So is Olympus Mons....when do we start driving? Sure - it's a long way but...it is THERE.

Who knows - maybe we can find somewhere to set a new speed record (>220m/sol) - but that route to the SE just looks NASTY.

Doug

In the context of Opportunity - a trip to Ithaca would be as much as 5 years of not-very-pretty-pictures-at-all

Doug

BUT - there is a point at which there would be criticism for just taking pretty pictures and not doing science

Doug

A brutal realist - that's all.

I think it's fair to take the 22 month treck from Endurance to Victoria as a fair measure of progress for a journey of this sort traverse. There will be things that are better ( software and planning) - and things that are potentially worse ( wheels that may break, more broken steering actuators, bad terrain ). Taking Endurance to Victoria (including it's two halts for technical problems etc ) it's a commitment of about 5 years driving. There's not point doing the "100m a sol x Y days = X metres a week" maths - it doesn't work. It never really has apart from primary missions on easy driving ground.

It depends on what HiRISE tells us - it really really does.


If it's all like that (which is isn't ) - it's potentially possible.



If much of it is like this (which it could well be) - it's madness.

To be fair - the route straight SE from Victoria doesn't look THAT bad to begin with. A few hundred metres of brilliant driving. Then a few hundred metres of typical purgatory-like dunes ( which we have to cross at 45 degrees, not traverse down the length of ) - but then you hit a large region of larger dunes mixed with sparse areas of expose rock - much like the north rim of Erebus that we diverted around by a wide margin - but there's no where to divert to...it's all like that.

Look at it another way - It took 230 sols to get from the Western edge of Erebus to Beagle Crater. About 1.5km - over terrain that looks to me to be a fair sample of typical terrain from here onwards. They didn't hang around very much - they got stuck once - but they averaged less than 10m/sol. Another 20km could potentially be 2000 sols further - or just over 5 years.

I see nothing to suggest it could be done quicker than that - I really don't - and I don't think committing to that sort of expedition is a wise use of the vehicle scientifically - nor within the spirit of the world 'exploration'.

It is a very romantic notion - but one that should remain within our imaginations, unless HiRISE shows little short of a paved highway leading the way there. Don't get me wrong - I would love Opportunity to be able to get there - I just see little evidence that it would be able to.

Doug

The WHOLE context would show the distance between VIctoria and there - with a scale bar, and perhaps the entire Opportunity traverse to date for reference.



Doug

Scientifically it could be. Two, three or more years of sand dunes wouldn't be. Look at HiRISE imagery to the East of Victoria. It's like the worst days of the drive south from Endurance - the area around Jame Caird, Viking and Voyager - an utter driving nightmare made even worse by the fact they would be trying to drive across all the dunes, not along their length..

Unless I see images of that very large crater to the ESE making an EXCELLENT case for going there and HiRISE images documenting the entire route showing it to be in any way feasable - I can see no point in trying to get there when all current indicators suggest it would be a not much more than a suicide mission into a dune field we would never leave.

Doug

None that I know of - they've been given all the cash they need to get it to the pad for '09

Doug

I doubt it's wind through the lava tube itself. Think of a crater - that can have a dust tail of some sort and there's no network to do that. I imagine it's just a function of prevailing wind and topography. Wind blowing over a lage flat area suddently finding a big hole is going to get chucked up a bit - you might even find that the area under the hole is at a slight negative pressure relative to the surrounding area because of it.

Another thought - given that this tube is beginning to collapse at this one obvious site and potentially many others, it's quite likely that the tube itself isn't much of a tube anymore and more like a range of adjacant chambers. Who knows...I can't imagine we will for a few decades.

Doug

MER + HiRISE + Phil = Requirement for large format printing?

Got a demo GIF for me to try - because I know CS3's doing things quite differently on the animation front compared to CS2 and I THINK....(and think...not know) CS3 can still do this. I think you have to load it up - set the anim window to frames instead of timeline - and then convert frames to layers.

(Just had a go - you're right - you can't do it...what the hell Adobe!!!)

I think.

Doug

Technically, Feb 8th 2004
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1

The switch to UMSF was basically 12 months later.

Doug

Yup - when the rovers landed there wasn't any UMSF at all

Doug

I'm not saying that you're not pulling out three different shades from an 8 bit greyscale image, for which some photons from the bottom my be responsible. I'm saying it's impossible to say "that's the bottom". Lest we forget, similar techniques turned a black dunefield into all sorts of things.

