No. No no no no no no no no no.

If it's in any way 'big' news - you have to sit your scientists down and make sure they've got it DAMN right before you tell anyone. Make sure the story is totaly solid, the data is checked, and rechecked, and that there's no chance of this being wrong.

You can't go 'We think we've found something amazing' and then 10 days later ' oops - sorry - calibration problem'. That's a massive embarassment for the team, and for NASA.

Really? Shading, dust deposition, and rockfall from each layer above seems to me, to be what we're seeing.

Doug

Lots of speculative posts in various threads. A bit of restraint is almost certainly called for - keep it sensible - and keep one eye on the forum rules ( especially regarding Politics )

Humour or not - politics is still politics.

Post deleted.

They're clearly close

http://spacex.com/testcast.php

Doug

FWIW , Excel '08 on my Mac can open the CSV In full - but asking it to plot anything is a death-sentence. So I just use Excel to generate a CSV containing the time I want and the fields I want, and use Plot to then..er..plot it

Doug

Last 55s or so of landing.

Altitude on black line, left axis.

X = blue, Y = red, Z = Green - velocity on right axis in km/sec

Note the brief -Z increase at seperation, then the gradual drop until the constant velocity phase at about 2.3m/sec

And seen by Modis on Terra at 0935 to 0945UT ( three frames merged )

I don't think Aqua will get it unfortunately.

Edit - It DID - about 20 minutes later....now attached.

4 frame anim from Eumetsat - Met 9. It's in the last two frames right at the top.

Quite a lot of cloud - but 2 neutral density filters, F22 aperture, and 1/10,000s exposure. Basically - the camera turned to be as sensitive as a brick.

Same view here - taken with a Sony DCR-VX2100e camcorder.

What about cheating - just add 2.5k to every alt value.

The joys of 'plot' - a freeware app for OSX..

It works for Audi at Le Mans

Yeah - it's end of fiscal year, Sol 124. For approx $2m. That puts it almost bang on an order of magnitude better value per sol.

Doug

I know - it's quite obvious now, looking at the Raw's

http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/i/SS061EFF901...8_16AA3RBM1.jpg

They got the OK for an extension to Sol 124!

Doug

James - send me your address.


D

Sweet.

Oh wow - that IS good stuff....

For excel-monkeys like me - keep CSV's coming

Doug

1015 local for the maximum for me in Leicester.

Going to bring Binos to work and hope the clouds part for a brief bit of projection.

Awesome - I'll have fun with that. Is this all DSN tracking-reconstructed do we think? If you plot Altitude-time, it's a bit \_ if you know what I mean.

Doug

To get an oblique angle, you end up much further away than your normal orbital altitude. 90k instead of 30k for example. So LRO's res of 50cm/pixel would drop to 1.5m/pixel.

Doug

If someone can convert these into CSV's or something - that would be usefull for all I'm sure.

Doug

Not a particularly constructive way of tackling the problem. Thread closed.