And right now ( for the next 12 minutes ) the cumulative sol total is infact...2000 sols. Just mindblowing....

I'll be celebrating 2001 cumulative sols tomorrow hopefully...but you'll just have to wait for that one It'll be different, and you'll like it

This poster was, like the pancam one, Printed at A1 size, but was sent over to the west coast team at JPL, for the building the girls, and looking after them for so long! This one didn't work quite as well as the other...but if you know your rovers, you'll know what it is

Doug

Yup - there's no Pathfinder IMP or Sojourner 'RAD' equiv PDS release ( which is real pity ). Are you going straight from the images on the PDS sojourner page, or are you using the IMGs?

Go on....what's your green-channel secret...I think you're still using it because I tried a synthetic green and it doesn't quite match with your results

Doug

"Hang on lads....I've got an idea"

It's been a while since we gave some tactile kudos to the rover teams both in Cornell and in JPL, the 1st Birthday card's are a distant memory now A while back, I made some basic photo-mosaics of some MER scenes just for fun. Some worked. Some didn't. But I thought that a cumulative 2000 sols would be worth marking in some way, and so I set about trying to put together something for each side of the the US to mark the occasion. I'm not going to share these in full resolution - because then they could be reproduced...and these are both one offs, never to be reproduced.

Jim Bell over on the East coast handled things for me - hiding an A1 poster away until conjunction started so today I'll share what I sent that way......and on Monday I'll share what went west....

Attached - a browse size to see the full effect and a crop from the full resolution to give you an idea of what it's actually like. This was sent to Cornell about a month ago, as an A1 poster, as a thank you for the hours, the effort and the images

The reason they used to use film developed on board is because that was the only means they had to store images rapidly enough. Take the photo, store it as film, and then you can spend the next few weeks scanning them in a fax like fashion to send them home at a rate the spacecraft can manage.

I think...
Doug

I couldn't help but revisit these having seen your great results. The Red and Blue channels seem to line up reasonably - just the green channel that's so warped....but looking at the green channel in photoshop, it has a trace of one of the other channels which I can't seem to cull out.

DOug

That's what I was wondering - will an observation program during cruise consume fuel to a point that might leave little or no margin for the DIXI encounter?

Doug

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image..._mars_micro.jpg
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image..._mi_diagram.jpg
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/MER-.../MI_Barrel1.jpg
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/MER-.../MI_Barrel3.jpg

About all I could come up with.

Doug

The information is here
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/public...01993_01994.tab

But the table description which should be here : http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/public...mndescript.html seems to be locked away somewhere.

HOWEVER

it's cached here
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:XxOF0...lient=firefox-a

Doug

The PPJ has always done tiff's - never figured out why.

Doug

We know there are winds on Mars. We've seen flaping heatshield material, we've seen moving DD's. We also know that it takes particularly strong winds to clean the dust off the arrays. The 'normal' weather on Mars could thus be inferred to perhaps be enough to blow around a tie wrap, but not enough to blow off the dust.

Doug

Well - high dynamic range is the buzz phrase in the animation world - and even with a bog standard camera you can get HDR output by doing multiple exposures at multiple exposure lengths and then adding them all up to get a cool image. The sort of thing you see being used for an example is the inside of a cathedral, and you can drag the brightness up and down from seing all the cathedral lit in dark candle light, and then drag it as far as totally black in the cathedral but you can see clouds outside the windows.

How much that might apply to something worthwhile or useable for spaceflight...I don't know.

Doug

That will be the Electra UHF relay test I presume. If it's near-nadir then they might do some observations but if it's not, then I doubt it.

Doug

This is confusing, because other news sites are saying this is simply a selection for further study...

From spaceflightnow.com

"Also selected for further study are three missions of opportunity that would make new use of two NASA spacecraft that have completed their primary objectives.....

....The Deep Impact eXtended Investigation of Comets (DIXI) mission would use the existing Deep Impact spacecraft for an extended flyby mission to a second comet to take pictures of its nucleus to increase our understanding of the diversity of comets. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., is DIXI's principal investigator."

