"Take a bib and leave your belt at home....."

Good advice most days of the week, where ever you go

I can pull myself along easily with one arm.

I can't do pull-ups with one arm though.

Doug

You may jest - but there was a great 'home movie' style downlink during hatch opening. I could swear I heard someone say 'wow - can you smell it?' when the hatch opened, and literally within 2 minutes of going onboard, they told the ISS crew that the STS toilet was ready for them to use.

Doug

One small quagmire does not render all of duck-bay unnavigable. Saying that Cape Verde is an impossible target is unjustified and probably quite wrong. Neither of you were in UMSF during the thrash to Burns Cliff. It took a long time, it meant getting stuck quite a lot - but it was worth it - it was worth every single sol it took to get there ( and it took a lot )

Doug

A thermal day-night cycle may well help it deploy further as well. But active intervention would be un-necessary

Doug

It just reminds me more of the Tyrone / Silica Valley / Paso Robles type desposits at Gusev more than the ice we see under the lander. Then gain, the more I look at it, the more it looks like the top of a 'layer' of some sort, which just has to be the ice. We'll know soon enough - that's the fun with exploration

Doug

Looks like a small dry powdery deposit of some sort to me - ice isn't whiter than white like that.

Doug

Sat Night it is - just need a sensible eating venue now.

Not wishing too hard eh? It restarted. Three posts deleted.

Seriously - not again.

I'd wait - a 16x higher resolution, and colour version, will be following over the next few weeks.

Doug

I think so - just a perspective issue. If you rotated them 90 degrees, you could make an anaglyph from them.

Doug

453 miles, according to google

Given the ambient temperature of between -83 and -28 deg C - 'wet' is somewhat unlikely. The arms actuators are heated, but the scoop itself is not, and whilst some thermal conductivity into the scoop is inevitable, I don't believe, at such cold temperatures, it would be enough to bring the ices over 0 deg C.

Try scooping dry flour or talc or other exceptionally fine grained material and it will also stick to surfaces in a similar way.

As for rust - well - there's a reason Mars is the colour it is - it's rammed full of Iron Oxides

Different camera location, different camera orientation, different illumination.

Asolutely - it's only fair.

Doug

TEGA cover rolling open...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._11310MBM1.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._11310MBM1.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/..._11310MBM1.html

Everything is totally static - I thought about emulating the rest of the landing, but until we see the PHX team releasing an EDL reconstruction, it would be fairly pointless. The elevation is fictional - I made it up - I gave the crater a bit of a rim, some of the hills a bit of elevation - just enough to hint at something. The final frame shows Heimdall.

I had a go at it myself - the LED's really work at this range - not so great imaging the surface at any sort of distance though.

The MPF, MER, MPL and Phoenix backshells are about 2.6 metres diameter. The Viking backshells are about 3.5m diameter

Use a RAD750 then. Very nearly 10x the processing power of a RAD6000. For the sort of number crunching involved or this - you would have a FPGA on the instrument itself anyway. Think of the FPGAs on HiRISE processing 28.6 megapixels per ccd per second. I'm sure if the need was there, it could be done with no problems at all.

They don't have to deal with it - they have calibrated data. The raw JPG's are just processed to be 'sensible to look at' not calibrated.

Doug

All looks totally natural to me.

Updated - more of a dolly-in-THEN-zoom-out - still at http://www.dougellison.com/?p=19 If we had an unquestionable heatshield location, I'd put it in. Someone was asking about shadow. The shadow would be way way off the bottom of this image, and way to the right as well.

Doug

The 'zoom out- zoom in' is actually the camera going from a 1deg fov to a 45 deg fov, whilst zooming in from 700km to <1km - it is a bit jarring, but it'll do

Doug

Simulation movie - http://www.dougellison.com/?p=19 - not 100%, but I think it'll help put it into context