No - I'd like a massive DEM so I could animate one of my own - at 4k x 4k - for full dome video planetariums

Doug

You've got accumulations of dust on the UHF, the LGA, the HGA, the PCMA...there are lots of places from which an accumulation of dust might be dislodged by wind and end up landing on the 'dial.

There's a bit of fluff on top of our Sky+ box, under the TV. I don't know how it got there - but you know what, I'm not going to spend too much time trying to figure out how it did

Doug

I always wait till after Christmas before buying me my own Christmas present - so I'll be placing my order probably this week

Doug

WANT

DEM



MUST



ANIMATE!!!


Doug

Typical dune forms where? Would the differences in pressure and gravity not render comparatively analysis a little dodgy?

Doug

It sounds like it's THE book you want with you when we start getting LRO imagery of spacecraft on the deck.

Doug

I swear the coffee machine in the staff room behind the operating theatres in a nearby hospital where I was dong some filming was more complicated than that spacecraft...it was certainly more complicated to operate than any of the procedures being done in the operating theatre next door.

Doug

YEah - here's the 8 bit v 16 bit problem - I'm getting steps in my terrain. Looks awesome at the moment, but that extra resolution for altitude would take it to that level where you couldn't see those 256 steps.

Doug

That guy has 'RCA' on his coat I think. I googled for 'satellite RCA' and found that it was the guys involved with Direct TV.

Enough googling, and I'm thinking the Anik B platform

http://satjournal.tcom.ohiou.edu/issue4/historal_hybrid.html

The KSC website is being crap at the moment - but it might have been a later Shuttle launched version of the same thing.

Doug

I could have sworn I saw some map projected CTX images on the PDS somewhere....or am I going nuts - I can't find them now.

Doug

We live on a planet called Mars
Driving tiny sun powered gold cars
But maybe this Christmas
A rock will come hit us
Shaking dust from our spectrometaars

Merry Christmas and all that

Doug (& Helen and Gizmo)

It'll get more and more accurate as time goes on - I'm sure we'll have a firm hit/miss in plenty of time.

Doug

Lets combine the lessons from the dust storm, with current Whrs. The batteries are roughly 600 Whrs in total when new - and running at something like 80% capacity now, 480 whrs.. The current power is 291 whrs (and decreasing) per Sol

We established that something like 150 Whrs was the minimum survival power when doing nothing ( no comms, no science - nothing ) So currently - the most you could put back in the battery is about 140 Whrs. It would take 4 days to recharge it fully.

To do late night obs ( 0240 AM and on for 2 hours) now would require enormous amounts of actuator heating, put joints and cables thru some nasty stresses and for what? Maybe, a small white streak in an image. Honestly, this is something I'm more than happy for Spirit to pass on.

More info :

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/39912
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/39793


Doug

Here's me thinking that 2 gigapixels in a single swath was a revolution in itself.

I"m having a play with CTX @ Gusev - there's quite a few overlapping images there.

Doug

The resolution and sensitivity of the IMU's is almost certainly several orders of magnitude short of what would be required to detect a distant impact or any seismic activity.

Doug

Outreach is certainly part of the mission selection process. However, the rapid release of raw imagery in the MER/Cassini style is certainly not 'virtually free'. Just ask their web teams how much bandwidth they get through.

Also - given that MSL is already nudging it's budget - a delay (which would be a not insignificant cost) seems unlikely.

Doug

Peaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.... 21 month forum time warp. Wadda ya know, googling about MOLA and PNG's - I ended up back here again

MOLA+IMG2PNG - It doesn't like them - and I'd really like to go to the 64 or 256 pix/deg resolution from here -http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mgs/megdr.html

NASA View loads the 4 chunks for the 64 fine, and saves GIF's fine - but they get stretched, unequally, in the process, and downed to 8bit.

A 20k or 40k 16bit PNG bump/displacement map for Mars rendering would be rather good when I'm rendering out of 3ds max at 4000x4000 pixels

I've got a fairly 'flat' 16k colour map which isn't too bad....but more is ALWAYS better when 16 megapixels are required

Doug

Not clear of any turbulence, just the bit of it that's recirculating and might trap the chute ( I think )

Doug

Overly emotional, accusatory, inflammatory or superlative using posts removed - quite a few of them.

Not one of us knows enough of the details to be conclusion jumping and flinging out accusations and condemnations like they're going out of fashion.

Further similar posts will be deleted, and the thread locked. Read the rules : want to rant, get a blog.

Doug

Lens Flare. Sweet

A mortar isn't an object in itself that would get ejected - it's a technique. As I understand it (and I probably don't) Imagine a cylinder and a piston. The parachute is packed above the piston - with a retaining cover, and a charge packed below the piston. The charge is ignited and the piston is pushed upwards ejecting the chute at high speed out through the cover and into the airflow. It's similar to the way the nose-cone and chute get deployed on model rockets. I think.

Some use a spring instead of an explosive charge - but with spaceflight you really REALLY want the chute to deploy, quickly, so a small charge gets used.

Doug

I was just re-texturing my low-res MER for project I'm working on, trying to find MER references...and I ended up back here

Doug

HiRISE - ROUGHLY - does something like distance in km / 10 = cm/pixel (i.e. 250km=25cm - 300km=30cm) - so 5000km = 5m/pixel - 20 pixels across.

CTX is 20 x that, so 100m/pixel - one pixel - and very roughly speaking, the same for THEMIS and HRSC.

Doug

Forget it with Spirit - no where near enough power to get up early or stay up late to observe something like this. The best instruments would be OpNav, Marci or CTX on MRO.

Doug