Thank's for the heads-up Veronica

"The NASA TV Media Channel will carry a feed with no commentary
or interviews, beginning at 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EDT). The NASA TV Public Channel will
carry a feed with some commentary and interviews, beginning at 3:30 p.m. PDT (6:30 p.m.
EDT). Both feeds will continue through 5 p.m. or later PDT (8 p.m. or later EDT)."

That's especially good news !!

Doug

Earth like exo-planet is my vote.

Well - http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/art...r_feature.shtml is a start. Have to work next to it - it's bloody 'orrible

You do know the countryside smells of poo? That's all there is. Livestock, and poo. I spent the best years of my youth in the countryside, most of it standing in, on, or near...poo.

That's rather unusual - can you cite more details - i.e. post numbers, thread numbers etc?

Doug

Sending lots of MER's doesn't make a lot of sense. THey have a tiny, comparatively, payload and a VERY tough limitation on Landing Sites. I've seen people saying they should be stacking 3 of them together, launching them on Atlas V's etc. I doubt you could find 6 safe, scientifically interesting place to land an MER on Mars.

And VEX was not identical to MEX by a LONG way. Different solar panels, different comms, different MLI, different instruments. It was identical at two levels - the structure and the boxes inside. Mike Caplinger has often said, very wisely, on UMSF that heritage works well at the 'box' level. As an example, flying copies of Pancam would clearly be good, ditto the UHF comms on MER, or the batterys on MER. But as a complete system, MER is totally wrong for Phobos or the Moon.

Doug

Sputnik at 100,000 distance?

Hmm.

Yeah - we got Digg'd or Slashdotted or something with those images.

Doug

Read the first post again guys...MER. There's amazing stuff in other areas, but I'm after MER stuff in here

There's a setting in Invision to turn a board on or off, and when you turn it off, you can put a message up - such as 'Men at Work', or ' Forum unavailable due to server transfer' etc

I need some input for something I'm working on.

What one thing - movie, mosaic, map, annotation, Pancam-graffiti - anything - is you favorite UMSF MER related 'thing'.

The most popular, with 21 and 22 thousand views each, are

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=13309
and
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=13308

What's your one (or maybe two) absolute favorite things at UMSF?

Doug

That's in the 'They have the internet on computers now?' ballpark of utter subject-unawareness.

After the great 'server drive' fund raising by UMSF members, we have our dual 3ghz server up and running. I have another domain hosted on it already. It has been fast, and 100% stable ( touch wood ) for 2 months.

Thus, the intention is to move UMSF to the new server this weekend.

At approx 1200UT ( 1300 my time ) UMSF will be 'turned off'. The database is rather large, and can not be moved in an instant - nor can the 4Gb of attachments.

After the forum is switched off, a full backup will begin, sending the entire forum content to the new server ( this has been tested just now - and takes 2-3 hours )

Only once the full backup is successfully completed, will the DNS settings be changed, pointing the domain to the new server.

Once the backup is completed, the database must be repopulated on the new server, the attachments moved to the right place, the settings updated and checked - and only once the forum itself is up and running will it be turned 'on' again. At that point, it will take a couple of hours ( potentially significantly less ) for the domain-name shift to propagate across the web to your own ISP.

The move is scheduled for what is the quietest days of the week, and the quietest hours of that day for UMSF - to minimize withdrawal symptoms. Things might not go perfectly, so you'll just have to hold tight.

To keep everyone up to date - I will use a new external blog ( http://umsf.blogspot.com/ ) with news of the transfer - once UMSF is down, check there for details!

Cpanel ftp backups now working ( and take approx 2-3 hours ) - so we are go for the switch this w'end

Doug

Ahh - that's a no then. I've used Premiere Elements - and it was very good compared to Premiere. Pity.

Doug

How about Photoshop Elements. It's V cheap ( <10% of Photoshop ) and is essentially, Photoshop with the pro stuff taken out. It might do the job.

Doug

That statistical likelihood of Phoenix being near a dust devil during landing is so close to zero as being not worth considering.

Even if it WERE to encounter one during landing - it would be during terminal decent under the thrusters, and to be honest, I can't imagine it having much, if any, impact on vehicle dynamics.

Doug

Probably a case of commanded odometry crossing over actual progress made.

Doug

Sorry for the delay in an update. The new server is now running a copy of UMSF. As a rough estimate for how well it performs - a page process time on this server is about 0.25s. Typically that figure is 0.05s on the new server. 5x faster. Obviously, it's connectivity that will dictate actual user experience - but it's nice to know that the server itself is very happily processing things, and much faster than we have now. It's undergoing testing by the admin team as I speak.

The actual switch over will be a 24-36 hour period at a maximum - hopefully next weekend. (weekends are quietest at UMSF...you clearly spend all day here instead of doing your jobs. I know I do)

Doug

I rendered a jumbo 4kx4k fisheye then polar-to-rectangled it back into this.

It's hard to get the rover wheels to sit on the terrain when the terrain doesn't actually appear until you render it

Too late on both counts. A big fat chunk of the titanic was actually raised - you can buy coal, cutlery, crockery, from Titanic. - and I believe pieces of Liberty Bell 7 were sold after it was recovered. (unless you mean the bell, not the mercury capsule)

In the very grand scheme of things, Tranquility Base will be reduced to nothing my micrometeorites given long enough (a few tens of millions of years for footprints iirc) - who knows what the state of them is after a LEM launch. But in the meantime, a 50m radius centred on the LEM decent stage as a keep out zone would be a wise step.

Doug

Could very well be camera noise etc. 4:15pm local is getting quite close to dusk. Do you know if those images are even in the right direction?

That's jumping to a conclusion more than just a bit:

From the Washington Post article "spectrometers on the orbiter have not found evidence at the site of the kind of minerals that would be expected around a hot springs."

Carefull about imposing your wishes onto a partial data set without looking at the whole picture.

I'd argue that the multi spectral abilities of Pancam, sky obs, albedo obs, atmospheric obs, as well as whatever geology it can observe, more than justify <$1m / month. The in-situ life-testing of every component as well, is worth it.

Comparisons with ISS/STS = argument we don't have at UMSF.


Doug

A vid of the inflation, the launch, and then tracking out to 20 minutes during the flight.

http://www.rlproject.com/fhalp3/

Doug