Trans X is all a bit complicated for me - the Encounter one is perfect for flybys etc

Doug

You need the Encounter MFD
http://www.orbitermars.co.uk/

Doug

Well - reading the logs for MODY and MRO - I think they've turned off the updates to the webpage as they have no radiated files since before the last MGS log entry

Doug

If I knew how....I tried for several evenings to make an iTunes RSS feed for the Pancam Audio Updates and other things....but got nowhere - it was just too damn convoluted and awkward.

Looking at radiation logs, both MRO and MODY have been recieving regular uplinks that look to be fairly normal - and given that the baseline smaller DSN assets can recieve from multiple spacecraft at the same time AND that MGS search is going on with 70m dishes....I don't think the MGS downtime should be impacting MER ops too much at all.

Doug

Yup - I was watching very closely.....did you spot the Victoria crater navcam pan.....anyho - very very little actually about VEX.....but to be honest, that's what I've come to expect from VEX - they had the platform to say "we're seing this this and this" - and said almost nothing.

Doug

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/lofiver...x.php/t902.html

"As of 05-153 (06/02/05) MGS fuel consumption is 3.3 g/day, with 9.15 kg of usable fuel remaining. At this consumption rate, the usable fuel will support operations into 2013."


Doug

Wow - I'll try these later

Doug

I'd say the Manned spaceflight forum to be honest.

DOug

Well - I found http://mgsw3.jpl.nasa.gov/seq/ which includes lots of similar info just by googling for "UHF Relay" - I can't believe that JPL would unintentionally allow that information to be out and about and so easy to find - indeed some parts are marked as being removed due to ITAR......but then it wouldn't be the first time that JPL would have let something be online that shouldn't have been. It wouldn't be beyond belief to have JPL stop updates going to that site because they didn't want people ( i.e. me ) reading it.

Doug

This is a date/time format I often come across when looking a spaceflight related data from places such as the PDS or the radiation / relay logs...
2004-01-02T19:15:38 or 2006-315T23:03:23.0(one using yyyy-mm-dd and one using yyyy-ddd etc )

Try as I might, I can't get Excel to 'read' these properly, even using my own custom cell format type as yyyy-ddd"T"hh:mm:ss.s

Any pointers?

Doug

Well - no updates to the log for 14 hours....most likely reason being that the script that adds things to the log is either broken, or intentionally turned off.

Doug

I've followed MCS for a few years - the lenths the guy has gone to and the trouble he has had....and the results he's got from his work all defy belief.

Doug

Well what else am I to do? I can't spam-email everyone with important forum news items - the onus is on people who visit to check in with that forum for important notes regarding rules, downtime, and cool things such as the Steve update.

I have to start at the top level, and then do a 'view new posts' which whilst not 100% reliable is a fairly good way of checking in with everything.

Doug

I'd like to go the same as Full Moon...but I'm not even thinking about it till the rovers quit ( a terrible thought, but a realistic one )

Doug

Well - reading the logs from overnight - there were about four hours of a different commanding sequence which included two references to the HGA (I can't see the sequences defined anywhere unfortunately) but since then - it's been the same CXSPG1, CXSPG2,TCM1MN,TCM2MN, STRPAN. If I had to guess a diagnosis - I'd say that they tried something different (perhaps based on predicts of spacecraft attitude) , had no results, and then resorted to the baseline sequencing.

Thanks for the input Mike - as with all such things the longer we know nothing the worse the situation seems.

Doug

Well - we've had this loop of 5 commands



And it was run at.....

04:00
05:18
05:58
07:58
09:13
09:53
11:12
11:51
13:09
13:55

That's time gaps of... 78,50,120,75,40,79,39, 78 and 46 minutes. basically cycling between 80 ish and 50ish with one odd one ( perhaps a DSN handover) looks to me like they're trying at the two 'sides' of the orbit with 80ish mins being hte visible time and 40 mins being the occulted time.

Unfortunately, space.jpl.nasa.gov doesn't include Mars spacecraft in orbit, and http://mars1.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/realtime/mgs1.jpg is very very broken
Doug

It doesn't really tell us anything to be honest - it's guess work at best, but it's a list of the sequences being sent TO the spacecraft, not ones being recieved from it....and the same sequence being sent many times over would be suggestive (I would have thought) of an unresponsive spacecraft.

Lots more commands radiated overnight, including....

Reset a sun-angle timer to a different time.
that's looped a few times, and then

Turn on telementry modulation
Switch that to 10bps
then that gets looped a couple of times

They've radiated 50 commands in the last 24 hours.

Doug

http://mgsw3.jpl.nasa.gov/seq/MGS/rad/MGSradiation.log_nohdr

Doug

Two more of whatever those things were...followed by two SCGNT :



Doug

Just for fun, probably highly inaccurate...if they DO do HiRISE imaging...I've seen figures of 100km smacked around which would be approx 10cm/pixel....so here's a couple of simulated views using ye-olde VRML model that's online if you google for it.

Doug

Well - not a set of calculations...it's just a simulation of what goes on.

Best place to start would be to google for 'The Rocket Equation'

Doug

SRSWTB - no idea what that is but it's something different than the rest of the day. Twice within 42 minutes...perhaps they're trying to schedule repeated commands at times when predicts would put LGA's at a more optimal position.

Doug

I don't know of a program to work it out - it's probably a more complex simulation to get accurate figures than Joe Public could manage (although perhaps using something like Orbiter one could simulate a fairly close approx.)

Most of the figures are out there for current or near-future LV's already though...they have to be in a commercial launch context so people can know what they're looking at www.astronautix.com is a great starting point, and hunt for Launch Guidelines or Payload Guides etc as PDF's at various LV manufacturers websites ( Ariane, Starsem, Pegasus, Atlas V, Delta IV, II all out there I think ) which give extensive versbose launch capacity specification.

Doug