I'm not sure that HiRISE can take longer exposures - 4x4 binning might help but of course we can do that with the image on the ground already

Doug

Because the ceiling is overhanging. It's a collapse to a lava tube. We've seen other hirise images that take this to the extreme just leaving a single piece over the top of the old lava tube - itself with overhanging edges (the 'bridge' picture). The mechanism behind a formation like this is certainly not that unusual and indeed terrestrial analogues are not uncommon either.

http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/plateaus/images/ap17.html

We're looking almost straight down it - so in actual fact it wouldn't take that much of an overhang to mean we don't see the sides even if they're lit.

That opening is 11,000 sq m . If there were 11,000 sq m of an unusual liquid - CRISM would have found it and we'd know about it. It's 8 or so Crism pixels across.

Doug

^

"Oh, for those of you wanting to overlay MOLA data, it's already been tried, without any luck."

Doug

What sort of liquid at .006 bar and -80degC? Would a liquid not have specular reflection etc. Orbital images of lakes and seas on earth are not black. Do not confuse the 'black lakes' of Cassini Radar imagery with the optical wavelengths of HiRISE.

There is nothing nonsensical in the concept of overhangs. We see them on Earth - they could be even more extreme in the 1/3rd G of Mars.

Doug

Yes - it really is impossible. That's not details - that's noise.

Doug

38 degrees. Call it 130m across - sohcahtoa and all that - 101 metres is the cutoff at which we wouldn't see light at the bottom.

Doug

I see what you're saying - and you do have a point - but the difference is this.

You spend €1B on ExoMars and it crashes, you don't get anything

Spend €800M (my guess) on Netlander - and you get four chances. Try one - if it fails, learn from it, change some parameters, try a safer landing site - try again..and again...and again. Quadrouple the chance.

Not only that - but perhaps you have two Netlanders that work - you might find that one of those vehicles finds the PERFECT landing site for Exomars.

Yes - the feed forward from Netlander to Exomars is not great from a systems perspective - but nothing from the MPF blueprints ended up on MER either - nor Viking etc. It's about experience more than anything perhaps.

I'm MUCH more confident in MSL than I could ever be about ExoMars. The MSL EDL guys have done it three times already. They know the challenges, they understand the trades. I want to see the EU guys get that sort of experience before hitting something big like ExoMars.



Doug

That is just jaw droppingly good.

Well - unless its many many km's - then there are other places which will have higher atmos.press at 'ground' level. But it's still a very very exciting and interesting feature

Doug

Ustrax - finally - you have what you asked for

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/di...PSP_003647_1745

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d..._1745_cut_b.jpg

THAT...is an abyss.

Doug

To be fair, ESA involvement in B2 wasn't that much. B2 was as much an ESA failure as the PFS mirror on VEX.

Doug
(Personally - I think B2 burnt up in the atmosphere due to a poor aeroshell design derived from Huygens.)

That's two of you.

STEREO OBSERVATIONS.

Do it.

Doug

Bold? Yes. Run before they can walk? I'd rather they didn't. It's about the right mission at the right time.

Maybe they'll decide to build ExoMars in full, with all the bells and whistles, spend €1B, and in 6 years time it'll all work beautifully.

BUT - the need for a set of smaller missions (the NetLander idea) is just screaming out to be done - and it is SO right for ESA right now. Landing on Titan is - once you get there - comparatively easy. Big thick atmosphere, low gravity - couldn't be a better place to land. Mars is REALLY hard - much MUCH harder than Titan. We need to practice it. We're not going to be spending Viking type money, but we're trying to jump to MER before going through Pathfinder. That's just no very sensible. NetLander gives us the opportunity to do something utterly unique, and get huge landing experience at the same time and maybe even pay back NASA for the millions and millions of €'s worth of relay and DSN time we've used by using the orbiter to relay data from some of their own spacecraft.

ExoMars has issues at this stage. Mass issues, or the ssue of fitting a payload that JPL are using a 700kg rover for, into an MER sized rover, or even the simple fact that the the #1 experts in the field of landing with airbags are abandoning it in favour of something else because they can't make it work for payloads heavier than MER...payloads like ExoMars ( which, with an MER like rover, and an active left-behind component - it would be ).

And the final point - if ESA put ExoMars on Mars tomorrow, succesfully - then we would all go utterly utterly insane as a beautiful vehicle rolls around mars taking stunning pictures every day - and we don't see a damn thing. I want ESA to grow up in terms of outreach expectations and standards before it blows it completely on a mission like ExoMars.

Maybe they fly it in full, maybe it works, maybe they 'get' Outreach, maybe they find the right landing site, maybe the instruments work. Too many maybes for me.

Doug