Fortunately, Sky News in the UK often carries Nasa TV for 20 or so minutes during a shuttle launch. I wish someone could put together a business plan to have Nasa TV on Sky TV in the UK at, say, £10 a month.

Doug

STUNNING ET sep shots - a whole swathe of back lit plasmarey, RCS-exhaustey lovely stuff.

It's been a long time, but Columbus is in space.

And away she goes

I think that's an issue that was sorted years ago. There is soldering on so many components of LV's - that I'm sure specific ways, means and methods for avoiding that problem have been addressed for decades.

Doug

Carefull of using the word 'exclusive'
http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?mission=...on&subm3=GO



Doug

Whilst discussing MVIC / Ralph - here's a shot of the spare CCD they have at the London Science Museum, and a map from the PDF here : http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/

Up close, these things ( when not filthy dusty ) are very pretty - lovely colours from different angles.

Doug

That's EASY - replace my model with the one from the 'mer photos' thread, and write a radiosity renderer to go with it

Yeah - that was my series of (probably very illegal) 'spacebert' modifications to dilbert cartoons usually talking about Beagle 2

That's a great big mosaic of DTM's - most of which have not been released yet - but yes, it's the ingredients to those that I've been using

http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/mex4/

Doug

I wonder if, with the Dawn flyby - we might get a similar view of Mars. We have a recent similar shot of Mercury, and Venus - it'd be great to wrap up a nice inner-solar system family portrait

There's hopefully another few metres to go 'in' yet. Then a few weeks, I would expect, of study there. Then another few weeks of getting a little closer to the cape, get higher res shots there, and then out.

Thereafter? We've got to turn left, we already went right

Nope - I often do an update, and while it's updating I often leave it for ages to do something else. Last night, I was doing everything else, and suddenly realised that the fans on my laptop were attempting to slide the thing across my lap and the heat was slowly slow-roasting my legs It really hadn't happened before - I would have noticed really quickly.

Doug

The monday-to-friday pattern is actually quite obvious on the forum stats - it's quite surprising just how much the weekends are quiet.

Doug

The new version is chewing 99% CPU occupancy under OSX - just in the normal image viewing panel after an update. What info do you need to take a look at it.

Doug

I just didn't have the time to get questions in before hand, and was stuck away from the 'net at the time.

Nice to see some good questions asked - I want to see the PDR before I really stake my claim. The top level questions ( MER size vehicle with MSL size payload - no relay capacity - the year long wait on orbit ) didn't get covered - but some good stuff did. I still don't think it's the right mission for ESA to be doing at the moment - I think it could spend that much money better elsewhere.

I don't think anyone's boycotting, don't be offended, I just think people still don't think of ExoMars as a real mission yet - I find it hard to - and until the minsters meeting later in the year - it is just a proposal and a study. That it will progress to a real mission is by no means certain.

Massive thanks to Jorge for answering questions!

Doug

You should listen to Planetary Radio on the Mercury Flyby for a similar response from Lakdawalla Jnr

The two peaks probably are at the same altitude, but the foot of each cliff is not.

Why not - if it gets people looking at the DSN's website, gets people talking about Cassini - it's a nice gimmick.

DOug

I mean the gold coloured honeycomb inbetween the top of the arrays and the bottom of the arrays -

(actually - looking at KSC, there is nowhere near as much of it as I thought there was - it's mainly a channel, pehaps a cm or two deep, to carry cables - but at the key parts for structure - it's a honeycomb)

tap tap tap

Hello....is this thing on?

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=107948

http://multiasciiart.webcindario.com/Ejemplos/homer.gif

Hmmmm - shoes.

THe sandwich material of the arrays is probably the only feature making it look odd at the moment ( i.e. there isn't one ) - that, and the tiny little covers for the Pancam lenses on the end of the stalks. It's a bit hard to see some of the details with the background being the same colour as the default rover material - but having done some radiosity rendering, I know that's basically what you start with.

Doug

I think the mistake was essentially putting Eris and Eros, Pluto and Pallas etc. into one category, located between Saturn and Uranus.

Doug

Oh heck, I didn't point it out this time around, UG did. You could do a 'If you remember Doug's Glogging about this visualisation web app for Cassini a few months ago..well it's now out' - type thing

I wish, I really wish I could download it and keep it locally.

Doug

Ahh - I see the question. It's not a sound from the vehicle that gets to you - it's the shockwave passing you.

Imagine a car driving past you - with a massive long stick sticking out the window. The stick could hit you before the sound of the car. Sort of.


Bad analogy - but I think that's the point.

Doug