The press conf at 6pm UT will cover it.

Doug

Sorry - the lost civilization thread went political. It's now deleted.

Wait...we have rovers now?

I think of this survival as like the NEAR survival parked on Eros. They shut it down a few days after landing, then 22 months later, tried again to see if it was still alive after long periods of total darkness and cold soak. It's just not a survivable thing for complex electronics etc to handle. Phoenix will only have 3 months of TOTAL darkness, then about 6 months of partial sunlight before returning to an environmental situation like is has today. The solar arrays might have snapped off, the joints and soldering failed etc etc. If it DOES survive - it would be astonishing. And it is worth checking, just in case.

Doug

Some of you will, hopefully, have seen the uStream broadcasts we did over landing night at www.marslive.co.uk and http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mars-live

On Saturday night at 2200BST ( 2100 UT, 1700 Eastern, 1400 Pacific...I think ) I'm going to do the Mars 'half' of a talk I've given at a fair few astronomy societies in the UK - called Cosmic Casualty. It's the story from Mars Observer to Phoenix - and whilst almost everyone here will, I'm sure, know just about everything I'll say, some of you might enjoy it all the same. Stu will be moderating the chat, and questions can go in to blog@marslive.co.uk with the question in the subject of the email.

See you there - hopefuly Camtwist should let me have slides + doug on screen at the same time, what I'll try and do is put a PDF of the slides up for download before hand so that people can ride along at full res.

The vehicle intentionally rotated during terminal descent to put the arrays left right.

I assume everyone here is a member already. If they're not, they damn well should be. As a Brit who can't pay US taxes, it's the only thing I can do to contribute in a meaningful way to this sort of stuff.

Doug

I'm on there, so are Helen and the much missed Suzi.

You're all members of The Planetary Society right. (anyone who says No at this point, hang your head in shame) So all our names should be on there.

Doug

I use the nasa.gov/phoenix site at the moment - the Arizona one is good, but the flash thing annoys me more than just a bit as well - and because they lack the full filenames, they're hard to interpret.

Doug

If I had to guess what it was - I'd say something to do with...

-Biobarrier deployment
-SSI deployment
-Helium vent valve
-RA deployment
-Met deployment

If I had to pick one - Helium vent valve.

EGD had a go at this in the Sol 3+ thread, I'm kicking of an RAC lander-imaging thread with my own attemt.

Practice what you preach and all that, I'm posting a thread on a sub-element of Phoenix activities.

This movie sequence was on Sol 3- you can see the laser firing, I think.

That's two posts you've made criticizing the current thread layout. Make a suggestion. How could it be better. I'm not sure what you're wanting UMSF to be, but it's not a press agency or a reporting platform. If I wanted to find the current Phoenix status, I'd go ready Emily's blog. If I wanted to see the latest mosaics - I'd come here.

Start a thread on a specific topic you think deserves one.

Open to suggestions on how to manage it especially better. There are 100,000,000 ways you could organise it. Splitting the enormous traffic spike of the first few sols into sep. threads was one. Note that this thread is 'Sol 3 and onwards'.

Discussions are essentially chaotic - attempts to cultivate them in an organised fashion at anything other than a very very low level will always be a waste of time imho.

Phoenix - in TallovisioN - WAY more horizon relief than I was expecting.

This threads going the wrong way. It's getting into political territory, personality attacks etc. Not at UMSF. Some posts deleted, thread closed.

Indeed Pete mentioned the community of enthusiasts who like to use the images (i.e. us ) in a previous press conf. He's in the Jim and Steve camp....one of the good guys

Doug

All hours of sunshine are not the same. At local midnight, the sun is only 3 degrees above the horizon - the solar array output wont be zero, but it wont be very much at all. At local noon, it's 45 degrees above the horizon - lots of power.

Doug

All three of them recorded 8k and 32kbps data all the way down to the ground.

Doug

I'd expect the heat shield to be below, and a little downrange (right) of the chute - that spot looks feasible to me - we're what, 20s after chute deploy, roughly 10s after heatshield jettison - it's not going to be a million miles away.

Doug

The instrumentation is good - to be honest I'd back any means to reliably get it to the surface.

Doug

I'd want to see a different engineering philosophy for a Beagle 2.1 I'm sure that it could be done within the volume and mass budget that B2 had, but it would be a whole lot easier at the 100kg-all-up level. That, I would put money into.

Doug

Ehhem...it didn't. The initial 'scout' budget was $325m. That went up by about $100m before launch. You have to include the $100m spent on the old '01 lander as well. Total cost about $520m.

Doug

It would be sort of cool to see the RAC with the 'lights' on imaged by the RA,B,C SSI filters

Doug

Well - at least I did it on purpose.