Ahhhhh - thanks.

Congratulations Mike, those text images are very promising. Sharp, vivid, no noticeable noise and an artistic amount of motion blur

Is that a set of in-flight-calibration lights of some sort bolted on via what looks like a D9 serial port on the top right of the electronics box?

I like the 4 0's in the serial number.

I agree. Using that phrase isn't inaccurate - it's just a turn of phrase.

ESA's recent gaff, however, is inaccurate, and in quite a bad way.

I'll probably be doing it again, but in a pub in London next time.

Essentially, UMSF and my entire Mars enthusiasm is a front for my alcoholism

It was this group - http://leicester.skepticsinthepub.org/ - and the talk went down very well. I think you may have the definition of skeptic inverted.

I'm very lucky, it seems. Helen really enjoyed the Imax film - and infact was a great 'taste test' when I tried some Mars imagery in full-dome video some months ago. She wont come to every talk I do but she'll come to any new talk, like the one I gave to a skeptics group on Tuesday.

NH got off the bad with barely a squeek from the anti-RTG crowd. I'd expect the same from MSL really.

Doug

Some words on img2png and the MDIS imagery would be good- - which tags we should be using for calibrated results.

D

I agree - it's just a turn of phrase - but ' Sees the Universe in a new light' would perhaps be better.

ESA have pulled a blinder - as Phil Stooke pointed out...
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMVGAWIPIF_0.html
"As it flies by at a distance of 97 km, Mars Express will image areas of Phobos that have never been glimpsed before"

WRONG. It's been glimpsed in full by the Viking orbiters. No excuses for that sort of misinformation.

Technically, I think Carl has been honored in that way already with the renaming of the Pathfinder Lander to the Sagan Memorial Station.

See - you would fit right in!

'Just going into the shed to do some forum stuff'

'Oh. OK'



To be fair - Helen will happily come along to most of the talks I do, and seems to enjoy them (no matter how beardy and wierd the audience might be )

D

I'm afraid the line you're taking is bordering on pseudoscience. I would suggest that other fora are probably better suited to the discussion you're after.

Could you go into more detail here - we have two quite different landing sites with Meridiani and Gusev. Very different materials structured in rather different ways. Conretions, layering, cross bedding, sulphates, vugs and so on. How does what you propose, explain those features.

Doug

Unjustified rant, and replies to it - deleted. If people wish to debate the rules or the application of them, send me a private message. This thread is not the place.

And it's very pretty

Actually the Eee PC's are on about the same performance as that celeron. They're rolling out new Eee's with the Intel Atom chip in them, but I don't know how powerfull that is.


Doug

Typical figures quoted are about 1kg

The mirror will survive, but that's about it.

Doug

There's no need to fill the UMSF server by downloading and then attaching all the Phoenix imagery in question - simply provide links to it at the Phoenix website.

Has anyone met a propulsion engineer who finds mossbauer spectra interesting?

OK - so several orders of magnitude out Infact, just about an order of magnitudes worth of orders of magnitude.

But still no in the realms of feasable.

A space station in orbit around the moon is a great idea ( although a romantic one - I can't actually imagine any usefull purpose for it - if you change your perspective, we're all just in a high lunar orbit right now ) - but the ISS has never, is not nor will ever be the right tool for any other job than the one it is doing.

Doug

Incidentally - thermally, I would expect the environment at LEO compared to anywhere else, with half the 'sky' being full of a warm blue marble, to be significantly different requiring non-trival modifications to ISS. Power wise, you've going to need twice the solar arrays if you take it to Mars. We're 4 months from Zarya being 10 years old. Mir lasted 14 years as a crewed vehicle. The author of that article has written a book I once flicked through. I find it hard to believe it's the same guy.

Doug

"There are good answers to all these objections."

There are not.

"How likely is any of this to happen? Not very"

Thank god.

He doesn't understand one iota of the challenges involved.

419,000 kg when finished

Let's guess a conventional ( rather than months-in-the-van-allen-belts ion ) ISP - 390s

http://www.strout.net/info/science/delta-v/intro.html suggests 4.1km/sec required

You would need something like 16,000,000,000 kg of fuel. 16 MILLION tons.

A fully laden Saturn V rocket on the pad carried 2,708 tons of fuel. It had a max payload of 118 tons.

Let's go optimistic - lets say it's a 1600 ISP Ion engine.

The requirement then is just 5,000 tons. 42 Saturn V launched laden with Xenon.

Someone please check the numbers on that - they may well be orders of magnitude off - but they do, to me at least, seem to be in the right sort of 'bloody stupid idea' ball park.

The phrase ' hand waving over the details ' has never been more appropriate

- 1.5 The manned vs unmanned debate will be never ending, always heated, and it is not allowed on this forum

Three posts deleted.