Big enough to get a few CRISM pixels in there

Doug

Wow - once you're in - you have access to a lot of journals

Doug

How do they do TCM's with spacecraft that are spin stabilized like MER?

That could be the part two, to a more general look after spacecraft on their way to Mars -does Phoenix have only one fuel supply which is used for cruise and landing?

Both questions for which I have NO idea to the answer!

Doug

That's not a report. When SpaceDaily say 'by Staff Writers' they actually mean the copying and pasting of a press release, in full, verbatim.

Here's the press release, as it was in my inbox on Aug 18th.

[]Subject : Calculating the Biomass of Martian Soil
Email : A new interpretation of data from NASA's Viking landers indicates that 0.1%
of the Martian soil tested could have a biological origin.

Dr Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, believes that the
subfreezing, arid Martian surface could be home to organisms whose cells are
filled with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water. In a presentation at
the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam .....[/I]

I don't think I need to carry on. Calling it reporting is like calling photocopying a work of art.

Doug

So you don't like Joop's theory then

Doug

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001890_1995 - that deals with the issue of finding Sojourner - I'm fairly confident that there's an item seen by HiRISE that doesn't have a matching feature as seen by Pathfinder - which is interpreted as Sojourner, being in a realitic resting place.

Doug

Nice shots - similar to the results I got with the earlier eclipse this year with the same lens. How do you find it? I've had mixed results - I'll have two or three STUNNING shots with it, out of a dozen that are a little average, for whatever reason. I've been so happy with my 17-70mm Sigma that I'm thinking of getting another sigma in the £200-400 range to replace the cheap Canon zoom.

Doug

If there's a graph that shows the behaviour of a 60:40 Peroxide/Water mix within a cell membrane of some sort at 6mbar....that I'm sure Joop would like to see it

Doug

Nice plug of the blog via one of the links on APOD today

Doug

Indeed - the ISS is being used as an LDEF platform - the MISSE experiments.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/...SE-3-and-4.html

It's the managerial lessons, the processes, that I think need to be learnt by future PI's in smaller scale projects - not how to build spacecraft (something they don't do anyway)

Doug

I think they're actually the locations of crism observations

Each will link (on the proper site) to the observation.

Doug

The electrostatic based cleanign which I've seen videos off at IAC, and mentioned again at EPSC seems the best way to go about it...no moving parts...thin, light, simple.

Doug

Spirit Landing...I felt physically ill.

Unlikely - they're not exactly SUV's doing 60mph over rough ground.

Doug

That 50 days is to get up to boiling point - and then you have the latent heat of evaporation until you use up enough of the water to expose the electronics I guess.

Doug

Law of the Stag...for conferences.

Now get out of your seat in THIS audience and go give your talk

Doug
(a the opposite end of the third row in the main conference hall)

Sadly - you're not allowed to record talks, so I couldn't then re-mix my talk back down with the slides.

When the duck bay image came up - people laughed (as I hoped they would - taking it in the way it was intended) , and I explained that yes, this was just a bit of fun, but the principle of putting some humanly tangible reference within a panorama actually can give it a sense of scale that a simulated rover image can't.

I've said about as much about the Q'n'A as I can unfortunately - it happens so quickly and so suddenly that it's something of a blur I couldn't BELIEVE how long the questions had been going on until I looked at my keynote screen and it had ticked over to more than 40 minutes.

Space.com article also a little bit bogus...

'Houtkooper presented his findings at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany this week. '

Nope - he's presenting it tomorrow - 1430, 3rd presentation of session TP8 in Workshop Room 2. It's going to be my last session - in intend to deploy any and every ounce of my non existant journalistic skills to try and get somthing good out of it as a 'response' to the mass media mass hysteria interpretation of a press release.

Doug

BUSTED - for not reading TPS Blog

http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001097/

One interesting technique is to use a phase change liquid in the balloon to control its altitude. It turns out that water is perfect for this. The balloon would drop to an altitude of 42 kilometers at which point the water would vaporize inside the balloon, inflate it - and the balloon would rise. Four or so hours later, it would reach 60 kilometers, the water would re-condense, the balloon would drop back to 42 kilometers again - and the process would repeat. You could explore that entire range of atmosphere with a period of around 6 to 8 hours, up and down, using water to autonomously control the altitude.

I didn't work out anything - it's all the presenters work. I'll drag up the abstract PDF later

Doug

The principle would be to have the pressure vessel at 90+atmospheres so the water would boil away at that critical point at 300 deg C (numbers are 'roughly')

Doug

Unfortunately - the guy's english wasn't very good, and his details were fairly thin on the ground. He talked about the power consumption of the electronics being only 1 watt to minimize the energy put into the water - and perhaps through langauge barrier rather than anything else - it seemd that he was infering that only 1W of energy would be heating the water. (and it was Earth days he was talking about - he wanted to reach a significant part of a Venus year - 100-200 Earth days)

Obviously - the cable from the batteries itself will be sinking more than that, ditto any other connectors to the 'outside' world in terms of instrumentation, comms, the vent for steam etc etc. I don't think the language barrier between the speaker and the audience helped when people were asking about the 1w etc. Think about what the rovers do when they're on 240 whrs - 10 watts average. Now think what a venus lander would do with 1 watt average.

There was another point made to me - a seismic instrument on 1 bps? Forget it. Seismic measurements from inside a boiling kettle? Crazy.

Like I said in the blog - most agreed that the principle would obviously work - but just not how he was describing it.

Doug

What about the gender of Cassini or Deep Impact or LRO etc etc.

(just to throw you all a curve ball)

Doug

Perhaps those extra mm would have meant they would have had to do a spacewalk to repair the recent damage? Perhaps those extra few mm would be the tipping point on previous undocumented-before-landing damage that required the replacement of multiple tiles and damage within OMS pods.

Suggesting it might be over-the-top, given that it's quite gratuitously a delicate and easily damaged system, is a bit nuts. Furthermore, alterations to a 30 year old system, 3 years before it's retired are just not going to happen.

Doug

I would imagine the Columbia crew might have difficulty with the word 'redundancy'

Doug