Having a mission be delayed usually means it's going to cost MORE money.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63336201

In this case "up to €360m"

That said - I would be very surprised if ESA couldn't find the relatively modest budget to keep MEX going until the spacecraft is no longer functional.

You just cited a wikipedia page...which in turn is wrongly using a citation which is a paper on which Mike is a co-author.

https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/pub/e/down...each_Camera.pdf

No where will you find the phrase pushbroom in that paper.

Because JunoCam - as Mike VERY correctly points out ( as he is - after all - the JunoCam systems engineer ) is NOT a pushbroom camera.

It is a pushFRAME camera which is very different.

It's probably best to trust the paper itself ( and one of its coauthors you were arguing with ) rather than a Wikipedia page editor who wrongly cited it.

This is the best stack of images I could wrangle from the video at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/dart-s-final-i...prior-to-impact

Over a period of ~20mins from the first to last observation in that group, it fades to almost nothing.

So I presume it's a twilight phenomenon and not anything else.

Seriously - much kudos to DSN schedulers across every mission out there - between the Artemis requirements and the blunderbuss of CubeSats it's deploying - the impact to the DSN is like nothing I've ever seen.

Oh my god you've gone full MER Prime Mission pancam with the thing.

When looking at the pop-up quicklook page for an image - a row of download links to the various levels of calibrated FITS files rather than having to jump from the quicklook to the 'find related data' and the select and hit download on a specific L2A product would make it a little easier.

Also - the quicklook page having more search tools ( i.e. show me all the xos4 mode images in these three wavelengths from Date X to Date Y ) would be useful as well.

But this is all nitpicking - it's a great repository - and the weekly RGB xos4 image are spectacular.

If you take a look at where the earth is during uplink windows (based on DSN Now and Mars 24…something like Az 103, El 19) ……the east side becomes very very sketchy from a comm / terrain occlusion perspective.

I'm guessing that was a multi sol drive without ground in the loop.

The fetch rovers being described also have wheels to drive around a bit as well.

Seconds after landing the pressurizing helium is vented from the prop system to somewhat pacify it.

I don't think it would do anything now even if you tried...and if it did do something (give that these are pulse throttled landing engines) it would probably rip the SEIS cable clean off.

I see in the release notes that Chang'e 3 data is supported complete with a debayer option added around the same time..

FWIW - I tried some recently downloaded Chang'e 5 data and got this error..



I went and checked - and CE3 PCAM images do process well - and I think the CE4 and CE5 images are largely the same.

Maybe something to consider for the next release!

Doug

You will note in the article in question : https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-mars-he...ance-rover-land : as is usual - both imperial and metric units are shown.

Given that the primary audience is the American public - it is only reasonable that the format is imperial ( metric )

No. That 'gash' is part of the disk-gap-band design of the parachute.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24989/wind-...nces-parachute/

Drag scales with the square of the velocity - so even when the powered descent vehicle drops out of the backshell and the mass is dropped to ~20% of what it was....the speed only reduces by a little over half to something like ~80mph ( the JPL release says about 78 )

Without the heatshield in place - the bottom of the backshell crashing into the ground at fast freeways speeds is frankly the absolute worst case for structural integrity of the backshell - it's little surprise it has broken up as much as it has.

Collapsing the chute would be a bad idea - that would have accelerated the backshell and increased the likelihood of a recontact issue with the powered descent vehicle. No EDL has done this. You want the backshell and parachute to take their time to drift in the breeze and end up far, far away. The divert maneuver as part of the powered descent phase is also to help reduce the recontact problem.

Everything in the Ingenuity images is consistent with the backshell and 'chute landing normally - at an expected terminal velocity with an intact and fully inflated chute.

Nope. Hundreds of millions of years and wind erosion are capable of this. See the best understood evolution of Gale Crater for similar massive volumes of wind erosion.

An incredibly slow mode of erosion, over incredibly long periods of time can literally vanish mountains.

Not really. It's about 90 degrees ahead at the moment - and shrinking.

OK - that's just projected maps in different channels. There's no radiometric calibration there as such - you're not going to get the colors you're expecting.

What is your pipeline before throwing images in to gimp?

Are you using radiometric calibration?

Depends on your intentions…..For a crude, approximate ‘true color’ (whatever that means) image - use F1,2,3.

Nobody would notice Perseverance doing it either, apart from space enthusiasts. Tianwen-1 was blessed with a very traversable terrain and a strategic route that went straight past their backshell anyway. It essentially cost them nothing to do it.

M2020’s backshell is not so fortunate. It landed in some rough terrain - round trip to get from here to the far side of it, safely, and back again, is probably two weeks of effort. That doesn’t seem a sensible thing to do with ~$30M worth of prime mission. It would likely gain as much “Why are we littering Mars” coverage as “Wow -let’s pay for more space” coverage. I have already seen the ‘littering’ comment repeatedly after the few Mastcam shots.

This mission, like Curiosity, has shown it is totally open to doing cool stuff purely for EPO (selfies, etc) but an expedition to go get a back shell postcard I think would constitute a pretty irresponsible way to spend prime mission time.

Yeah - that's the backshell and chute for sure.

What do you think Phil - first sign of the top of the backshell and parachute?

Another drive or two and the backshell should be visible to the south

So - due to the move to remote operations (and MSL is still remote right now) the active shutter glasses are not an option for our Rover Planners over VNC - so they've been using the red/blue glasses at home.

We wrote up an article about the move to remote ops for IEEE - and it's here - https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/51708 - Page 9 mentions that specific challenge.

I believe the Mars 2020 RPs have been largely working in person at JPL and so probably have that 3D active option. Not all the RPs find it beneficial - infact I believe the off-planet record holder for total distance didn't use either option.

If dust didn't stick to vertical surfaces....we would never need to clean office windows.