Ahh - you see what you do then is rent your place out for the week and earn back two months mortgage payments in 5 days

It's what happens in Monaco - hardly any locals stay for the f1 weekend...they take their holidays then and get the hell out

Just a wierd follow up. The McLaren F1 team have taken over almost the entire complex where the conference was last October...

http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/190214/0/c...lonso/valencia/

to unveil their new F1 car later today - and they're going to drive two of last years cars around the roads nearby - including straight under the windows of the hotel we stayed at

Doug

You jest - it would be suprising, but not beyond the realms of possible to see that little feature move. Sojourner is designed to be totally solar powered and did work for about a month with no other power source after its non-rechargable batteries had exhausted. She might be too dusty - and things may be broken inside - but it's plausable that the old girl wakes up every morning, tries a bit of a move, and then goes to sleep with the setting sun. Despite the enormous cool factor - this would also help confirm the current Sojourner feature...rocks don't tend to walk

Doug

The rover was programmed to - after a while - backed up to where it last had succesfull comms with the lander. If that failed - it was programmed to drive back toward the lander - but also maintain a keep-out zone around the lander. This would have resulted in the rover heading back toward the lander ( a fairly clear route that indeed includes the spot where we think we see Sojourner ) and then probably turning right and circulating that way until its position knowledge would drift and it would start roving just about anywhere.... the 'return and circle' sequence didn't actually exist per se.

I'm fairly confident that Sojourner could very easily have got to that point we see in the HiRISE images - I can quite believe it got that far.

Doug

Ooo - look at me - trying to take pictures of a comet but I accidentally took a photo of the Sydney Harbour Bridge instead.....

That is a little missleading.

HiRISE is 10 x 2000 pixel wide CCD's to make 20,000 pixels wide. The middle two of these are also replicated in the Near IR and Blue/Green - so giving a false colour 4000 pixel wide swath down the middle of HiRISE images. It is not at higher resolution though - it is the same res as the rest of the instrument. They missed Pathfinder with the colour first time around, but I am sure they will have another go at it.

The idea is that while everything looks very 'similar' in the normal red channels - perhaps the lander and sojourner will be a little more forthcoming with the nIR and B/G channels.

Please look at the rest of this thread and the HiRISE website for their preliminary location identification which is already very compelling given the fact that there is a roughly sojourner sized feature at a space where no such feature exists from the Pathfinder surface imagery.

Doug

The overhead projections are from the Planetary Photojournal.

Doug

Which bit do you think is sojourner?

Doug

Yesterday - with Firefox, IE and Free Download Manager.

I've tried to grab that Meridiani image - but twice the download has died about 10% the way in.


Doug

It's not really about benefit - it's about cool factor...little else really

Doug

If they had a way of obscuring the sun - yes - it'd be interesting to see how much of a view of the comet either of them might get at sunset though - different geometry and all that.

Doug

Wahghg

I'm sat here wearing jeans and a shirt, looking at me in the same jeans and shirt, looking at Mars.

Wierd.

Doug

If you look at this one..

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

Sojourner was backed up to the rock called Chimp - centered on about -1X, -10Y on that graph.

Doug

No - there really is a big bit of airbag material - with exposed foil etc - just there.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81220_full.jpg
See the glare it produces.

See the foil here..
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81957_full.jpg

Sojourner is never going to be obvious - it's barely at the resolving power of HiRISE and is going to be a very similar colour to the terrain...much like Spirit is today
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins..._1_True_RAD.jpg

What we DO see with the HiRISE images is some rocks that appear where we expect them to - and then one about Sojourner that is where we don't expect one, in a place where it's entirely possible Sojourner could have driven to.

The sequence was never onboard to actually circle the lander ( as I used to think ) but infact to return to the lander but simulatanious remain outside a keep-out zone. She would probably (given enough time ) have tried to go around the lander anti-clockwise as a result of that. However - she wouldn't have got too close to the lander as the lasers would/should have stopped that happening.

