The clue is the word radar.... VEX is not equiped with radar to see through the clouds of Venus. VIRTIS (the IR camera) can infer surface properties at some wavelengths, but direct observations of the surface and virtually impossible. VEX is there to study the Atmosphere, Wind and Cloud, not map the surface with radar.

Doug

Well - http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/di...PSP_003234_2210

Good to see they've hit it and can now ignore the emails that will have been pouring in about it. Every HiRISE image is a joy to behold - but this one tells us what we knew with MOC...it's an ordinary little hill. The response from the usual places will be interesting - these two crops from the full image will grab his attention I am sure.

FHAZ sequence, one frame every hour - for 12 hours

Doug

The MI has a probe on a spring as a contact sensor - if it touched, you'd just get a little hole where the end of the probe hit the soil.

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/jpeg/as..._Inst_Set_1.jpg

After April 21st I'll tell you

And you guessing all of this from a single drive toward a target we already knew they were driving to?

To date, they are following the plan as mentioned on planetary.org to the letter. They've driven into a dark streak, and this recent drive ( from which you are reading an array of things none of which are related to the drive itself ) is exactly what the next step should be - driving back up the streak toward where it meets the crater. Then, Tierra Del Fuego (to get the views of the next bay/cape along, and back toward VWOP - then VWOP for a possible toe dip, then back to Duck Bay. The stuff here should take about a fortnight.

I'm not quite sure what you thought the plan was, and why you think what's going on is not the plan...but it is.

Doug

Actually - it ties in well with the visit a dark trail then visit the source of a dark trail plan.

Doug

Well - a lot of google earth stuff is aerial photography, some of it is satellite (most of the UK is aerial) , Quickbird is 60cm/pixel orbital.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/corn...9_2006_dgwm.jpg
http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/new_...8_2006_dgwm.jpg
http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/las_...4_2005_dgwm.jpg

As with that period between MOLA and the second SRTM mission - Publicly available data for Mars is better than that for Earth.

Doug

It wouldn't shut him up (RH) - because his entire career depends on it. He would simply find more artifacts at the limit of HiRise resolution, as he always does, with every image.

Do you mean this one - http://mrrs.eo.esa.int/mrrs/images/2007/04..._image_0260.jpg (24 meg )

There's been nothing on the Shuttle launch manifest that includes an IUS since before Columbia as far as I know - certainly nothing in the ISS-Complete+Hubble list.

Doug

I wonder if/when the data from Hayabusa will make it to the PDS
http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/missions/hayabusa/index.html


Doug

MSL's a bit open ended really - some of the landing sites include a 10km 'drive to' from a safe landing site nearby.

Doug

Your flyby velocity would be ENORMOUS though - you might sail past something like Matilde or Eros at 4 or 5km/sec on a conventional flyby - and then maybe 20km/sec if you were going the other way....eek. I'm fairly sure that you could do something like CONTOUR for asteroids with some intelligent trajectory design, 3, 4 asteroids with 3 or 4 times the data collected at each one. If you picked them right, you would get a good 'grab bag' of different types of bodies. Going the other way I imagine the spacecraft would be going "ARHGHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" all the time Perhaps you could bounce in and out ot the asteroid belt using Mars as a grav-assist teach time. Dawn but without the orbiting - you could get really nice long lazy flybys of many asteroids I would have thought. If you're going to Jupiter you would have to have crazy Juno/Rosetta like solar arrays, and if you're getting THOSE< might as well just use 2-3kw and chuck an ion engine or 5 on the back.

Doug

LOVE it...

EVEEEJSJA
EVVEEVVEVEJSJA
EEVEEJSA

Makes Galileo and Cassini seem like a quick trip to the shops round the corner.

Doug

South Pole is only just coming out into sunlight now after the winter, so I'd have thought those would all be on the "too do" list in the next few months.

Doug

Gusev, Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris - heavily off Nadir, with MARCI

All of it with CTX, but Olympica Fossae's one of my favorite regions.
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/4_6_99...c2_108_msss.gif

And with HiRISE...APART from all the recent cave sightings - you've got them all, except two, MPL and B2 If you find the first, I can let the second go


Doug

4 megapixels, R, G, B, 12 bits, 20:1 compression. 40 hours of downlink. I see a problem.

