Go and read the rules boys and girls.

Doug

There are papers on this on the JPL Technical Reports server....but it seems to be very broken at the moment so I can't have a look

I do remember a chart showing capacity as a function of cycles - and it drops to about 80% over a few thousand cycles. - I think....can't quite remember.

Doug

But of course, one LV failure with 8 discovery missions is a little less drastic than a single LV failure on a flagship mission. There are benefits to spreading things out a little.

Doug

I thought it would be rubbish....it was spectacular!!

Doug

Ahem....politics.


Doug

Minerva wasn't much of a scientist - camera, temp data and the ability to 'bounce' itself around a little.

Philae - however...

Rosetta Lander Scientific Instruments

Investigation of comet materials COSAC MPAe D chemical analysis with mass spectrometer (MS) and gas chromatograph (GC); pressure sensor Ptolemy Open University UK isotope analysis (ion trap, GC) APX MPCh D element analysis ( Alpha Xray Spectrometer) Cameras for viewing of the comet core ÇIVA IAS F panorama, stereo and microscope cameras, imaging infrared spectrometer ROLIS DLR D landing and down looking camera Investigation of comet core structure SESAME DLR D seismic measurements, dust monitoring, permittivity probing CONSERT CEPHAG/LPG F microwave tomography MUPUS Univ. Münster D penetrator with thermal sensors Plasma and magnetic environment ROMAP Univ. Braunschweig D magnetic field and plasma monitoring Sample Retrieval SD2 Politecnico di Milano I drilling and sample distribution

John is the BAA's Jupiter Section director - and I saw a great talk by him a while back where he suggested that the current GRS might not be the one that is supposed to have been visible for so long - but is actually the second GRS since recorded observations of Jupiter begun hundreds of years ago.

Also - the current spot is 'speeding up'. In 1950 it was rotating in around 10 to 12 days. Now it's more like 4 - 6 days - but at the same time it's getting smaller so one can't assume it's getting faster as a result

Observations of Jupiter are one of the great amateur projects still ongoing.

Doug

Looks like a shadow behind an unusual shape rock. An impact splat would be larger than that (i.e. the best B2 team estimate is approx the crater size I show in my simulation ) - but it's another 'hm - interrsting' target.

A chute will always be very very obvious. The MPF chute is so very obvious nearly 10 years after landing. The MER chutes were very very easy to find - the B2 parachute if it deployed will be similarly obvious - despite being a much smaller lander, it used a similar sized chute ( because it had no retro rockets ) -

Attached is the 'all my hardware' playground for the 3d sims. It's all been seen before - but this shot ( at 33cm/pixel) shows the B2 stuff top left as seen here - then three sets of 'chute - backshell and heatsheild on the right which, from left to right, are Viking, Pathfinder and MER.

B2's chute design was a different shape to the JPL vehicles - but it's a similar size.

The three scenarios I'm interested in are...

1) Burnt up on entry due to unstable aerodynamic design. This is actually what I think is most likely given that the B2 capsule was a significant departure from the 'heritage' of Viking and MPL and actually used the Huygens heatshield shape which makes no sense imho - 1.5bar N2 compared to .05 bar CO2 - very different challenges. If this happened - we'll find nothing in HiRISE ( for a comparison - have we found any MER cruise stage... no )

2) Didn't burn up - but was dead on arrival and simply had a lithobraking impact that would produced a crater as simulated and documented in the B2 report. This would be very obvious in HiRISE imagery imho - MGS has shown us that recent craters are fairly obvious - so HiRISE would see this very clearly - but I would expect this to be at the eastern end of the ellipse if not beyond ( I want to ask the B2 team about this actually - what scenario that ellipse is for ) as there would be no deceleration from drogue or main chutes.

3) Survived entry and then deployed the drogue and the main chute. If we're going to find ANYTHING else - this HAS to have happened and so personally - before considering candidate hardware that isn't a crater - I want to see a chute first because it's a prereq of seing a heatshield (which deployed after the main chute) - a lander or any airbags on the surface.

This is the first sensible thing to search for...
http://www.planetary.org/image/hirise_path...crop_200pct.jpg
(ignoring the backshell)

Doug

Just a little car program that's loved by about 4 million people and hated by the rest in the UK

Doug

Looks like a laugh - I though last weeks US special was a work of genius.

Doug

There wouldn't be much point - I don't know enough about the map projection parameters to even make a sensible guess. rendering at 33cm/pixel and then resizing to 25cm is going to introduce some of the 'softness' that reprojecting might induce.



Doug

As the simulation shows - it would be the right sort of size for the heatshield or backshell or unopened lander - but a deployed lander I would expect to look different. If you were to say "this IS a bit of Beagle 2 - which bit?" - I would say the heatshield. But - if you ask which is more likely - 800 megapixels having the odd imaging artifact or a piece of B2 indicative of the spacecraft making it through entry and deploying it's heatshield but later failing, and that heatshield being visible in the first HiRISE image of the landing ellipse....I'd say cosmic ray hit. I'm not saying it isn't a chunk of spacecraft - and it really does look like a chunk of B2. What I'd like is a HiRISE image targetted directly west of this one - a tiny bit of overlap - but I would expect the 'chute to be back up the trajectory and thus west of the heatshield (same was true of Spirit and Opportunity if you think about it.)

