Ahh - someone else who went straight for the Gale image

Have you 'found' it in the 12m Themis Vis mosaic yet - it's not a great mosiac but I really can't pin it down.

Doug

And rightly so - but I think it's when you suddenly find that the thing might be gone you realise that you've taken it for granted and not taken the time to appreciate it's results. As many said during the MERA Sol 18 issue, it's when things go wrong that the reality of just how fine a line it is that connects us to these probes strikes you.

Oh - and great Article MC - I hadn't seen that one.

Doug

I wasn't hopefull of that one - that would have required a power positive vehicle with multiple failures on the X-Band sdie which given the symptoms before the loss would seem unlikely.

Doug

I'm still trying to figure out how to get Diviner into a sentence

Doug

Here in the UK we don't do Thanksgiving - the closest thing we have is Christmas really - however given that most of what we discuss here has a US origin, it's certainly right to mark what I think is a one of the more sensible national holidays in the world.

So - given the not so great new recently, and the fairly dim outlook - I though it appropriate to give thanks for the people and the talent behind, and the results from Mars Global Surveyor.

When Mars Observer was very first planned.....there was no plan for a camera on it...and eventually a manager said "You CAN'T send a spacecraft to Mars without a camera...." and that is when MOC was selected.

HiRISE owes its existance to MOC - because without MOC we would not have learnt, so very obviously, that much much higher resolution teaches you much much more. That may seem obvious now - but back in the late '80s and early '90s - it wasn't. It truely was a proof of purpose in getting high res pics. It's perhaps fitting that MGS has survived long enough to pass the baton on to it's decendant MRO, the 4th Orbiter sent to Mars since MGS, but the first to carry a camera of higher resolution than MOC.

MGS took us to Meridiani, it showed that Gusev was a safe place to go, it helped Odyssey and MRO in their aerobraking, it gave us - for a while - a better elevation map of Mars than we had of Earth. It was the first to image another Martian spacecraft, the first to use aerobraking at Mars, It mapped the progress of global dust storms as well as seing tiny dust devil tracks on the ground - it was Weather Satellite, Spy Satellite, Communications Satellite, and, most of all, a Global Surveying Satellite - the first part of the modern Mars Exploration program which has brought us to where we are today - Three working orbiters, two working rovers, a lander in final assembly and a long range rover on the drawing board.

It was the Viking Orbiter of the Internet generation, and bridged the gap, fed the science, gave us the data we needed when things went wrong in '99, and took the torch forward beyond any reasonable expectations.

It taught us of the Mars we know today, and for that, today, I am thankfull.

Doug

I totally and utterly agree 110% and would never suggest otherwise. However - there is much criticism of the skycrane manouver simply because it looks a bit scarey. So did Viking, so did MPF, so did MPL and so did MER. In some respects it is a hybrid of Viking and MER/MPF techniques...the throttled decent of Viking followed by lander seperation on a bridle and bridle cut at the surface.

I thnk I've been through every PDF I can find and I've even swopped emails with some JPL engineers about the MSL system. When you REALLY think about it - if it can be made to work (and I have no reason to see otherwise) it's arguably a more reliable means of getting things on the ground than the MER system, and certainly the most weight efficient way of getting a rover of that size on the ground.

Put it this way - I have a higher expectation of the MSL system than I would of a repeat of the MER/MPF system and arguably higher than the MPL/Phoenix pulse throttle system.

You are very wrong to label them as 'nuts' for leaving the MER system behind. It simply can not scale to MSL weight. They have to come up with a means of getting a rover on the ground outside that platform. The 'long decent with retro rockets' is actually going to be a shorter decent on retro rockets than was the case for Viking - only about 900 metres. Look at the efforts of Armadillo Aerospace with very little money and time to produce something which could be seen as similar to the MSL decent stage.

I'm not trying to ignore the difficulties...being here in Leicester, I really don't need to be reminded how hard landing on mars actually is... but I'm yet to see a sound argument against the MSL design based on anything other than 'it looks scarey'. With an atmosphere not thick enough to be usefull but thick enough to be a problem - landing on Mars will ALWAYS be scarey.

Doug

(PS - other cool docs - http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/39907 - http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/39871 and http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/38898 )

Why do you think UMSF is how it is?

It's precisely because I WILL NOT allow that sort of discussion here, I don't WANT a lot of people here. It's like the old saying at the Brooklands race track - "The right crowd, and no crowding"

The scope of UMSF is overly large as it is...it's certainly not going to grow.

Doug

You raise an interesting point there - looking back at the colour segment of the Victoria image, it seems to be not quite registered properly, there's something of a glow around the outcrops etc - almost like a low res image being overlayed on a higher res image.....was there something in the workflow that might have done that and is it something that might improve over time?

Doug

Well - they're all listed here
http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/

AND

here http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/TRA/ (with Nov 22nd after them)

Doug

If you describe to yourself the process of the MPF and MER landings, and then do the same for the MSL landing...neither is particularly confidence inspiriing.

The thing to remember is that there is only one team of working age in the world that has landed on Mars, and it's done it three times. If they think that the MSL system is the way forward, to be brutally honest there isn't really anyone out there to challenge that imho.

" The long descent with retro rockets will be treacherous and unpredictable."

Well - that's no different to Viking (worked twice) - and indeed given that it's from only 900m altitiude, the MSL decent stage will be working for a shorter period of time than that for Viking probably. We did that 25 years ago.... to call it treacherous and unpredictable today is not true.

