high speed turtle is my favorite by miles - love it

Doug

Emily has done the full smackdown on this at her blog, which Phil's picked up and reposted at badastronomy.org - There was one comment asking about the shutter speed of Pancam and how it wouldn't show motion. Just to mirror here what I've clarified there - it's not the duration of the exposure that's the problem, it's the time taken between the three filtered images. Plus, the Navcam images taken a few sols before. I had a look at some typical Pancam images, and exposures of 256ms are fairly normal.

Doug

I should probably ban myself for this...

FOUR MORE YEARS.....FOUR MORE YEARS




Doug

ImageJ can handle this lot perfectly - I'm now working on mosaicing the 128ppd set - but basically importing at 16 bit signed, then exporting a TIFF - the final tif is fine.

Doug

I've done a post to Phil's BA page


Attached, the Screenshot in question, and my guess of where it is in the imagery from a fair few metres away.


Update - I think the same region is imaged in these :
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit_n1350.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...AP0736L0M1.HTML


Doug

We were reluctant to let this topic happen at UMSF - but over my morning tea ( Dan - what were you thinking! ) I figure we can so the same for this as we did for the 'puddles' with Burns Cliff.

Lets rip it apart.

Let's identify the location, the size, and give the media some facts.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit_p1367.html ( top row )

Left http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CP2415L7M1.HTML
Right http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CP2415R1M1.HTML

Where's that parallax-to-range calculating webpage?

347 px in the left frame, 215 px in the right frame, and approx 13 x 28 pixels in total

Damn - http://copperas.com/merpx/ is broken

Doug

That's GENIUS

As an update - thanks to the first installment of the matched-donation, we just smashed through £1200. With Chris's generous referal deal, and a few other projects - I think we're well on our way to a genuinely sustainable state of affairs for UMSF.

Doug

I'm waiting for you to get them - as there isn't a 'browse' folder with these - so I can enjoy the Emily-o-matic PDS-for-the-public amazing web-pages.

Doug

Currently £706.83 with £500 of matched funding already to add on it's way - (£1206 in total) - and any remaining £ before the Feb 28th date will be doubled as well - currently a grand metaphorical total of £1413.

I'm grateful, speechless, and a bit emotional about it to be honest. Just 25 people have donated - and have done so with enough gusto to bring out plans forward significantly, to an extent where we are seriously hoping to get everything in place BEFORE Phoenix, 10 months earlier than we first planned.

I thought this would take all year. It's barely taken all weekend. Thank you...seriously...thank you.

More good news - we have now set up an affiliate scheme with the excellent Nasaspaceflight.com
details here : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4916

I've just added another update to Post 1 of this thread - with some amazing news

One exceptionally generous UMSF members has offered to match every £1 of donation between now, and the 1st Anniverary of the New Horizons Jupiter Flyby ( Feb 28th ) - so every pound you donate, is worth TWO to UMSF! With that amazing offer, we hope to hit a grand total of £1500 by the end of February, and we will try, if we can, to move to a dedicated server much MUCH sooner than we thought!

We are at £405.95 already - which is more than £810 once you account for the generous matched donation offer! Keep the donations coming thick and fast and we'll have 12 months worth of dedicated hosting funds ready by March!

Doug

(Update 2051UT - £506.60 GBP - so with our matched donation, we've reached the £1000 mark - but the more we can get, the more long term security we have for dedicated hosting)

For those of you that don't know, NASASpaceFlight.com (www.nasaspaceflight.com) is the world's most read space flight specific news media site, with 300,000 readers per month, and a forum that is the manned equivalent to UMSF for Unmanned Space Flight. It's managed by a fellow Brit, Chris Bergin - and we met a few months ago when I was giving a talk up in his home town of York.

Due to the recent initiative here at UMSF to generate some revenue for dedicated hosting, Chris has offered to help by donating a healthy percentage of revenue from UMSF referrals to the site's excellent and completely unique L2 subscription area.



Chris has an overview of L2 here :
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/th...944&start=1

I myself am a paid up member of L2 and I never fail to be amazed by the quality and quantity of genuinely fascinating information that comes straight from the manned spaceflight coalface. I can personally recommend it as a great way to get thousands of presentations about Shuttle, Ares/Orion, ISS, ELVs and even rare Historical Apollo era content - in fact, watch the L2 ticker in the middle of the front page to get an idea of what's inside. During shuttle missions, you will find bang up to date checklists, same day MMT meeting presentations - everything a spaceflight enthusiast needs to follow along in as much detail as you could possibly want, live.

