MarCOs WALL-E and Eva will conduct bent pipe realtime UHF to XBand!

This PDF
https://mars.nasa.gov/files/mep/msl_sci_team_key_papers.pdf

Has links out to a LOT of MSL science results.

If you look at the three subframed Right FHaz images taken as we did the backwards 180 over the weekend - it looks more like shedding tape than sticky soil.

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...91P1220R0M1.JPG
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...99P1220R0M1.JPG
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...A7P1220R0M1.JPG

It's been there a while...

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...QEP1243R0M1.JPG (4774)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...B7P1293R0M1.JPG (4591)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...29P1110R0M1.JPG (3950)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...UBP1215R0M1.JPG (3489)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...QOP1214R0M1.JPG (2595)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...__P1201R0M1.JPG (2474)

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...WMP1201R0M1.JPG (2468)

But I don't think on 2464
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...Q0P1212R0M1.JPG

And clearly not on 2454
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1...QP1212R0M1.HTML

That would pin it to somewhere between 2464 and 2468.

If you take that copper plate impact - and apply it to a rubble like surface, in basically zero-G - it'll do plenty of damage !

Apologies to Emily et.al. for this taking me so long to write....but....I became a Dad for the first time just under 4 months ago, so time to get it down on paper has been a little scarce!

Hope you all enjoy it. And yeah....Ashley and I have since gone back and figured out what a 2.0 Selfie sequence might be like. We'll do it again at some point.