I wonder if it's possible or practical to shift dig-and-dump operations to me a local midnight when the temps are more like -80 instead of -30.

Doug

Ahh- that makes more sense.

Doug

There's a burp in the imagery pipeline somewhere obviously - the people that need to know, now know.

It's all words, basically, until the November ministerial meeting

What was very funny at the little dinner we had in NYC a few weeks ago, was two of the people began to debate politics. It got slightly heated, but not too bad - but another person just turned to me and said 'Now I see why you don't allow politics on the forum'.

It's hard to set the lines - but this is one that I'll defend to the ends of the earth. It ends up splitting a forum apart, rendering members who would happily discuss things all day every day - sworn enemies. In some respects, I've been a little too lenient in not drawing the line further away from political debate.

I've seen it destroy forums, first hand. I'm not a big fan of thehabitablezone.com - but that's probably the only place a political space discussion could occur.

There is a plan is to conduct a lower compression, more filters, less down-sampling pan as I understand it ( called the Re-Peter Pan ) Of course, with Pathfinder, it had 1/16th the resolution to contend with.

Doug

ahem...

political
politicians
president
m v um
oil


1.2 of http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=boardrules
- 1.2 Politics - the discussion of politics is strictly forbidden. The distribution of money between projects within a space agency is a valid discussion, but outside that scope is not. Discussion of politicians, politics, political parties, various topics of the moment (Iraq, Terrorism) are all very much off topic and posts that include them will be removed.

Please don't 'test' or 'push' the rules. It's hard to draw a line, but one HAS been drawn, and you all seem hell bent of dancing along it.

Doing a little dance along the 'no politics' rule..a few people slipped one foot over. Posts deleted.

Doug

Well - I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling for a requirement for lander relay capability during the next decade either.

Seriously - MSL is the only landed asset firmly scheduled. That's it. The next up to the pad is, currently, the last.

We do have the next scout, which will be an orbiter with at least Odyssey like relay ability - which will (if you presume a decade lifespan) relay capacity out to at least 2020+. There's no reason to expect MRO, MEX and MODY to all die especially soon either. MRO, imho, will last a LONG time.

Doug

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/.../20040825b.html
...The spacecraft has enough fuel onboard to keep operating through this decade and the next at current consumption rates.

A google search hints at far more details here - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=A...78ab683f86ac8c3 - but it's clearly a pay-for paper.

"Odyssey was the first Mars relay satellite conforming to the CCSDS ... With 37 kg of fuel remaining and fuel use at a level of less than 1 kg/year, ..." Not sure if that's a contiguous citation from the ScienceDirect paper.


Doug

See this...

----------------------

That's a line being drawn under the debate regarding Marc's writing. Some like it. Some don't. End of debate.

Quite - the sub-headline should be " If these walls could talk, they'd say 'Aluminum Perchlorate' "

Well - I can hand on heart say I've never regularly visited - there are so many blog-like sites to keep an eyeon, that one just doesn't make my daily reading.

What I can say is that UMSFs traffic has spikes and troughs...but at not point did I feel the need to write a post declaring its coming death, because all that will do is turn people off the site all together - saying something like that can do no good, and only harm.

Doug

I use a PC

Seriously - I do - img2png on my desktop PC machine.

My MacBookPro is my 'life' machine (Email, calender, presentations, photos etc), my PC desktop is my 'power' machines (storage, PTGui, cold hard data, 3d rendering, Photoshop)

Doug

There are three of them - they are where the uprights of the landing legs came thru the lander deck before they were deployed.

The LIDAR laser has been imaged, but that's not what those images are of. The LIDAR laser is much smaller, closer.

Doug

Look at Marks page - they are described as sky water observations. Solar filtered ( thus long exposure and noisy ) horizon obs.

Doug

This European sure as hell doesn't get that.

Doug

"The 1 cubic meter (35 cubic feet) of soil was taken from about 1 inch below the surface of Mars and had a pH, or alkaline, level of 8 or 9. "

Oh boy. Did they take the cartoon of Phoenix burying itself seriously ?

Doug

That's sort of the point of it - adjustable focus to fully image the contents of the scoop.

Doug

Poll now closed, because that would be like...cheating


Doug

Poll = Fail

The results from the first sample are a pH between 8 and 9

Doug

I think that's asking for this off-topic thread to turn political....which would be a double yellow card, resulting in a sending off.

Doug

We have samples in one oven, no reason so suspect we can't get samples into others, samples in one of the WCL's, met, lidar, MECA TECP to use...AND pretty pictures.

Doug

Given that this is from a clean slide that hadn't been exposed to the landing dustfall - anything seen is simply artifacts of a non-perfect collection slide. The illumination is entirely from within the OM ( http://www.mps.mpg.de/images/projekte/phoe...ca-om01_xxl.jpg ) and the LED's are in a ring around the OM optics, causing the change in shadows as the different LED's are turned on to image the slide. Notice how the 'worm' moves in exactly the same way as the shadow around all the other imperfections on the substrates?

Disappointing, but not all together surprising that people would try and make something out of it.

http://www.geocities.com/launchreport/reliability2008.txt

If you take all Zenit variations and all Proton variations - the Zenit comes out at 81.5% success rate, the Proton 92.3%

In the last 12 months, Zenit has 4 launches with one failure, Proton 3 launches with one failure.
http://www.geocities.com/launchreport/stats2008.txt

The Proton is not unreliable, especially when compared to Zenit.

Doug