Keeping it up to date

Even with 200 Whrs - all I'd want to do is charge the battery. Figure out the times of day when solar-array wattage > non-deep-sleeping rover wattage requirements and just power up for those times and then shut down again. Be 'on' when the potential is for power-positive operations, be 'off' the rest of the time. Because if this storm has taught us anything it's that it can get worse again faster than it gets better.

Doug

The Pluto part was done a few weeks ago as part of something else - the Charon was just a variation on it. The texture, for those wondering, is 50% Dave Seals Charon map, 50% Enceladus - as a noise pattern mixture.

Doug

But - iirc - that heater only comes on if it's cold.

I was thinking that actually the situation might arise when it's better to leave the battery cut off because even at noon, the array output wouldn't be high enough to power the heater - BUT - citing Encyclopedia Roveranica (Roving Mars ) -

"It kicked in half an hour before midnight Mars time, and it didn't go away until about 1000 the next morning. And whatever was responsible, it sucked more than 170 watt-hours of energy out of the batteries overnight"

Given that it's summer, and warm because of the dust - the arm heater might not kick in at all.

I don't know the specifics of the PCB, but is it intelligent enough to be preprogrammed for an expected wake up array voltage of X volts (when X is a lower number right now ) - which could be estimated to be 11am - then the master sequence for the day is sleep all day, wake up for the earliest Odyssey pass at which point you both uplink for the next day and downlink for that day, and then enter deep sleep till 19 hours later.

Doug

As seen on TPS's blog yesterday.


Doug

Well - good news in so far as the vehicle is healthy enough to tell us the solar array output from which the figure has been derived.

Doug

5.2-5.5 guestimated from array power on Marks latest update.

Doug

This is what Wiki says:

Currently there are three Saturn Vs on display, all displayed horizontally:
A Saturn V on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
A Saturn V on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

* At the Johnson Space Center made up of first stage of SA-514, the second stage from SA-515 and the third stage from SA-513.
* At the Kennedy Space Center made up of S-IC-T (test stage) and the second and third stages from SA-514.
* At the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, made up of S-IC-D, S-II-F/D and S-IVB-D (all test stages not meant for actual flight)(soon to be moved to a new visitor's center).


So the JSC one is all flight hardware (and the only one to be so) - just not from the same vehicle.

yikes.

Spirit's FHAZ's are filthy right now, that much is obvious.

Doug

I have a fair ammount of confidence that even with a couple of weeks of <200whrs essentially out of touch all together - the vehicle would be recoverable once the tau gets back to <3. It's summer, it's warmer at night, perhaps the MiniTES lens will go (but it hasn't with some very cold nights so far) - but I'm quietly confident.

Doug

More than 5! NIGHTMARE.



I'll have to change the scale of the Y axis on my graph!!!

Until you can come up with ANY viable means by which they could form on the surface - it's not premature at all.

I'm not going to try and defend or explain the MER line of geology at Meridiani - but have you considered asking them, or searching for references regarding the interaction of concretion formation and rock layering. If the best you can do to explain your own theory is to find fault with another one - you're going about it the wrong way. Finding fault with theory A does not make theory B any less or more correct. Focus on YOUR theory with the evidence we have.

Simply looking at the laymans-terms evidence we've seen - I have not seen you tackle any of the major issues involved here - and you've got to. It's that simply. You can't keep arguing for this theory whilst continually ignoring the big issues sat on top of it (which you have been for a long time)

The berries-on-stalks we have seen at places like Fram are indicators surely that the 'muffin' is eroding (and leaving berries behind as it goes) , not being deposited. How can you form a berry in mid air and then form a connecting rod of sulphate rich rock to connect it to the rest of the rock? Did the rock know to form out to a point and then magically grow a berry on top?

If you're saying they're forming, today, on the surface, then why are they different not over km scales - but METRE scales - from the top of endurance to the bottom - a distance of <20m and a height of 5m. If you're aguing they're forming today - they why only here and nowhere else. Why not other equatorial regions of similar elevation?

How can you explain that over a distance of 1cm, you go from the formation of hematite on top of olivine soil, to the formation of hematite which is then burried by sulphate rich rocks?

How can you explain the composition of the rock you say is forming today - is different from the top of Endurance to the bottom? Whatever water vapour etc you're saying is forming this stuff is going to be the same from Tennesse to Axel Heiberg. But it isn't. Nor, simply at face value, does this stuff look like it's forming today. If it were, it would be the same look everywhere - but it isn't. Just in a few metres of Burns cliff it looks different from top to bottom, which indeed we see in matching APXS data. It it were forming today - would it not all be the same? Would it not have hidden the cross bedding? Why, if it's forming today, do we see this bright band at Victoria?