There's no OBVIOUS sign of Sojourner - but that object that does look out of place - and in a spot that is easy to imagine Sojourner getting to - it's the only real candidate if the old girl stayed 'local'

Doug

Bloody yanks...




I'm getting through it - slowly - trying to really understand what they're going towards, but you are right - their goals are too modest imho.

Doug

There's a tape out there by an ex pilot who did an after dinner speach....it's infamous and amazing....one section is something like this

"Helecopters are different - you put on phenomanal ammounts of power and it defies all known law - and lift off. It should of course screw itself into the ground. Once you've got it up in the air you grab hold of the stick and go crazy with the thing - then you hold it in one place and watch what the helecopter does....because if you want it to do that again....that's where you put the stick"



Doug

Oh - impossible on the raw....but very visible with calibrated imagery

Doug

What members don't see are the posts that get deleted by the admin team. When a member posts something unacceptable in the forum, we usually 'hide' it, discuss the matter as an admin team, and then make a call - usually meaning the post gets deleted and the member told about it.

If the problem reoccurs - we usually give the person one more chance to stop posting things that we consider unacceptable.

Typically - on the third occurance - the account gets deleted as well - by this stage the problem isn't what the member is posting - it's the decision to ignore, twice, the requests of the admin team.

To put it bluntly - our forum, our rules. We'll give you a couple of chances, but if you keep breaking them - you will be shown the door. There comes a point when a contribution - no matter how good - is not worth the time and effort that that member takes from the admin team.

That's what happened with R.T. - You may have enjoyed reading his posts - but there were other posts that he made that were firmly in the tin-foil-hat catagory. We deleted several and asked him to stop posting things of that nature. He refused to stop doing it, despite being warned - so his account was closed on Dec 29th ( after his last post...which you wont find as it's been deleted)

It can often look overly harsh from the outside because regular members don't actually see the stuff that got the guy warned, and then kicked out - because we delete it.

More often than not - I then get a very harshly worded spitefull email insulting me, criticising the forum and claiming that they don't want to visit it anyway.

Such is the joy of looking after UMSF.



Doug

A total fob-off.

The problem isn't that they reported things totally factually incorrectly - the problem is that such a thing is able to happen when the facts are all set out ready to understand on multiple web-pages.

I've written to correct perhaps a dozen science stories over the past couple of years - all things that 10 seconds with google show to be wrong, but still they - the BBC - one of the most highly regarded organisation in the entire industiry - get badly wrong.


Doug

What might make a very interesting target for a weekend (next weekend perhaps ) is what I've started calling the 'dock' of the Bay of Toil - just north of the bay a sort of 'echo' of the rim set back 10m or so. A few 10's of CM's of material.

Doug

It's a discussion JB and I have after the last round of transits when they managed to get 4 sec-per-frame shooting of one of them. Purely for cool factor.

From the top of Husband hill looking west or east you might see the darkening moving - but from where we are now it's simply a case of cool factor. downsample them to 512 x 512 - compress them hard - get 12 into the budget of a single normal FHAZ frame and make a movie

Doug

Bingo - it'll either be "take a tau, then watch a transit" orrrr the other way around.

Now I've got to start convincing the team to do a Hazcam movie during a good Phobos transit to see the terrain 'dim'.

Doug

Infact, I'm going to pull them off the approved attachments list ( which for some reason, they are on by default)

Doug

Well - First bounce, Lander and Backshell tend to form a fairly large triangle of several hundred metres on a side. If there were a little red graph of Pathfinder bounces in the way we saw one for MERA and B, then one could overlay - but I dont' recall anything like that.

Unfortunately, I don't have the brains to reconstruct one from the PDS EDL data in the Atmospheres node.


nprev - what you're seing, imho, is a bit of a dark patch which is the resolving of a few cobbley sized rocks. The combination of a bright part and a dark part ( i.e. something with relief to it ) in a space where the pans tell us there is nothing that size there.....it's fairly convincing.


I'm fairly convinced there's two obs as well James - I really don't think that's a projection issue - it's a different picture.

Doug