Until we see either a fresh crater or a main chute - I don't think it's wise to say we've found any Beagle hardware - we've simply found interesting targets.

Just thinking out-loud again - the TDI CCD's on HiRISE, there's plenty of scope for a single cosmic ray hit to actually take out a few pixels in one go - 128 lines to have a stab at for each 'finished' pixel if you think about it.

Attached - an extract from the mission report which you can find at http://www.src.le.ac.uk/projects/beagle2/reports.html

Suggestive that the heatshield might be somewhere around 150m downrange from the rest of the vehicle...of course drift under the chute and bouncing around could obviously change that significantly.



Doug

Remember - a cosmic ray hit might be a single pixel in the collected data - but it will 'grow' over multiple pixels during map projection.

Also...

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d..._1920_cut_b.jpg

There's nothing about the Ustrax target that elimiantes it from being an imaging artifact.

Attached - applying perspective distortion in photoshop on a single white pixel - first just in one direction, then in two directions. See how the dot 'grows'. I don't know how the map projection for HiRISE works - but I imagine it would introduce similar artifacts.

Doug

I had that as well.."hmm - a bit tall..OH...it's on a little plinth thing...." I spent about 10 minutes picking holes in the one I saw - I'd need about 10 minutes to find anything wrong with this one....astonishing.

Doug

THAT IS MENTAL.

There is a touring exhibition that was in Manchester early last year - and the MER model in that was no where near as accurate as that one...no where NEAR as accurate.

Doug

After The BA mentioned Emily's blog entry about this HiRISE image - Andrew commented on a feature that I've pulled out of PSP_002347_1915_RED_r2c3.png - Alex will be calling it house rock before too long although to be fair - that segment off to the left does look like the orange-segment sort of shape one would expect from the airbags....BUT....if the vehicle was healthy enough to fire the pyyros to drop away from the airbags - one would expect a working vehicle on the surface.

The 'killer find' still has to be either the 10m diameter parachute or a fresh crater + debris.

THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM.

Instead of looking at a 2048 x 4983 image - get the full-fat 812Mb 28247 x 68730 image

Doug

You're clearly not going to moved on the issue - but I strongly object to that statement. If it did what it HAD to - then it would have none of the recent upgrades. If it did what it HAD to - it would have uninstalled itself and shut the vehicles down at sunrise on Sol 91

Doug

Yes - you're zoomed out a huge ammount - perhaps firefox has downsized the image to fit in your browser window?

Doug

You're zoomed out by about 5x... to give you a sense of scale - this is at 100% - and is the area you mark as 3 airbags is actually two small craters and a pile of rocks. what you mark as Heatshield is infact a bright dune.


Doug

Depends how much of the EDL sequence worked.

Burnt up during entry : Nothing on ground
Survived re-entry but dead on arrival : that estimated crater size
Main Chute deployed but no airbag inflation - Large chute, probably a small 'splat' mark nearby.
Chute deployed - airbags inflated but B2 died on impact - Large Chute, one large composite airbag mess of all 3 bags.

Everything worked but B2 didn't open and deploy - Large chute, three airbag lobes, and an unopened lander would look fairly similar to the heatshield alone I would guess. HOWEVER - that would suggest some sort of failure after a great landing but before deployment and I find that a hard scenario to believe.

I think you're probably reading too much into a probably imaging artifact - BUT - it's certainly on the list of 'hmm - interesting'

Also - be carefull of rotating things. I set the lighting in that simulation to match the average lighting for HiRISE looking at near equatorial sites. I've not adjusted it to exactly match the parameters of the image we're looking at - but it's there or there abouts. Rotating things puts the shadow in a different place etc etc.


Doug

Fair play to you - it's an interesting target.

The thing I think we need to be careful of is that these images are re-projected and so any single cosmic-ray event or anything else of that nature (as shown here - http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d..._1920_cut_b.jpg ) might - even if only a single pixel in the downlinked image - show itself as more than a pixel in a reprojected image.

That said - I've done a comparison between that target and the the heatshield in my sim - and it's not a million miles apart. I do my sim's at 33cm/pixel now - it just seems more realistic in terms of resolving power - so I've upscaled my 33cm/pixel render to 25cm/pixel and put it side by side.

I personally don't expect to see a deployed B2 on the surface. If it were there, I would expect to see a very obvious chute nearby, as well as airbags.

I've started a new thread just for B2-in-HiRISE searches...

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3919

Starting a thread for possible B2 stuff within HiRISE images...I think it needs its own thread.

People may find these usefull..


http://video.beagle2.com/Descent/play_descent_a_640x368.htm
http://video.beagle2.com/Landing/play_landing_b_640x368.html

When I get home tonight I'll check if any specific materials are used in the 'chute or airbags - but I would expect them to be fairly identical to MER. The airbags were made by the same people for instance. The book I referenced in the simulation image is essentially THE opus on Beagle 2. If it's not in there, it's probably not in the public domain at all.

Doug