All the information on signing up at NSF and joining L2 is to be found here http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/l2/ - and Chris and I have agreed that UMSF will receive a nice referral fee if you mention UMSF during the Paypal process (in the Payment notes, along with your NSF Forum username) to pay for L2. Once you've done it - drop me an email ( doug@unmannedspaceflight.com ) so we can keep count! You get all the spaceflight information you could ever wish for, Chris gets a subscription, we get a new server - everyone wins!

Cheers

Doug

What gives you that idea?

Doug

Well - umm - I check my inbox thismorning and it's FULL of 'Notifaction of Payment Received' - we're at £291.43. £708 to go.

Wow!

Update 1216UT - £339.28
Update 1432UT - £386.93

I'd not heard the word Varve before - but a seasonal climactic pattern tied in with the Athena team's hypothesis for Meridiani makes a lot of sense.

Doug

Was anyone bugged when Mars Odyssey went after MGS, MEX after Odyssey and MRO after MEX?

At the very lowest level, two streams of data coming back from Mercury are better than one. More insightfully, BC will be doing some overlap science, some new science - and will be observing at a higher resolution.

Doug

What, another new logo for you all to argue about? Hell yes! Thanks to Astro0 for the lovely 100k icon to drop in there to celebrate something of a milestone! No, it doesn't say 100,000 posts, so yes, it might not be obvious to everyone. Before you comment...just remember - IT'S JUST A LOGO... so, moving on.

Currently, the UMSF admin page reads 101441 posts. The secret admin section has about 1800 posts, the total number of posts made is more like 108,000. It depends how you slice it - but which ever way you look at it, we have either reached, are about to reach or have long since reached the 100,000 posts mark. So to everyone who's made one or more 0.001% contribution to that - thank you, well done, nice one, etc etc

Meanwhile, post 1 of UMSF ( at that time, mer.rlproject.com ) was made on Feb 8th 2004 - just under 3 weeks till the 4th anniversary!

This, combined with a bit of a spike in the forum performance thread seemed like a sensible point at which to think about how UMSF works, where it's going, and - most importantly - how to pay for it.

We're going to have issues in a few months - the Phoenix landing is probably going to make UMSF a bit of a nightmare performance wise. There's not really anything we can do between now and then (although we'll going to try) - but before we know it, it'll be MSL, LRO, Dawn, Rosetta, Messenger, hell, New Horizons. What we want to get in place before it all goes crazy, is a dedicated server. A box of our own. At my place of work we recently upgraded from a normal hosing package not too different to the one UMSF runs on - up to a dedicated server. The difference is night and day. Not only would a dedicated server mean UMSF was 'in our own hands' performance wise, but it would be a lot faster, probably more reliable, and we'd have the ability to do a few interesting projects we've talked about in Admin HQ (talking about those can wait)

I have always said, and the admin team (thanks for the input guys) agrees - UMSF will never have a subscription model. UMSF will always be available for people to view and contribute to, for free - not to mention that from an administrative perspective, we can do what we want with a 'member' - but a 'customer' has to be treated in a different way, a way we don't want to go down. We do, however, need a big old chunk of cash to pay for dedicated hosting. Something like £1500 per year, about 10x what it costs now. The odd casual donation has covered UMSF to date with a bit left over to do fun things like send 2000 Sols posters and Birthday cards to the MER team to thank them for their hard work. But now we need a lot more - this is the plan.

We want to switch to a dedicated hosting solution 12 months from now - and we want a years worth of hosting money ready, in the bank, by then. People have often said "I'd pay XX'. We've steered away from a begathon in the past - but not any more. We want the membership of UMSF to have donated £1000 in the next 12 months. We've reached 100,000 posts - I think we can scrape together a penny for every one of them. I'll be adding the donate button to the forum footer in a few moments. It operates in £'s not $'s - as UMSF while centered on US subjects, is a UK institution which will have a UK bank account.

