Yup - I'd say tomorrosol is thus...

Targetted Navcam on Kitty Clydes Sister ( 5 x 1 )
IDD document arm.
Drive
Penultimate haz's
Final haz's
A full 360 navcam pan

And then...I guess reboot into the new software the sol thereafter.

Doug

Well - firstly you've got to find the space for the thing - MER was the most tightly packed 'dense' thing. Then - you've got to spend Whrs and Mbits imaging the thing and send those images back. Then you've got the thing stuck up in the way for imaging like a stretched LGA, wobbling around casting shadows on the solar arrays.

There are smaller, lighter, better ways of measuring wind speed and direction (like Beagle 2's little instrument) that might have got smuggled on board - but meteorologists don't carry rock hammers, and Geologists don't carry anenometers seriously - to learn something from the wind I would have thought you would want to have a static station

Doug

That's what I thought dilo - but the change is real imho.

Doug

Well - I've been waiting for this first proper array to be deployed in the right place...

http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/gallery/image.../s115e06723.jpg

Great pic - and so out comes photoshop No node two or JAXA/ESA modules - but hey - 3 years from now this should be something like the view. I had to clone arrays, radiators, take out one set of russian arrays, pull the arrays out from behind the current config...

And in honour of the razor manufacturers who did one with 2 blades, then 3, then 4, and now - a 5 bladed razor....I thought I'd take ISS to the power producing max

Doug

I'm not sure to be honest - probably best to match these features Nav or Pancam and work the range from that.

Perhaps - if we're lucky - they will do another Navcam pan from this position and then we can compare with earlier Navcam pans and vertically project it to see the track.

Doug

I think they simply forgot to put in "Plans called for...." - because I think it was written before that sequence would have occured.

Doug

Not a new image though - quite an old one - just took a while to come down the pipe Nice colours though - and fascinating layering of the dune material - reminds me of those toys you can get. A tank with water in it, and different types of sand. You shake the whole thing up and the sand layers its way up from the bottom.

Doug

The attachment that Fred did - and the one I did - are basically the difference between the Sol 961 image, and the other RHAZ images. So that dark streak is something that has changed between the last RHAZ image, and that Sol 961 one. It reminds me of the sort of trail left behind after a DD in Mark's enhanced DD movies.

Doug

Well - the orig plan was for a ratting - and we've not had that so far. I don't know if they hang around and try again though.

Doug

I've used Firefox since it first released and I'm not having any problems at all. I'm on 1.5.0.7 as well.

Doug

Oh crikey - I was looking at something else.....you may have spotted something I was looking in the 800,280 sort of area.... I'll see what I can come up with for anim-difference images

OK - the anim is a work in progress- but this is the difference between the 961 image, and the average of the preceeding three images. Bloody good 'spot' there Fred - nicely found. I'm going to 'phone it in' as it were.

Doug

I'm not getting my white druid robes out the loft again - they're all moth-eaten



Actually - it's WAY smaller than you think it is.

Jodrell Bank is good - National Space Centre in Leicester's good - Science Museum in London's good.

When it comes to the realm of manned spaceflight - Bill is one of the best, if not THE best imho. I call it the shuttle in general terms. If I'm talking about the stack in general - then I identify the ET, the SRB and the Orbiter - but once on it's own - it's a shuttle in my lexicon. Certainly nothing wrong with calling it one.

Doug

Look at the change in the shadow cast by the aft solar array on the ground - that's quite a lot of solar-angle change - and looking at the three frames - the change you identify would seem to be consistant with a change of illumination more than anything else.

I have - however - been looking hard for changes in lots of images and I've not found anything yet. What WILL be interesting is the changes in tiny ripples upon which the rover is now sat.

Doug

Jodrell Bank would be good - I'll try and visit it this winter to see what it's like now ( I visited last year at some point )

Doug

Tosol is very early Sol 943, 6 or 7 hours from uplink - and there's no tracking information for that sol yet.

940 was IDD work for Mossbauer placement
941 was IDD work for APXS placement
942 was targetted remote sensing.

Things are happening a bit slowly - people should stop wondeirng "when's the drive, when's the drive" because then you're setting yourself up for dissapointment if there's a drive fault or it's only a short drive etc etc.

We'll get there when we get there. Not before.

Doug

Red Cross it is then

One thing I do like it the 'alizer' bit. Yesterday I made a pick-up-sticksalizer - a spreadsheet for doing scores when playing pick-up-sticks

Doug

Hmm....er.....

Nope.

But I get a pay rise this month - so I think I'll give you $50 in October instead

Doug

It really doesn't look that revolutionary - seems like a 3d rover model, put inside all the press release images. ?? A nice way of bringing all that data together - but not something I would bother with personally.

Doug

Thanks for the DSN perspective - I guess flicking to new flight software would be something you might want to do with plenty of realtime DFE/DTE comms.

Doug

Well - they didn't do all of them - but the reason is storage capacity I believe.

Doug

The dynamic range involved in trying to capture the 'halo', the lit rings, and the E ring makes it almost impossible to capture in one image - but this is my best guess.

I see that the sequence made the effort to do multiple exposures in each filter set - but there was some down-sampling in some of the exposures. When this lot hits the PDS I'm sure Bjorn et al will work wonders on it Vio+IR is just enough to make something interesting

By explanation - would it be enough to say that just about everything is saturated and scattering of light from the rings is lighting the 'eclipsed' rings as well?

Doug

For the love of god do we have to have this bloody argument again.

..answer... No.

Stop it. Now.

I can promise you two things about the manned/unmanned/politics debate..

One - it will never end

Two - it will never take place here. Find somewhere else.

(Background : The debate for and against manned spaceflight has been going on since before man even made it into space. There are people who will sit on both sides of the debate firmly, without moving, and yell insults at one another because they don't have anything better to do. Discussions for and against manned spaceflight will end one way - in a vile argument. It's happened hear already and a member was banned for it for consistantly ranting on the subject - I should have stepped in earlier. That's why I've stepped in here, now, to stop this discussion. Yes - discuss the observations of Apollo sites etc etc - but when it turns into the political debate which this thread turned into in a matter ot a page - it's no longer acceptable for UMSF. I had multiple messages saying they found posts in this thread offenseive - from BOTH sides of the debate.

So - if you want to debate the pros and cons of manned spaceflight, or the eternal manned vs unmanned argument - by all means do so elsewhere, but NOT at this forum. Just because this forum is dedicated to talking about one half of that equation does not make it a plaform to rant against the other half.

You have all had the official heads up)

Doug

That 'update' tells us what the rover has done in the last week. It's been a hard week for scheduling so it's not exactly a packed week - but it's an accurate retelling of what's gone on.

Doug

Given that the vehicle has both flight software versions onboard right now - I can't imagine a reason why you couldn't boot back to the old one.

A bit like having Win98 and WinXP installed on the same partition

Doug