"Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky"

THAT - is an outright lie. You can't argue it any other way. It's utterly utterly wrong, inexcusable and totally unacceptable. They've written the press piece to make it sound like they've discovered some sort of new phenomenon - and they've have not. They've investigated a known phenomenon and found out new things about it.




Doug

A reception facility for optical comms isn't a 'bolt on' sort of resource - I don't have an exact figure, but we're talking metre+ scale light buckets.

Doug

This all seems like ESA 'discovering' something that we already knew, again. (H2O ice at the poles for example). We've seen clouds, no astronaut on mars would be suprised by the, we saw them with MPF, MERA and MERB - not to mention from Earth ground obs, Hubble, and orbit around Mars.

Doug

Opportunity has a front right wheel STEERING actuator that is broken...i.e. it's stuck facing just about forwards. BUT - it still turns to drive the vehicle.

Doug

This single image was picked to be downlinked as it was the highest resolution image image that included the whole planet. It's about 3km/pixel

Now - MDIS will not reach HiRISE resolutions. But the highest resolution images from this flyby will be about 120m/pixel - so about 25 times better than this first returned image.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/encounters/ind...&timestep=7

Doug

No - Messenger really is quite a low data rate mission. Cassini has a great big HGA. Messenger doesn't.

Doug

I can partially agree with that - the 25cm GetMapping project that covered all of the UK was an aircraft project.

That's because a nice twin engined aircraft is cheaper than a satellite, can be flown hundreds of times, and cover an entire country over a period of a year or so.

But this isn't a terrestrial issue.

An aeroplane on any other planet is a full spacecraft mission, will fly once, and cover only a small swathe of ground over a few hours or so.

It would be a brilliant engineering exercise - if you had to design a planet for gliding and flying planes, it would look a lot like Titan. But scientifically, you could only really justify it as the post-script optional extra of an Orbiter, a Lander, or Balloons.

Doug

What can a plane do, that an orbiter can't do over more ground, or a lander do for longer, or in many instances a Balloon do for longer, over more ground?

I don't doubt that the Ares mission for Mars is a very very cool project - but I have doubts about it's scientific benefits.

Doug

There's always a target, with a error range, that is acceptable. The fact that they cancelled the last TCM before the flyby shows that they were happy with the trajectory - appreciably different could be as little as a few hundred metres, or as much as a a couple of 10's of KM's - but if that's within an acceptable range for the trajectory, there's no problem. You just clean up with the TCM you have had scheduled after the flyby anyway.

There was an Earth occultation (you can see it in the flyby timelines - Emily has it excellent documented at TPS blog - 18:22:27 till 19:30:33 ). And Messenger really flew past the dark side - not the lit side.

I strongly doubt that imagery was returned Early - high data rate comms are not something that happens by chance or accident. It's far more likely a radio science result of some sort.


Doug

This is just as exciting as the Apple keynote tomorrow evening

Doug

WOooooosh

Time Until Closest Approach: 00:00:08 (hh:mm:ss)
Altitude: 201 km (125 mi)
Visible Surface Sunlit: 0.0%
NAC Resolution At Image Center: 7.74 m/pixel
WAC Resolution At Image Center: 54.18 m/pixel
Surface Coordinates At Sensor Center: 3.62 º S 31.54 º E

I would consider aerocapture an enabling technology for both Uranus and Neptune orbiters. Get that sorted, and you don't have to trade fuel vs flight time quite so much.

Doug

Quick anim of the 4 frames so far.

Very exciting stuff!

Frustratingly, the available DEM's for those observations do not extend as far as those features - they've elected to cut them short of there.

Doug

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/360_334/360_334_low_hi.mov ( 25.9 meg )
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/360_334/360_334_low_lo.mov ( 8.0 meg )

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/360_334/360_334_higher_hi.mov (21.8 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/360_334/360_334_higher_lo.mov (7.7 meg)



The next one is the same terrain - particularly happy with this one - but a different fly around.


.

Moving object, of 10th Mag? I'd say no.

http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins...projects_2.html

Spirit managed 6th Mag when looking at Orion a few years ago.

Doug

I got your notes on handling that - I've been flat out HRSC Dem'ing - but I'll have a look at these over the w'end

Doug

This thread, basically.

I've been totally sidetracked from it - I'd love to see it happen, but I no longer have any time to spend on it, I've got a very interesting project that's come up and I'm focussing on that a lot. If anyone in Europe wants to take this on - I'd be happy to bundle up all the kit assembled so far and send it over to you.

Doug

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/511/511_ctx_hi.mov (18.7 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/511/511_ctx_lo.mov (7.2 meg)

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/988/988_1x_hi.mov (10.4 meg)
http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/988/988_1x_lo.mov (3.8 meg)
[attachment=13112:988_1x.jpg]

Bulldozing contractor to write up the invoice

There's nothing 'fake' about this data. I've not made any part of it up - it all comes straight from the actuall data provided by the HRSC team.

HiRISE imagery is many times higher resolution ( 100 - 200 x better resolution ) - but based on that argument, perhaps we shoudl take Themis, HRSC, CTX and MARCI and turn them all off. Only HiRISE provides that resolution, so everything else must be useless, right

I don't think anyone is claiming this is the 'best' data, nor the 'best' way to look at it - but it's something new being done with a fascinating and growing data set. Scrolling around HiRISE imagery with the viewer is another way to look at a different dataset that shows us different things from a different spacial perspective. What's unique about HiRISE is that the imagery is immediately made sense of by even an uninformed human brain as it is of a resolution that we can interpret in real terms. What's unique about HRSC is that it matches moderate resolution and higher resolution elevation data.

Now - DEM's with HiRISE imagery (which will hopefully make it 'out' at some point) would be the best of both worlds - astonishing resolution in every dimension ( except time ). But even that isn't the 'best' or 'most real' way to look at Mars.

Doug

And the HRSCView website will let you do that, to all the dem's they've got

Doug

This is the first frame + a middle-ish frame of the Eberswalde anim - the landing site, very roughly, markes with a white circle (which vanished after 2 secs) - you can see the CTX swath in there. Sadly - I couldn't get 3ds to handle the 23k x 32k tif I wanted to use - so it's at 50% of that.

This + 2 x Nili for Friday probably.