That's a stance I can totally appreciate. 'Wake me up when it's over' is perhaps the most sensible option.

I'll be in Patrick Moore's dining room bouncing off the walls probably.

Doug

Nope - BBC's not involved at all.

Doug

FYI - this works beautifully on an iPhone/iPod Touch - I zoom in to the left hand side to get the bigger picture, or the right hand side for the details - it's perfect

Doug

Yeah - I've not posted there in years, but they were saying nice things about the DEM movie, so I thought I'd give them the link to the proper version that isn't horribly compressed like the APOD version

Doug

Maybe Stu's thinking of the Beagle 2 Yahoo Group I had at the time.

UMSF's previous life as mer.rlproject.com started in Feb '04.

Doug

You forgot Peanuts!

Back when it was the 2001 Lander, it had the beginnings of the MER Athena payload on board. Mini-TES, Pancam, Mossbauer Spectrometer on an Arm. It also had the spare of Sojourner - Marie Curie - which would have been picked up by the arm and dropped down onto the surface.

And the landing site would have been Meridiani Planum..I wonder what that looks like

Doug

At the time of landing, it will be up all day. I guess human nature just means we call 5, 6, 7pm 'evening' even though, when it's still daylight at midnight, it isn't.

Really? With only 90 sols, 8 TEGA ovens and 4 MECA suites? At a site where all the obital data says the science we are after is essentially homgenous across the ellipse. Ten times more science? Please do explain how, exactly.

I would argue the EXACT opposite of what you say. There would be ZERO scientific benefit for Phoenix to be mobile. Would a rover in the polar plains be interesting and exciting? Yes. For most science investigations on Mars is mobility a benefit? Yes, clearly, MERA and MERB have shown this to be the case. Would a rover offer benefits for the science that Phoenix is attempting? No. Phoenix has a full schedule to conduct as thorough a characterization as it can manage within the time of it's expected life span. Phoenix is niche, it's arguably one of the few scientific missions to Mars that doesn't need mobility ( a second being the long overdue net-lander type mission).

But to claim that Phoenix would be able to do 'ten times more science with just limited mobility' is wrong - very very very wrong.

Doug

I think you should have a go yourself

I know what you mean about the colour. The sky colour is, imho, quite accurate. The ground colour is a little washed out. The simulation from here http://www.marslive.co.uk/?p=5 is a better looking product, BUT, the orientation of the sun when rendering, and when the HiRISE image was taken would contradict. The sun has to be to the west, and reasonably high, to be honest to the shading of the texture on the surface.

I'm not touching it again for a long time. I'm happy to put the 16bit PNG DEM up somewhere if you want to grab it and have a go.

Doug

Here's how I'm going to play it. On spacecraft time, I'm going to run the HUD animation, think about what's happening (whilst keeping an ear on NTV ). I want to use that time to act as a 'preview' if you will. But - then - whilst we get the Odyssey coverage, in my mind I'll be thinking 'well - it's all over one way or another' - but my attention will be firmly on following events in 'real time', 'real' being ERT.

Doug

This is the best I can do with one of Randy's DEM's. To be honest, I could save myself a lot of render time and not use the full resolution of the DEM itself, and just pre-displace a 100 x 100 poly plane.

Doug

It makes sense, I guess, to get rid of any pressure as soon as possible, so that fuel line heaters etc can be turned off and not bothered with again. While the system is still pressurized, you can't let the fuel freeze, which it would do quite quickly, I would have thought, with -60degC outside or whatever it will be. Just guessing, but that's my take.

I would rate the chance of seing a tree growing as somewhat slim (particularly given that such a thing would be easily visible from HiRISE)

The point with Phoenix is that you really don't need mobility. The science is right under your feet wherever you end up. If you need mobility - rockets are a dangerous, heavy complex and unpredictable means of doing it. For missions that need mobility ( MER, MSL ) then they've got it.

Doug

5 seconds post landing, the pressurizing helium gas of the prop system is vented, so it's a no from the start. If you look at the realtime EDL movie at the Phoenix website, this is shown.

