Tarted it up a bit with more realistic colours based on the McMurdo pan.

Doug

Your laptop is <10 inches

A few months = two years for Huygens SSP?
Smart 1's EXTENDED mission began in the middle of 2005.

Sorry - they're not even sticking to their own word.

If the agreements between ESA and the instruments dictate that the current turnaround of data release and regularity of outreach efforts is acceptable - then the agreements are flawed and future agreements should be different and specify more verbose details on what should be done, by when. The argument that ESA is underperforming because it is a complex, distributed organisation is nothing more than a poor excuse.

Doug

That's because your laptop isn't a bumper

What size would you like?

Doug

Yeah - I spotted that...I put it down to misscommunication between Wes and Matt.

Doug

Outside the remit of outreach - but still a job it should be doing and isn't.

My point was that whatever picture they showed at AGU - it was not their 'first' - as they showed several in Valencia a couple of months before.

I don't doubt the emense difficulty in doing that sort of thing and the effort and time required. This stuff is hard. Other missions are also doing hard things..AND doing a good job with outreach. It's a culture issue - it's just something ESA doesn't feel the need to do but to remain accountable to the taxpayer and indeed perhaps gain support for a bigger chunk of that tax to come their way....something it should do. There are data product that the wider science community would like, the enthusiasts would do good work with, and that exist, ready to go, sat on ESA servers.....but they just don't share them. As a program that is funded by the public, I believe that is very wrong.

The means to share data and give people a sense of being involved in this adventures are more accesable, easier to deploy and indeed cheaper than ever before.....I can see no honest excuse as to why they should be avoided.

It's unarguably the hottest debated subject here - and in some respects reminds me of the manned-v-unmanned-v-politics ones of old... unresolveable as two camps of opinion seem so polarised and sure of their opinion there can be neither concession nor middle ground.

Doug

Note interesting comments from Rob about HiRISE pathfinder obs

Doug

Not true.

Oct. 4, 2006 | 09:54 PDT | 16:54 UTC
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000714
Nils Muller then presenting a brief look at some science being conducted by the VIRTIS instrument onboard VEX to try to pull data out from the surface. About 95% of the data in the 990-1050 nm range comes from the surface and this reduces to no surface data in the 1250-1320 nm. BUT -- the 990-1050 range still has an input from the clouds. So, using clever maths, Muller basically stacks a few images from the 990-1050 range, and subtracts the influence of the clouds in the longer wavelengths to hopefully get a temperature map of the surface. Due to blurring by the atmosphere, the resolution of this data is only around 100 kilometres per pixel, however he was able to present some images that showed a variety of surface temperatures from around 720 to 740 Kelvin from data taken out of a mosaic of images collected on the 112 orbit. This data actually quite closely matches the altitude maps of Venus collected by the Magellan mission. So, if it matches the Magellan altitude data so well, what's the point in going to all that trouble? The simple answer -- Volcanic activity. Your average Venusian volcanic lava flow is expected to be perhaps 1000-1500 Kelvin and cover many hundreds of square kilometres, so it should be visible in these 100 kilometre resolution thermal maps. Hopefully, if there is any active volcanic activity going on down under the clouds, then this technique should be able to find it as a change of a more than 5 deg Kelvin in his thermal maps.

I wrote the words, I saw the pictures.

Turning up at a planetary science meeting and a cohesive broad education and outreach program are not the same thing. I don't blame the scientists per se - but the public awareness of planetary exploration by ESA is a disgrace. Fact. No one can pretend it's at an acceptable level.

From the enthusiasts perspective - a few key issues that I still consider unacceptable.

HRSC's lack of map projection for all channels and refusal to release DEM's to the PSA/PDS given that some of this has been sat on hard drives at ESA for 3 years and it is generated in near real time.

Smart 1 data......six month chunks six moths in arrears I was told at IAC. To date - nothing.

Huygens data - DISR and SSP still not published onto the PSA or PDS - despite promises of '12 months' then August, then October on the PSA and PDS.

ESA's outreach and data publishing efforts are sub-par. As a tax payer in Europe I expect and deserve more.

Doug

Nothing strange about naming it after a river - we've splattered the names of lakes all over Gusev.

Doug

Suprising - I would have though the MCO+MO2K1 bus would be a build-to-print basis for scout budget orbiters.... I hope Alan can drop a few PDF's / PPT's onto the SWRI website about it.

Doug

http://www.dti.gov.uk/consultations/page36442.html

Get the 40 page PDF - read it carefully - and then submit your response to the address included, once I've had the chance I'll post my response in here.

Doug

There is a mutual exclusivity between transient astronomical phenomenon and the British climate - I'm sure of it.

Doug

merged the two topics - we were doubling up.

Complete cloud for the past couple of days here - not a hope in hell of seing the thing.

Doug

With such high gravity to fight against, and a nice thick atmosphere that's screaming out for chutes, parafoils etc.... landing with rockets on Earth just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Doug

Given the polo treatment :

What's even worse is that from one month to the next it changes, dramatically, so it might be 1200 one day, an hour one way the next etc etc.

Doug

There's only a movie of it on the JPL site somewhere...I've not found the actual DEM for that one.

Doug

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it. As a payer of taxes within Europe, my opinion is somewhat different and I believe ESA is short changing the people that pay for it. Clearly I am not alone in having that opinion either. We are each entitled to our opinions.

However you are not entitled to tell others to 'shut the hell up' because their opinion differs to your own.

Doug

There is nothing I see in Bottomless or Duck bays that other bays further round don't do as well or even better. One thing that might be crucial is how the seasonal lighting might put the rover in shadow at parts of the day when close to the larger outcrops and it may infact turn out that there's half a dozen places that are all favorable to get in, get the science and get out - but one offers systematic benefits because of slope or low shadowing. The south eastern quarter of the crater is, if the MOC DEM we've seen is to be believed, offers gentler slopes anyway - so I would think that it would be in the '3 to 5 o'clock' position that we actually go in.

Doug

this image
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Pioneer_5.jpg
Of P5 atop its LV without those features would suggest they're in the 'remove before flight' catagory.

This may only be a coin, but it doesn't have them either
http://www.farthestreaches.com/images/pioneer5f.jpg

Not sure if this is a model - but they're not here either
http://astro.zeto.czest.pl/sondy/pioneer5.jpg

Doug

I don't have a CLUE what they are - but I'll have a few guesses...

Attachments for cables to test array deployment in 1G environment.
Launch restraint bolts.
An instrument of some king for Mag etc?
They look a little like the sort of motors we see all over the MER's - but I don't think they would be that.

Doug

I tried that...it killed him

Seriously.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicest...ire/3754905.stm

I contacted him at the beginning of May '04 - he wrote back to me asking for more details, sounded genuinely interested...and promptly died before I could get back to him.

Since then we've had two more MP's - one of whom wasn't around long enough to matter, the second just fobbed me off with copy-and-paste UK space policy nonsense. Basically a dead end. I'm thinking of approaching the science minister.

Doug

What we need is an MSL proposed landing at Isidis Planatia - then you could wallpaper the Beagle 2 Ellipse with a proper reason

Doug

"Did anyone see anything similar up to now?"

Probably a thousand times, but I couldn't find one for you - it's just one of those things you notice when the images are coming down the pipe into MMB.

I'd recommend reading
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/Bell_Pancam_InFlight.pdf

and the other Pancam operation papers here :
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins...blications.html

Doug

Yes - but there IS someone to observe the event - the scientists on the instrument teams ARE seing this stuff going on - they're just not telling anyone about it.

The apple falls, it's measured by scientists, written in their notebooks -but they don't think to publicise the fact.

Doug