All that's actually been decided is that they're going to get $250K to study the proposal further. Either the NASA press release, the Discovery program website, and all the othe space news websites have got it wrong...or Space.com is jumping the gun by saying it's a done deal.

Doug

Yup - we had that discussion a while back about star scanners being out of focus to produce a little ring of the star which is easier to identify with software than a sharp star and cosmic ray hits etc.

Was that at the time when they were considering an entirely robotic servicing mission? It was on the cards for a while.

Even $900m is expensive, but Hubble is one of the few science projects which EVERYONE knows about and EVERYONE has seen the pictures. Keeping that asset alive and productive is a worthwhile exercise even if not for entirely scientific reasons.

Doug

Because it's still the best camera for looking at Comets during a flyby we've ever had, and combined with its ability to take IR Spectra, it offers a very very cheap way of exploring another comet for something less than 10th the price of a new dedicated mission.

And - when it comes to measuring transits with an out of focus camera....all you're doing is counting photons, and that can be done just as well with an out of focus instrument in actual fact...it's not ideal, but it will do the job (and if it couldn't, they wouldn't have been selected for the next study phase)

Doug

I've looked for online printers who do REALLY big...and not had any luck. I visit a printing firm near by. An A1 print is £35 on Satin paper.

Doug

MPL will be a must-have I think...for lots of reasons We know fairly well where to look for that one...I hope.

THat 500ish kbps will go up to basically, 10x that over a period of 12 months - as a really really rough guide - you could just add 500 kbps each month for 10 months, and then hold it at the highest rate for 5 or so months...very very very ballpark guestimate figures.

25% of near continuous 500kbps is 10,800 Mbits

20,000 x 40,000 x 12bit with, hopefully, 2:1 compression when I spoke to Graff at IAC = 4,800 Mbits.

Scarey isn't it.

Doug

Ahh - that's better - a not-quite-so-warped Gibson pan.

Doug

You would end up depending on wind strong enough to blow around a piece of string, but at the same time not strong enough to blow off dust that would be removed by that piece of string....AND somehow get the string to not just hang of the sides of the rover like corks on the side of an Aussie farmers hat. I can see why one might see the little 'scratches' in the dust that that little cable tie has made at the base of the PCMA - but I just can't see it working as a means to actively clean dust off a solar array. There are far better methods in development at the moment ( electrostatics being one...excellent paper at the IAC about that, with cool videos to match )

Easy solution.....RTG.

Doug

But realistic. Whilst MRO's pipe to the ground is bigger than any previous downlink you've got to consider two 'feet on the ground' realities....
HiRISE doesn't get it to itself ( as any Glog reader will tell you, it's only about a quarter ) -
and HiRISE images are bloody ENORMOUS data products. A full resolution HiRISE image is like stacking every 360 pan that Spirit has taken on top of one another.

VERY rough, VERY back of the envelope that don't really tell the truth and don't include compression.
( 20,000 + 4000 + 4000 ) x 40,000 x 12 = 13440 Mbits.

Now - get creative with the binning and the compression and drop the colour, and you can have 4, 6 or more images within that same data budget. Quite a lot of those images in the Transition phase were only 2x2 binned, not full res, and they were still spectacular, and would be more than enough to identify an MER, Pathfinder or other known lander.

Doug

I can't imagine being able to pin down any pre-viking lander to an ellipse less than a MER-like 80 x 15 km to be honest....and that's going to take 14 large HiRISE images to 'paint'.

Doug

Actually - the Civil Aviation Authority declared the time from first contact to fourth contact as aviation darkness - so the flying for the day started AFTER the eclipse. Also - because of the sun getting stolen for the morning - it was a poor day for gliding, very few good thermals around.

Doug

Oh - I distinctly remember the '99 total eclipse here in the UK - I was in Bidford-on-Avon, we got about 95% eclipse, and I was at a gliding competition - I remember the shadows the gliders were casting on the ground were very very sharp.

Doug

I have a few - I'll see which ones they are and get back to you. They made good reading.

Doug