That's one of the things that Squyres has mentioned in the past iirc. Usually, at the end of a talk, people will ask 'how old are the rocks' - and he replies with something alluding to the fact that the instruments to do that science, no one's figured how to put them in a shoebox yet.

Doug

"We're hoping to get close enough to reach out and touch the face of this cliff,"

Squyres, in the TPS Rover update for March.



Mr conservative here got it wrong.

Restricted visibility for Mars Odyssey communications. You would probably be taking a 1/3rd off total downlink if you brought the local horizon to 45 deg elevation (given that the spacecraft will appear to move slower nearer the horizon, thus more of the session, and thus the data, is sent at the lower elevations. )

Doug

"Hey folks! I’m on-duty with Opportunity this week and it’s going to be pretty exciting. We are in the process of driving the rover over to the wall of Cape Verde to study the layers of rocks there in much greater detail. I will be posting updates all week with the spectacular new pictures that we should be receiving. Stay tuned, it’s going to be a pretty cool week!"

Thanks for the update Ryan : http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com/200...ng-to-the-cape/

I wonder how close they'll get. I think no closer than the height projected from it's base ( i.e. 45 degrees )

The bridle was cut 21.5 m above the ground and impacted at a velocity of 16 m/s (14 m/s vertical and 12 m/s horizontal). It bounced about 12 m.

(paraphrased from http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/20...pathfinder.html )

Doug

What would be the requirements ( size, mass etc ) for a MAV with cubesat-to-orbit type ability. I'd have thought it would make a lot of sense to forgo any on-Mars assembly at this stage and just take a solid fueled vehicle in one piece.

Of course, in the future, as a precursor to ISRU methane production - a liquid fueled MAV would be an interesting project - but with something with so many weak links and challenges as MSR - I think where the potential is there to KISS, it would be crazy to do otherwise. You want as few launches as possible.

Of course, even with an MSL or ExoMars cache - we have to presume they're dead. So you need to land close to them, and then go and get them with a rover ( MER-scale I guess) That's going to lead to something very special - revisiting a dead vehicle.

Doug

I remember discussing it - but it must have been elsewhere.

I'm really looking forward to the creativity that comes out of this. However, the Google cash isn't enough, imho, to do the mission in full. As a result, there needs to be some commercial return (not insignificant commercial return) and I don't know where that will come from or what it will mean for the science that may or may not get done.

With the Ansari X-Prize, there was a world of commercial sub-orbital lobs to tap into, with a lot of people prepared to pay a lot of money. I'm not sure there's money to be made in small scale lunar rovers ( unless ESA/NASA/JAXA start paying people to do them - and the spending of too much governmental money outside of the nations in question isn't going to go down too well ).

And - can anyone figure out a way to get to the surface with just a Falcon 1 sized LEO payload?

Doug

There another animated gif (what the hell's with those!) which is of the flight wheels. I think they've dropped the JPL text from within the tred, but they're still 'woah - BIG' looking.

Doug

Good words at NW

"While I have not agreed with all his decisions, I think that Alan Stern's tenure at SMD has been a huge boost to space science and his resignation is truly unfortunate. Also unfortunate, however, is the amount of misinformation being spread (often with the best intentions) by people without a full grasp of the facts.
For example, "Anonymous manager" used MER operations as an example of "overzealous spending", pointing out "a 75% reduction in productivity for a 20% budget cut" on a project with "300 individuals driving two rovers". The facts are the following: The proposed budget cut, that was to be applied to the remaining funds in FY08, was roughly 40%. One rover was to be cut back from the current standard 80% duty cycle (due to the way Mars time aligns with a standard work shift) to 60% (this does not include the fact that the rovers are not commanded on weekends), a 25% reduction. In addition, the second rover that was to be hibernated (not killed) still required weekly contacts and some minimum amount of engineering analysis and commanding to maintain its viability in the dynamic martian environment; let's say this is an 75% reduction. This still comes out to ~50% overall, more than a proportional 40%, but unfortunately project expenditures are never linear. As for the 300 people driving the rovers, total MER staffing (management, operations, IT support, data processing, etc.) at JPL is roughly 50 FTEs; the larger number quoted accounts for part-time individuals and the large science team, many of whom receive minimal funding.

It is fair to question the scientific usefulness and management efficiency of any mission, particularly those in their extended phases. MER undergoes detailed external (non-JPL) science and management reviews at least annually investigating these issues, and so far they have concluded that it represents an excellent science value for the expenditure and that the operations budget is lean and reasonable. Your opinion may vary.