Doug

Myself, Chris Lintott, and Peter Grindrod will be gathering at Sir Patrick Moore's house, Farthings in Selsey, on Sunday afternoon. The four of us will be Blogging, uStreaming and Youtubing our way through the night, pulling together any and every source of information we can find, previewing the events of the evening, and hopefully filling the gaps between NASA TV coverage. I'll also be making sure we 'stand down' during Emily's hour at JPL, as frankly, I want to watch it myself!

We've set up a blog to preview events and to be a home for the content we come up with on the big night - hopefully some of you will pop in and pass comment through the night! We will have more details closer to the time at http://www.marslive.co.uk

MPF, MERA and MERB are the only succesfull direct entry landings - attached, ellipses with X marks the spot on each. They're not to scale. The lesson is - they've all been VERY close to the centre line - but changes up and down range are quite significant.

Brilliant stuff - I was hoping something like the MSSS 25 and 10m/pixel MER ellipse imagery would make it out in time..

Combined with this : http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/?p=180 : we should be able to identify which image to look in when the time comes!

Doug

Ahhh- Engrish. I love it

Doug

Two problems with that. If I had, say, 1cm/pixel imagery around the rover - then my image map would have to be 1cm per pixel. There isn't an easy way to accurately place a second texture on top of the MRO one without actually making the whole thing 1cm pixel. That would mean a texture 800,000 pixels across. No cigar. I went down that road with CTX - on - HRSC DEM's. It was a bloody nightmare, and the results didn't pay off.

The other problem is that at the moment, it all sits together quite nicely. Panoramas don't make good maps very easily.Only a few M from the rover, it's warped and distorted beyond the point of usefullness. ( for eg - http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer2-...8l000m2.img.jpg ) and for the brief moment we are close to the rover, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.

Adding terrain meshes to the Victoria crater one is something I've already had a look at ( I thought the capes might benefit ) but given up on. The meshes themselves just don't stand up to the level of quality to make it worth while.

Always helps to actually publish the damn thing http://www.dougellison.com/?p=5 is now working. That, for now, is my last treatment of the Columbia one. What I'd REALLY REALLY love to be able to do, is some sort of realtime thing where you can drive around it on a quad bike. I'm sure Half Life 2 could manage it, but I just don't know how to put a million polygons into a game like that

Doug

Not really - I did a blog entry from Valencia in 2006 about upgrades to RF comms that are coming online.

There is a 180w Ka band transmitter ready to fly at JPL. Combine that with a 3m dish on the spacecraft and a 70m DSN dish, you would get 8 to 20 Mbps (4x MRO's performance)

Upgrade the DSN to the proposed 400 x 12m dish arrays, and put a 6m dish on the spacecraft - then you can do 320 Mbps from Mars to Earth.

Finished thing is now here : http://www.dougellison.com/?p=5

Enjoy

I didn't know it had been posted on there. I got an email from Randy who had got emails from people saying how cool it was. He told me, and then told Bob to edit the descriptor. Then we realised is talked about MSSS / MOC / MGS, and tweaked that as well. Then I realised Bob had linked to my highly unfinished and quite broken soon-to-be-blog.

The cliffs are a bit rounded off, just a symptom of the resolution (1m per 'pixel' for elevation) really.

And, to the very best of my abilities, they are accurate for elevation, as close as I could possibly make it. The clincher is that rendering the Columbia one from the landing site - it's a perfect replica of the success pan images of the hills.

The proper movies are here - http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001423/ - although I intend to update the Columbia one later today - links later Randy Kirk got some nice emails about them, which is good because it's his hard work that made the data, and his kindness that put it 'out there' for nutters like me to play with.

Doug

Well - there are four done for various Phoenix sites, but, how can I be nice about this....

They're dull. Very very dull.

I think many of the MSL candidates will get a DEM treatment, hopefully those will make it out the door as well.

Doug

Just for fun, I actually have a better version on the burner right now Clouds, sun, haze etc. Results over the next few days.