Lets talk local - no one's put multiple megapixels on any cubesat in LEO, when you've got (comparatively speak) orders of magnitude more power and downlink that what you speak of.

Helvick - your 650kbps - is that for the 100w Xband or the 35 Ka Band on MRO? Are you scalling apples with apples here? And have you visited http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/sum...orce_external=0 - it says that at Max range, the Ka band can actually manage only 331kbps, and the Xband, just over 500kbps ( so 600 seems reasonable ) - That document also tells us that the 35W Ka band on MRO requires 81W of actual spacecraft power. The 100W Xband, 172W of actual power - your 1W Ka band is now looking at more like 1.5 watts of consumed power, with a downlink of 25bps. That one colour frame now takes 80 hours.

I grant you - something smaller than NH is possible with near-future technology....but in the Microsat ( 50-100kg 50-100W ) bracket, not the multiples of cubesat ( 1-3kg and a few watts ). Pick a target of 100kg and then decide what power you can get, by what means, from that. Even then you're talking about technology found in PDF's - not in ATLO. The Stirling RTG is something like 34kg, for 110W - that would be my starting point.

Doug
(PS - NH2 was proposed by Alan et.al. http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/NH2_community_info.ppt - but sadly turned down A real pity as the Voyager/Pioneer/Viking/MER/Mariner syndrome of getting two for less than the price of two would have kicked in here )

Where are you going to get the power from...AND....where do you put the instruments - not seen a single mention of those yet in terms of mass, volume or power. I've not seen anyone, realistically, add up the figures here yet - just immediately jumping to "well - if the tank can be only 10cm then the whole thing will be 50 pence and return amazing science". You're jumping about 25 steps too far forward. You're talking about MRO's X-Band. That's 100 Watts. Where are you going to get 100 Watts from at Neptunian distances? That's just about 1/2 of NH's power budget gone right there. The mass of that power supply alone is going to be an order of magnitude above what you're talking about. So your delta V is going to be an order of magnitude less.

If you're going to do the outer solar system, as small, light and cheap as possible - the only logical place to start is New Horizons, the most advances, lightest, cheapest outer planetery spacecraft to date, and work from there.

Doug

The complete process is fully documented here
http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/...op/program.html

• Mission Overview (PDF)
• Engineering Constraints (PDF)
• Planetary Protection Constraints (PDF)

First Landing Site Workshop
May 31 through June 2, 2006, Pasadena, California

• Workshop Abstracts and Presentations
• Workshop Report (PDF)
• Workshop Summary Letter (PDF)
• Landing Site List from Workshop (PDF)
• Landing Site Voting Results (PDF)

Doug

27 hours and your in a panic already.



Sol 18A would have put you in an early grave!

Spirit - it's 1157.4 now - they have 1156 data on the ground, 1157 is scheduled as a heavy MI workout

Oppy - currently 1137.0 - they have plenty of 1136 data on the ground with 1137 not yet scheduled.

Doug

£713 gets you an NAS with 4 x 500GB HDD's in Raid 5 - - 1.5TB of Storage...enough for about..ooo...a fortnight of HiRISE stuff

Doug

Some of you may find these usefull

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&...11c19329bee59b0

I think the assumption is that in the case of MERB - the residual RAD firing at bridal cut flung the backshell and chute in a westerly direction, but the chute did not re-inflate. They followed an arc, impacting at very high speed, thus breaking the backshell and creating quite an impact. Whereas, if you look at the HiRISE imagery of both MERA and Pathfinder, you can see that the backshell is sat, upright, on the surface, with the chute to one side suggestive of the chute reinflating (at least partially) between that residual RAD impulse, and impact.

GREAT results - there were a LOT of super-res images taken while Opportunity was parked up with IDD trouble around Olympia (West end of Erebus) - if you're looking for food for your process, that's the place to go


Doug