One thing that made me go "eh?" is ", two for each of the 14 CCD"

I can understand one channel - the image data....is the other channel just housekeeping data or there more to it that that?

Doug

When it's dark?

And why do you need or want a huge landing pad? Apollo 12 put down literally a few tens of metres from the intended landing site, and a beacon system would improve that.

That overly long post has no place in the Lunar Exploration thread, it belong in the hitherto unknown "sci-fi" subforum which doesn't actually exist.

Doug

Yup - pure speculation but it might have navigated back down toward Yogi, then around the lander to the right, ending up SSW of the Lander at the start of the Rock Garden...

OR...

It died not long after the lander and is sat where we last saw it

Doug

Sojourner would have started an attempted circumnaviation of the lander at a radius of about 5m after a set number of sols of no communications. Now - that 5m radius would include all of the rock garden which I would have conisdered not far from impassable for a little rover without human intervention. (even with human intervention they got sort of stuck in it for a while)

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/path/path013.jpg

I think Sojourner will be identifiable.

Doug

The Lunar Surveyors didn't get burried for > 6 months in frozen ice and CO2. Yes - there's a chance that Phoenix might survive it, like there was a chance that NEAR could have survive 6 months + on the surface of Eros, but I would be astonished if it were to happen, utterly utterly astonished.

Doug

System clock change

Doug

Hmm - a Sojourner track to HiRISE might look like an MER track to MOC perhaps - BUT - if I'm honest, I think time will have taken their toll on them and removed most, if not all evidence of the tracks.

Doug

According to Midnight Mars Browser....

The flick from 999 to 1000 will be 00:44 UT on Thursday October 26th for Spirit

02:16 UT on Thursday November 16th for Opportunity. (I think - there's a daylight saving time shift between the two annivs)

Doug

What would be the physiological effects of living at 1.6+ Bar?

I was thinking that you could get away with basically a 'warm suit' with breathing gear ( i.e. the Baxter suggestion in 'Voyage' )

HOWEVER.....

The only way to not contaminate from outside to inside the module via the airlock would be to evacuate it to as near a vacuum as you can at each cycle..

i.e. people put on suits, get in. 'habitable' air then pumped out into a pressure vessel so the airlock is at as near a vacuum as can be made.

THEN - you repressurise with 'titanian' air up to titanian pressue.

On the way back in - shut the door, pump out to a vacuum dumping it to the atmosphere outside, then represurise with the air evacuated before the EVA began...that would minimise the cross contamination in the meantime

BUT

It then means you have to have an EVA suit that can manage a near vacuum so it's going to look more like a modern EVA suit rather than something more minimal that one might immediately assume would be enough for Titan.

maybe

Doug

Quite. And I still don't quite understand the genesis of this internet wide confusion that has taken over every FORUM and renamed them as Blogs.

BLOG - One person writes and the rest sometimes comment
FORUM - Lots of people write and comment.

Consider a loud 'tut' expressed

Doug

PS - the actual data volume for the McMurdo is 3.92 Gbits That's something like 5-6 weeks of Odyssey downlink of pure Pancam.

Doug

Well - the power constraints would preclude it for sure - and I'm not sure if they would even be visible with Pancam or Navcam.

Doug

It would end up as Bill Bailey describes going thru customs in Australia

"Have you got any soil on you, and bark or moss, any sticks or stones or pebbles there? Have you ever made a nest amoungst marsh land..."

"graphically scrambled codes that bots can't cope wit"

Already in place, but the bots have a human element that gets through it.

There are more spammers than forum software writers, so the spammers will always find a way around whatever scheme is in place.

Doug

They're still pooring in, but we've changed the registration process now so that an admin has to approve every new registration...it's fairly obvious when the registered email addy is 309hsdg@redhotxxx.info or whatever that it's spam and not a genuine member.

It's like a leaking damn - you block up one hole and another one opens....but you still have to go and block it up. There are patterns emerging however, certain higher level IP ranges that are quite obviously a source of much of the registration - so bringing together the list of banned IP slowly adds to the library from which we can draw the most accurate but broadest 'net' to try and bring the problem down.

I've spoken to a few other forum admins and they have the same problem as we do here, and there's nothing that one can do above what is already being done unfortunately.

Doug

FatBoySlim and I (that's my laptop) have enjoyed the HiRISE imagery to date

Doug

Paul was banned about a month ago for continually refusing to stick to the rules (a crime in itself) and ignoring repeated requests from the admin team to do so ( a greater crime in UMSF land ).

So Don going and Paul going are two very different things. If you want epidemic, then I can show you the list of banned spamming accounts and IP addresses that ammounts to up to half a dozen per day, every day.

Doug

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/current.html

Suggests that Oct 13th was the date for the MOC release.

Doug

What baffles me ( and the rest of the admin team ) is why he couldn't just leave without requiring his account to be closed. Very odd, but I have to respect his wishes.

Occasionally, you'll get a "CLOSE MY ACCOUNT" type email from someone who's been given a warning and had a few posts culled for breaking the rules..a toys out of pram situation...but that's fine, that's doing us a favour to be honest

However with Don it was just straight out of the blue. Very strange, but there it is. He was a gold mine especially on the Russian side of things - I'll miss him.

Doug

He asked to have his account closed.

Doug

And will not be visible from Europe

Doug

Jim and I had a joke about this - it's time to reaquaint yourselves with families...read a book...take a vacation...or look back at 2000 sols worth of imaging

Doug

FYI - we recorded last night - and hopefully it'll go online late tonight some time.

Doug

The MCS image was from Jim Graf's paper presented at the conference and I asked him if I could reproduce it.

As for Vic crater.....meh...just guessing. (Actually - I honestly guessed that they would try and get it before conjunction a couple of months back ). Yes - Phoenix targetting is important, but I would consider planning traverses for a current spacecraft to be more so and thus I was always fairly sure that Vic would be in that transition phase. When Jim suggested that Friday's conference should be interesting, I put 1+1 together and made 3.

Doug

Rocks are SO Sol 200

I'm going to be accused of being a heritic here - but I prefer Navcam pans etc 'au-naturelle'. That's not to say that I didn't love that APOD Cloud mosaic, and obviously - I like the two pans from the fab-four that made it into AWST and APOD, but in each case I think I've prefered Navcam pans to be as nature ( or the engineering team ) intended...greyscale....and I know that's a stance I share with JB....but I'll put it to him when it comes to one bit of the q'n'a I've got marked down appropriately

Doug