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/press/op.../20040818a.html - look at the MI's, look at the graphs. How can this be happening today?

I'm not trying to have a go at you - I genuinely want you to try and tackle these questions because for your theory to become anything other than against the mainstream hand waving ( which is where it's at currently ) - you've got to start answering these sorts of questions.

Doug

This could work better with terrain meshes, textures, then re-rendered from above...but that's a LOT of work

Doug

Two examples - one big, one small.

The Saturn V at JSC is built from parts destined for Apollo 18/19 and/or the third stage that got pulled off to make room for Skylab.

And Marie Curie - the Sojourner spare - then destined for the 01 lander, which got cancelled, and never made it onto the Phoenix payload - not sure where she lives now but she's been to exhibitions afaik.

Doug

Colours, layers etc etc - it's all still rammed into a 25cm/pixel image. We need soething better. I think what we need is a map of Silica Valley based on Vert-Proj Navcam imagery

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer2-...avcam/site0125/

It's not great - they ran through there fairly fast on the way to Tyrone/LRH - but I think it might help improve things a little. I've done a very very quick, bad, dirty stitch of all the VP's I can find in that run through - and reprojected to 5cm/pixel ( i.e. HiRISE of 25cm @ 500% - VP's of 1cm at 20% )

There are four places where I think something like this is worth trying. Eagle Crater, Endurance Crater ( SW quadrant of ) at MP, and for Spirit, the Larrys Lookout-Methuselah area, and Silica Valley to LRH.

How sure? Have you done the leg work? Found typical atmospheric pressures at that altitude, looks at phase diagrams. Remember - even at lower altitudes we're working in a very thing part of the phase diagram that allows water only over a very small temperature range.

And - if, as you say, there is so much water here - where is the minerological evidence for it?

It's easy to go 'looks like water'. It's very hard to make a water tight case for it. You're a long way from that.

Doug

From a few streaks, you're making an entire region 'water rich'.

That's a leap of faith.

Doug

"There's a new team in town and we don't work that way"

I think we should club together and buy Alan a sherif badge

All credit to the guy - these are not easy decisions to make - and the best decision is rarely the easiest one.

Doug

Maybe the tube makes the ridge, the lava drains from the middle while the outside cools solid making the tube - and then sand etc form over the top of it to make a ridge? Then the ceiling of the tube collapses. Pure guesswork.

Doug

Damian Peach has put a few up at the BAA website ( www.britastro.org )

Doug

New record for Opportunity on B1234 of 4.2. Much kudos to Mark for keeping the figures updated despite being involved in a Phoenix ORT.

Doug

How do you make hematite rich spheres sat on top of olivine rich soil? The two are essentially mutually exclusive minerals. The existence of one makes a VERY strong case against the formation of the other. You're going to have to some up with something extraordinary to do that.

You've still not touched the fact that the spherules are different and/or absent in different places.

And the earth analogues we've seen of concretions show a lot of concretions in not a lot of rock - the ratio is certainly similar, if not higher, than the one here.

And - if you're proposing the surface formation of the spheres at the same time as the surface formation of sulphate rich rock - why is there not sulphate rich rock everywhere? Why is there some forming and hiding spheres to a depth of a few mm here (pointing straight down at a piece of outcrop) but none there ( pointing to a patch of soil a metre to the right).

Surface formation has a lot more issues to tackle than any other theory I've seen. It seems like you're trying to solve one problem, by creating many more.

Doug

4,000 gigapixels of 6m res will cover the planet - I think. Maths might be wrong.

Doug

Helen and I were in London for the pasge few days, and this morning we headed over to the Science Museum to see the new Space Wing.

If you've been before - everything on the left hasn't changed at all - and on the right things are mainly the same - the LEM model has had a good makeover, looks MUCH better now. The Apollo 10 CM is still way up the far end of the ground floor - why didn't they put it with the LEM!!!! But the good news is that there are 1:1 models of Beagle 2, Topsat and Huygens, and 4 CCD's from E2V ( the UK company who make a fair few CCD's for flight )

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/SciMus/ for all the pics - but a few highlights :

New Horizons Ralph CCD
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/Sc...es/CIMG0293.htm
Full Res Crop attached.

Hinode CCD
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/Sc...es/CIMG0286.htm

Huygens Penetrometer
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/Sc...es/CIMG0290.htm

Hubble WFPC3 CCD (1 of 4)
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/Sc...es/CIMG0297.htm

HiRISE CCD (1 of 14)
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug/Sc...es/CIMG0305.htm

Enjoy

Doug
(OH - and we saw Gok Wan at a party on the South Bank)

Well - IMG2PNG will help - and/or NASAView (google ) for viewing IMG's.

Doug