There are many troubling issues with costs and overruns withing SMD, and many places (certainly including JPL!) where blame can be assigned. But while I welcome a spirited (no pun intended) discussion, I think we should try to avoid opinions masquerading as facts.

Anonymous MER staffer"

If you made, say, a thousand - stacked them up in some sort of release mechanism, parked it on the Kibo external platform and released them, at speed, downward - you could distribute along the ISS orbit, in such a way whereby one or two might make it down. Have each primary school make one to the fixed design and then send them all up. I love paper planes - infact I'd love to fold this design if I could find it, it looks fantastic.

Doug

I'm annoyed that the DEM's that are available to download via the HRSCView site are clearly not as high fidelity as those used by the HRSC team to produce their illustrations. I'm not sure how or why, but they're just not of the same quality. But - given what's available, I don't think I could manage much better than that apart, perhaps, from using the MOLA set to give some context. I've been doing some renderings of mars as a sphere with the MOLA set and it's just breathtaking, even at the 1/4 of it's full res that I've been using.

Doug

I've not heard anything specific or formal - but rumor has it, yes.

Kepler is a very different sort of vehicle. I would be more inclined to compare the LRO ATLO schedule with something like MRO or a member of the EOS system.

Doug

They've taken another in flight RAC shot - flicking between the two you can spot a tiny bit of the bio-barrier moving. Probably a thermal thing.

Doug

100 (meters per hour) = 515 090.655 smoots per year

55 mph = 242 hands per second

(500 million miles) per (6 months) = 167 316.677 feet per second

240 000 (square feet) = 7 698.81934 sq smoots

This is important stuff!!

Sweet.

No - they really were getting ready to put a full hibernation plan into place, which would have been sent up next week. I have no doubt about that. People were figuring out how to do MER part time and work on something else as well to help with the money to reliable keep things going.

And lest we forget, there was an impact on Odyssey as well, something the public really barely know about.

I think people are trying to second guess who thought what and when - probably in the wrong thread. What the hell, I'll have a go as well.

What I do know is that Monday was the Mars program going to MER and saying 'you're only going to get $X from now, what can you do' - and the answer had to be going to full hibernation on Spirit and loosing a lot of team which would have been near impossible to rebuild. The plan was real. The decision to cut funding for Odyssey and MER would have had to occur above Odyssey and MER. The resulting impact was perhaps not appreciated until the MER team meeting (and I presume a matching Odyssey meeting that's gone less well documented). You can be sure as hell that Squyres et.al. tried to think of any and every way to keep operating two rovers - but there is a financial floor beyond which you simply can't keep the people on board to operated both rovers. Perhaps above MER they thought "Yeah - MER can handle a few million less" without realizing that after 4 years, they're operating about as efficiently as is possible. It'd be interesting to compared the per-week cost of operating the first 90 sols (not the $800m/180sols - but the chunk of that $800m that was actual operating costs during that 90 sols) and compare it to today. That critical mass of engineering and scientists you need to operate them would be just about impossible to rebuild ( and utterly impossible if an $8m cut for '09 were carried thru ). If out take out the dust storm - last year could have been suprisingly productive for Spirit - home plate finished, and south to the interesting features there. She was back to 800 Whrs can you believe - and then the dust storm kind of ruined that - but hey - we learnt about dust-storms instead. If she can survive the next winter, I think it reasonable to suggest that 800 Whrs and an active summer could happen again - and, we'll have survived three Martian winters - a useful scientific baseline for future long term exploration.

This is why, in the other thread, I question the sensibility of a Mars 'program'. MSL is the problem here, for whatever reason. The challenge was put to the Mars program to find further MSL funding itself - and it's decision was to go to Odyssey and MER and say 'you can't have the normal extended funding anymore' . What Odyssey and MER came back with in response to that probably surprised a lot of people - but they were not doing it for a reaction, they were doing it because that's all they could do with the cut they were being presented with. I see MER and Odyssey getting hit as no more appropriate than say, hitting Aqua, Terra and Aura to be honest.

Perhaps Alan was expecting the Mars program to sort this out for themselves, for JPL to find cash from elsewhere to top up the MSL budget without impacting other missions. When they didn't or couldn't do that, I think Alan was probably prepared to let them hang out to dry for a while, see if they capitulated internally and found the cash somehow. With the threat of too many 'NASA kills Mars rovers' headlines, I think that the money would have been found from inside somehow. Griffin instead capitulated over him, and thus rendered ineffective Alan's commendable efforts in trying to get some honesty and accountability within the mission design and ATLO process. With that precedent set, then missions of the future would try to pull the same thing, and thus Alan essentially becomes a Sherif with a Colt that his boss swopped out half the rounds for blanks. It's untenable.