There was no full scale testing for Pathfinder, Viking, MER...you just can not test that sort of stuff on Earth - there's no way to replicate the conditions. You can test systems, you can simulate based on those systems - but you just have to build enough smarts and flexibility into the system to mitigate the risk.

And as someone else has mentioned - the bags just don't 'do' bigger....and as it is they take up a HUGE ammount of the payload. For a delivered rover of 180kg, you have 827kg hitting the top of the atmosphere. Scale it all up - a 500kg rover - we're talkig 2300 kg at the top of the atmosphere. The bags are good up to a certain point - but beyond that, they just don't make any more sense.

Doug

if anyone has chute dimensions, airbag sizes, lander dimensions, or any VRML stuff with dimensions of some sort - let me know and I can drop it into my 'Lander Zoo' 3ds max scene

Doug

It'll be a while until I can get round to this I'm afraid - 'real life' is being a bit obstructuve - but I'll post in here when I can...the important thing is that it's all down on 'paper' so anyone can read it all, even if it involves some thread jumping

Doug

That was SOHO

Doug

Operating normally, it's got fuel through to beyond 2010. Operating in various safe modes, 1 to 2 years.


As for figures..... well... until the second Shuttle SAR mission, MOLA had produced a better elevation map of Mars than we had of Earth.... it took more than 600,000,000 altitiude readings of Mars before the laser failed and it operated as a passive radiometer.

TES has taken dust loading, temperature and mineralogical readings for 5 martian years - collecting more than 206 million spectra.

MOC...well...wide angle and narrow angle added up - probably 250,000 images, the entire planet, every day, in red and blue, for weather monitoring with the wide angle - and then probably more than a million sq km of Mars covered at better than 4m/pixel resolution.

Can't find anything more specific for the Magnetometer and Electron Reflectometer.

Doug

Veronica Mcgregor ( Manager of the Media Relations Office at JPL ) has been kind enough to email me and let me know that the conference will be available for a week at....

TOLL FREE FROM WITHIN THE U.S.: 866-513-1230
INTERNATIONAL TOLL: 203-369-1973

Doug

Last question was about how many images have been taken in the search - 750 Star camera images, 1 CTX image, 1 HiRISE image taken.

Doug

Well - it's a bit odd that they have not found anything in the images...but they were not specific as to how much of the area in which they expect MGS would be in ( a one minute window in its orbit, roughly ) they have covered via CTX or the ONC. If they've imaged most of it, it would worrying that they have seen nothing. If they've only imaged a bit, it's not so worrying yet.

Doug

Ours are self-adhesive

Doug

-Dr. Michael Meyer
"We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher."
blah blah - what the instruments have done - blah blah...

Fuk LI
Activities in last two weeks.

On Noc 2nd 3.35 pm Pacific - telem showed more than 50 difficulties to move an array, automatically tried to switch to redundent systems at that time - 5.27pm should have come back, but no communication. In last two weeks - no communication with the spacecraft in a normal fashion. Only time we thought we might have heard from it - late 5th - early 6th - 4 partial orbits showing potential carrier only signal. After that - not heard a thing. Sent 800 command files - none of that has been succesfull.

Tried to use MRO - not easy - our knowledge of MGS location is not good. Do not know exact orientation so don't know how bright it will be. MRO just starting primary science phase and wanted to do everything to make sure we don't impose undue risk on MRO. Last friday used Star Camera. yesterday HiRISE and CTX to image a region where we thing MGS could be. Preliminary analysis has not yielded ANY sighting of the spacecraft. Today and tomorrow - send messages to MGS to turn on its UHF - have Opportunity listen and relay any info via Odyssey.

Not exhausted everything yet...."we believe the prospect of recover is not looking very good at all"

Still ongoing - but that's the 'meat' of it.

Doug

"I think that it is time for UMSF members to debate the merits
of switching to an alternative to NASA's present architecture
for the VSE."

I don't. It would be off topic for UMSF. It would be a pseudo-political debate at best, so no....that debate is not happening here. The Manned sub-form here is for occasional discussion - not political debate.

Doug

I was talking about this to a colleague earlier and I said that they will almost certainly get great pictures of every lander we 'know' ( V1, V2, MPF, MERA, MERB ) and possibly MPL and B2 as we have a REASONABLE idea of where they might be...

But as for finding old Russian stuff, I suggested it would be like trying to wallpaper a living room with first class stamps : Expensive, Time Consuming, and really not a great idea.

Doug

Right - gone as far as I can with this...

Pathfinder lander, Sojourner at various angles, its heatshield, backshell and the chute at a distance from the backshell it would be if the lines were tight. A MER at various angles, the MER scale heatshield, backshell and chute again at the right distance from the backshell if at max distance. The Viking backshell, heatshield and chute ( did the Viking chute seperate from the backshell? I can't remember - anyway if it didn't - that's the proper distance from the backshell). Beagle 2 and heatshield. a 5m size crater 30, 60 and 100cm cubes and an 80m long 'stick' (used for setting the res right)

Rendered at 25cm/pixel and scaled up 500%

About as far as I can take it.....we don't really need an MER lander as we know what we're looking for and where....all I would LIKE to add is a viking lander but I can't find a freely available VRML model etc.

I've added a perspective view just to imagine how truely wierd this would be to see for real.

Doug

Ahh - that's not too bad...if it was a Mac Book Pro, I'd probably hate you as well

Doug

No Alfred McEwen would be suggestive that there's no HiRISE image to be unveiled - but they might still have something.

I have to go to a distant relatives funeral tomorrow...then come home and listen to this....I think I'll leave the suit on just in case.

Doug

I hate you so much right now

Doug