You can do the maths any way that you want - there's about 1300 members. If one in ten donates £10 - we'll be way over the target. If the top 50 members do £20 each, we're sorted. Do the maths, grab your bank card, and do it. Don't feel guilty if you can't. I know what it's like to not have £10 to send off like that, so if you can't - don't, and don't feel guilty. Just keep being a member of the community, that's input enough for anyone. But if you can, then please think about it.

James Canvin and I are going to sort out a proper UMSF bank account here in the UK to transfer the donations in to, and to operate the place from. It'll be transparant - I'll keep a running total here of how much money we've got, how much things cost. If we're totally honest with you, you will hopefully be more generous in your donations.

We're also looking at a few other revenue streams. The Cafe Press store is a nice novelty, but it doesn't generate a great deal of money - not will it ever do so. What might make some cash is if we cut out the middle man and do something ourselves. What would you be inclined to buy (I'm thinking an embroidered patch, an enamel badge) and for what sort of price. I'm also trying to put together a DVD (with ElkGroveDan's generous help) of some early MER live footage from JPL which we'll be selling at some point this year - it'd be nice to see how many people might like that. Google ads are not worth the hassle, but we're not against the concept of a 'support by' sponsoring oraganisation and that's something we're looking at as well.

So - there it is - by UMSF's 5th birthday, I think we can be moving to our own server, with a faster forum, a more certain future, and the opportunity to do some cool projects to make it a more interesting and useful place!

As ever, thanks to the admin team for their advice and support. We're at £105.11 already - £894.89 to go!

Doug

Update - a PayPal donate button has been added to the forum footer. It's down the bottom right corner. That's the easiest way to donate. If you don't use paypal, then it's either cold hard cash ( can get anything exchanged, so no problem) in the post ( send me a PM for the address ) - or a cheque (but can only really take those in £'s).

Update 2 - One person's asked about charitable status and US tax law. Because I'm a Brit, and UMSF is based in £'s - I'm not even sure that is possible unfortunately. If there's a US accounting guru who knows the rules and regs on that one, get in touch.

Update 3 - One exceptionally generous UMSF members has offered to match every £1 of donation between now, and the 1st Anniverary of the New Horizons Jupiter Flyby ( Feb 28th ) - so every pound you donate, is worth TWO to UMSF! With that amazing offer, we hope to hit a grand total of £1500 by the end of February, and we will try, if we can, to move to a dedicated server much MUCH sooner than we thought!

Time to close the playground again. It's a subject that has been done to death, into the undead, and now to death again. Everyone has had more than a fair chance to air the opinion, interpretation and respond appropriately. It's not being closed because of the subject, it's being closed because it's going in circles - tens of thousands of words of circles. Posts covering this ground elsewhere will simply get culled, we're done here. Thanks to all who've contributed from all sides - but I don't think anyone could say we're getting anywhere.

Doug

I only noticed because I've been bitching about that very issue ( basically, the laptop has an ego ) on an Apple forum regarding my white Macbook

Doug

In that subtle, introverted, quiet way that they love to - the little apple logo on the lid lights up - the light from the back of the screen filter though it and makes it quite bright.

Doug

LOL - they might want to turn the laptop on

Doug

When I toured the 'back office' of ESOC at the Rosetta Mars Flyby, there were control rooms for many missions - have all those transfered to ESAC now then as well? And what will be conducted at ESOC and ESTEC in the future? Would future press events ( like the mars flyby) be held at ESAC instead now?

No offense to any German readers - but Madrid sounds like a much more exciting trip than Darmstadt

Good luck with the move!

Doug

It also says that an astronaut would have been surprised to see them. It infers that clouds were not known to exist.

Doug

Been there, done that, search this forum for the reasons why it wont work.

Doug

That's about the full story there Ted. It's the total lack of acknowledgement of previous science, pretending that no one has studied this before. They're doing good science, that I am sure of. They're doing an utterly dreadful job of communicating that science. I would rather a press release like this didn't exist at all - as a European, and thus someone who's paid for that release to be written, it's embarrassing. Either the writer has never ever heard of google, or they are intentionally sexing it up. Both are frankly, not good enough. Plenty of scientists and engineers from the past couple of decades have worked long hours and dedicated their careers to doing Mars science - they would have every right to feel put out and somewhat insulted byt the lack of acknowledgement of their work with this announcement.

Doug