Whole spacecraft? No. But some of the RapidScat hardware is approaching 20 years old. It was built with the rest of the SeaWinds program in the 90's. The spare Voyager optics in Stardust and Cassini are another example.

Obviously not - which is why the dust storms visible in every version of this I've seen retain their ochre / butterscotch color.

Check out imagery from Hubble, or the Rosetta OSIRIS flyby imagery - white clouds are the norm. MEX has seen white fog, MGS MOC/WA saw white clouds. The MRO MARCI weather updates regularly show a sluice of white clouds around Mars.

Even amateur ground based astronomers have seen white clouds on Mars. I've seen them thru a tiny telescope with my own eyes.

Spirit successfully imaged Mars Odyssey with Pancam, so one would infer that yes, MastCam should be able to do the same.

I know many corporate firewalls block imgbox content. That's certainly the case here at JPL.

Why? We're not in Yellowknife Bay / John Klein any more. We're in a different geological unit. That's kind of the point of driving all this way.

By my guessing it's approx 1100 x 850km, the southern end of Syrtis Major - about 72E, 2S in the center.

Strongly disagree. The early Opportunity images in particular were a scientific revelation. Concretions, Vugs, Cross bedding, fine laminae - it was a geomorphological treasure trove.

The team knew that was a risk. They trusted the scientific community to respect their PDS delay and not attempt to beat them to publication. It worked.

I'm very disappointed to learn that someone has failed to exercise that same professional restraint with Rosetta.

Not much - but probably something. Here's thruster firings from an ATV on approach to ISS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XqG7zt5kK0#t=143

Almost certainly not visible from any other asset at Mars. The spacecraft itself might be, however, much as MODY and MEX were images by MOC-2 on MGS.

I don't believe they'll be taking a lot of descent images....indeed, there's not much point. OSIRIS resolution will out-perform that of the descent imaging until we're pretty close to the surface. One before bettering OSIRIS res , one at some intermediate point, one just before touch-down.....that would be enough for a very good localization.

The Onion is a parody website......they don't actually care if it's taking pictures or not.

They load fine here. Try a different browser ( I'm using Chrome - but it also loads fine in Firefox )

Not really.

MAVEN will go lower than other orbiters have in routine science ops - but not as low as other missions have during aerobraking passes. MRO was routinely doing passes of 97-105km during aerobraking ( http://issfd.org/ISSFD_2007/3-3.pdf ) - Odyssey went as low as 95km.

The MAVEN deep deep campaigns only go as low as 125km. The impact on its apoapsis will be pretty negligible..

MRO and MGS oriented their solar arrays to have aerodynamic stability during their aerobraking, Odyssey parked it's solar arrays 'behind' the spacecraft bus to have a similar stability. MAVEN doesn't articulate its arrays - so the inherent stability had to be designed in - hence the solar panel configuration.

If you don't need to use aerobraking....why bother. It takes time, has its own risks, and incurs operational costs. It was an enabling technique for MGS, MODY and MRO. MAVEN can get to the orbit it needs to without aerobraking. It's not like carrying extra propellant cost them anything, they used the lightest launch vehicle available.

And yesterdays MastCam view of the hills is actually a 360 now. Here's my favorite part of it...

http://dougellison.smugmug.com/Landscapes/...ity/i-Nh6kjjv/A

Pahrump Hills - here we are. Sol 753

Here's the single image - http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/ra..._DXXX&s=118

Yeah - I as thinking of my 50mm F1.4 - but rounded up

I believe it's about 250x brighter than a full moon. About 1/1500th as bright as the Sun at Earth.

Someone may want to check my maths on this....but....

One way to express it is with a camera. If you go outside with a DSLR and open the aperture fairly wide - you might get an exposure of, say, 1/4000th of a second ( the quickest exposure on many off the shelf consumer DSLR's )

Find a place where the same aperture results in an exposure of about 1/3rd of a second. That's how much darker it is on Pluto compared to the Earth.

Alternatively - it's like going from an aperture of F2 to F38....but without the added benefit of great depth of field

Doug

Deep Impact. Escape velocity from Tempel 1... and a collision course.

The quote you cite sounded to me like they were talking about the fly-away burn after deployment.

Again - refer to that drawing I grabbed from the conference - it's quite clear that they in essence do a pseudo 'deorbit' burn - separate the lander, and then do a divert burn to avoid following the lander into the comet.

Also from the press event.... "We are in orbit around the comet. We interrupt this orbit - we fly closer to the comet, we go downwards, we release the lander" and also "We phase the orbit of the spacecraft to meet the landing site"


Put it this way - let's conduct a thought experiment where they don't do a divert for the orbiter 30 mins after the separation.

The 18cm/sec separation speed, allowing for a 12:1 mass ratio between the 100kg lander and the approx 1200kg dry mass of Rosetta

This means Philae will be pushed forward at 16.6cm/sec and Rosetta pushed backwards at 1.4cm/sec ( roughly )

So after 7 hours, Rosetta will be 0.3km in one direction - the lander 4.1km in the other. The comet is approx 3 x 4km. If you had perfect navigation - and aimed such that the lander were aimed at the center of a 3.5km sphere..... the orbiter would swoop over the comet at an altitude of only 2.6km - way closer than they would normally fly the orbiter, especially given that in the conference they stated the difference in accuracy between orbit reconstruction and orbit prediction is about 1km.


So - is it an exact collision course? No. But it would be a damn close flyby if they didn't divert the orbiter 30 minutes after separation. DAMN close.

No - it's pretty clear from their artwork, from what they said during the press conference, and from the SPICE trajectory we've put into Eyes on the Solar System - they put the orbiter on a collision course with the nucleus - approach for a couple of hours, deploy Philae - carry on following for about another half hour - do a divert burn and then try to image Philae.

The great thing about the priority system is that the rover figures out for itself what to downlink based on the predetermined importance of data at the time it's collection is sequenced.

Also - it's worth noting that they were returned in the first few days of the rover's mission - at a time when it had the capability to return a lot of data, but not the capability to generate a lot of data as science instruments hadn't yet been checked out and they were not driving yet.

To add to the timing issue ( i.e. touchdown could have been +/- some tens of seconds ) there is also the opportunity to watch what happens after touch down - how long does it take for dust to settle, do pebbles roll around for a while, do we see any other impacts of EDL on the environment etc etc.

I think it's hard to make the case that the rock's definitely not there in the 2007 image. In-fact - I think it could be. That '07 image looks soft, perhaps a local or regional dust storm at the time - making it a tough call.

Be careful on the HiRISE resolution there - those images are map projected to 25cm/px - not the native res of the observation of 28cm/px

Can you provide a wider CTX view to call out the crater so we can find it perhaps in MGS MOC imagery or if we're lucky HRSC-SRC franes?