Two things are wrong in that picture. The treatment of all Mars missions as one big accounting code, and the over runs of MSL. The MSL overruns are massive. HQ moved the goal posts on them (pre-Stern), inappropriately, requiring further engineering work which was never accounted for at the beginning. There may have been further MSL budget growth for other reasons, but at least part of it was HQ instigated.

But why a Mars 'program'? Why not an inner-planets program? LRO goes over so Messenger gets cut? Outer planets : Juno goes over, so the Cassini extension gets cut in half. I don't think that's the right way of doing things. But I don't know what the right way is. I don't think anyone does. Alan was having a damn good try, but if you're not left to get on with your job in the best way you think, then there's nothing to be done but walk out the door.

Doug

That's the exhaust from the APU's. (little hydrazine turbine engines that provide power to move the aero-surfaces and engine gimbling etc ) - apparently...it's normal. We just don't normally see it when it's day light.

Having done that - here's my thoughts.

Funding a Mars 'program' is , I think, not quite fair. The case in point is clear here. MSL has had budget issues. Now - to be fair, so did MER, but that's spent cash now. Why should the current budget growth of MSL reflect as a punishment on Odyssey and MER? I know 'life isn't fair' - but Odyssey and MER are big success stories, with more to come and the budget problems of another mission shouldn't impact that.

However, missions HAVE to be accountable. But, you can't exactly scrap a $1B mission when I'd imagine most (more than half I'd guess) of the cash is already spent. But neither can it spend without implications. And I just don't think it's fair to steal from the pockets of other missions currently flying. The only way I can see it really working is if there is an overrun- you then have to look at future missions, and rescope / descope / delay / cancel them. To look sideways and cull from current missions just doesn't seem right, and nor is it fair to clump together multiple missions ( i.e. Mars program, discovery program ) and punish others from that 'clump' for the errors on a different mission. Funding for extensions is hard. I've spoken to David Southwood in person about the struggle to fund new missions at ESA when MEX, VEX, XMM-Newton, integral, Cluster etc etc are all needing extended mission funds. And while new is always good, it's also criminal to cull an active, scientifically productive mission where all the risk is just about sunk and you KNOW what your extra money will get.

As for the argument of how much to spend on certain fields of interest - I think there's a certain level of bigger picture to be had there. Currently we can do 30cm/pixel, 4 Mbits orbiters at Mars, and (hopefully) 20km+ rovers with movie cameras and amazing laboratories. Part of me thinks that actually, whilst it's always true to say that the technology will be better tomorrow (like buying a new laptop for example) - targets such as Neptune and Uranus could do with a decade or two further development so that when we return there, we do so knowing it'll probably be the only trip for half a century, and it better be damn good as a result.

But whilst it would be nice to have a 'scheme' on how to fund, who to fund and when - such a system is basically the net result of scientific taste. Who's to say that the scientific calling of one body get's an 'A' over another body getting a 'B'. Guess what, the scientists with an interest in each will say each is the most important. And how much does our technically ability to investigate those sites play a role. I prefer TE over the other flagship missions. Why? Because I like Titan. That's just about it. Does it offer better science than the others? No. It's different science - and I don't think it's even possible to say what better is. It probably offers MORE science though. But then, we don't KNOW what the science if going to be. So, do we do the easiest mission? No - because half (imho) the benefit of these missions is the engineering progress they make - and a mission should be considered good for having engineering challenges that are good challenges, but manageable challenges (MPF for example).

Trying to manage all that, well, it'd be enough to make you quit your job.

Oops.


Doug

I've moved two posts that are about a broader issue than AS's resignation into this one where I think they are more appropriate.

Two posts moved to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...60&start=60

Bit of a delay in getting the new server properly up and running. Got some fairly poor service from a server management firm. Have now moved and had some fantastic service. Joe and I will be starting to use the server in earnest over the next few weeks - ideally rolling out before end of April.

D

Alan's resigned! I didn't see that coming. He's done a lot in the short time at the helm. I wouldn't be suprised if the recent Mars program issues are somehow involved- but I'm not going to try and second guess his reasons. Should make todays science briefing on NTV interesting. (March 26, Wednesday 2 p.m. - NASA Science News Conference - HQ (Media Channel)

I loved XCOR's long video about what they were doing from a few years ago. It was fantastic. There are some special guys there, I can't wait to see what they can do.

(and their photo library is a great resource of rocket exhausts for animators )

Doug

Reader Advisory. Stu got broadband.



Doug