They uploaded new flight software on...

Sols 75,76,77
and Sols 374,375,376

They're quite good at it

Doug

Typically 1000 local - 5 hrs from now when it'll only be 1200 EDT - so the sequences would have had to have been done yesterday.

Over at Gusev they're about to do capture magnet MI (and I assume Mossbauer/APXS) work - perhaps the same is scheduled here.

Doug

I was wondering why we're not doing 'much'at the moment....perhaps the shift to the new flight software has been scheduled for the next few days? I remember them wanting to get it in before conjunction, and thus probably better now rather than when we're at victoria.

doug

I was just talking innner solar system - i.e. a '4th' stage of the LV that operates for say, 6 months.

Doug

Hi Hermes,


Do you know about the Deep Impact mission? That was launched to a comet, but about 24 hours before it arrived it split into two - an 'impactor' and a flyby spacecraft.

The impactor had a camera and the software on board to navigate its way to hit the comet - and the flyby spacecraft manouvered away from the comet and flew past it - to obseve the impact and recieved, record, and relay the data sent back from the impactor.

This is not TOO disssimilar to a planned missiont he moon ( whos name esacpes me ) where they plan to have two spacecraft - one to impact the moon and one to fly through the ejecta to 'sniff', hopefully, the water involved.

Also - it reminds me a little of the Mars 'SCIM' Scout mission - which would fly through the upper martian atomsphere to take a sample of it and perhaps capture some high altitude dust and return it to Earth for analysis.

When thinking about an Earth-Pluto-Earth mission, I didn't think there would be much point in coming back without something to show for it. However - Landing on Pluto, sampling, and coming back would require such a huge ammount of fuel that it might be impossible given even the largest launch vehicles we have now - or even the Ares V in the next decade or so.

So - I wondered if it might be fun to try and take the deep-impact idea, but take it all the way to Pluto - and not try and observe the ejecta - but use the Stardust mission style of sampling..... use an aerogel capture array and fly through the ejecta hopefully capturing some of it on the way - and then return that to Earth....essentially the KBO bastardisation of Stardust, SCIM and Deep Impact

If you wanted a NASA style acronym for it...

Pluto In Situ Sample Earth Delivery

I'm not sure how easy or hard it would be to calculate trajectorys for spacecraft with Ion engines - but I think you would almost certainly want to look at those - using very large solar arrays - as perhaps an electric propulsion stage for the inner-solarsystem section of the trajectory just to help cut down on flight time.

Doug

Fair enough - I'm just used to seing reachability maps that are a lot more conservative than those deployments..

http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator...DL35C8P1201L0M1 for eg.

Doug

I'm going to double check with my secretary ( Helen ) - but I THINK I might be able to make the 22nd....not 100% sure.

Doug

Post drive FHAZ images are a normal thing though - penultimate, ultimate, and IDD deployed - and apart from the tracks (which we've basically done 90 metres back up the road ) I can't imagine there being much in the IDD work volume at this particular location. The rock on the left's a bit out of IDD reachability.

Who knows.

Doug

Looks like normal end-of-drive-idd-deploy, not a specific intent to do IDD work.

I'm not CERTAIN - infact I'm guessing - but a complete Navcam 360 and drive direction imagery after a drive of only a few metres makes little sense to me. Perhaps the drive faulted out for some reason? It does seem odd otherwise.

I'll send some emails

Doug

Just as an example - consider the size of shadow being cast by the PCMA here...

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...00P2260R1M1.JPG

Doug

Wahahah?

http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/a16f.grandprix2.mov

7 -8 seconds in - LOTS of dust.

The surface of the moon is almost ALL dust.

Doug

Looking at tosols imaging schedule it's just a bit too busy to be a long drive sol imho....not sure exactly where they're going, But then - drive direction imagery from the end of a short drive doesn't make too much sense but perhaps driving 10m SW to the other side(ish) of Emma will provie VLB stereo using the drive dir imagery from yestersol toward Vic.....maybe?

We'll know in what, 4 hrs ish?

Doug

Micrometeoritic impacts over the past several billion years. The surface of the moon is very very dusty.

Doug

It takes approx 2% of the deck area physically - area that could be repalced by solar cells - I think that was the argument being made.

Doug

I've had a look and there some effect at the near side of the crater - but not much. I had to rotate my head 90 degrees for it to work. The point of stereo is to show depth - but my reprojecting you've translated depth into X and Y anyway, so it doesnt really make sense. As I said - there was some 3d effect....but not a lot, and certainly not much that made sense.

I'd invest your time in just doing more of the 2D ones

Doug

yup - infact I remember the really low whr figures up on West Spur and then the really nervous drive across West Spur to get to the slope that lead to LL...they had 'sun' maps that showed where was good and where was bad in terms of driving.

Doug

That's better

We used to worry about mentioning words that would raise this places googlability.

However - I've since looked at how google works - and it's by links. The more links TO a particular site that exist, the more popular it is considered by google and the higher up the list it goes. Hence I really don't want to link to 'over there' because it's a source of missinformation and lies and not something I want to see climb up the google ladder.

Astonishingly - this place rates very very highly with google...clearly lots of people like us

Doug

Links to that place are not a good idea. Can people please find alternate images so I delete those links.

Doug

If one was feeling brave.... you could seperate an impactor a few days before closest approach - and then capture the ejector using aerogel and return to earth without actually stopping

Doug

COUGHAHEM FIREFOX COUGH AHEM

Doug

I knew I should have done this earlier - not as good as the official one ( but we're not privy to the proper data ) - however something is visible.

Doug

I was about to say... How do you know it's changes to the ground and not an ejecta cloud..

Then I thought -hmm - I'll do some image work myself - where's the movie...

Then went to find it and found this

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=39968

Doug

Several of the MSL proposed sites are not far from Opportunity.

The four serious MER sites were Gusev, Meridiani, Elysium and Isidis.

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/index.html

Of the MSL sites - 5 are proposed to be in the Meridiani district, and while Gusev's not there, the remaining two MER sites are.

Doug

Unfortunately not - Pluto is a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of 9/10ths of 4/5ths of nothing in terms of mass when compared to Jupiter.

AND - Pluto & Charon is the primary goal here - to comprimise the flyby geometry for any sort of gravitational assist would be a no no I would imagine.

Doug

Someone somewhere ( MM perhaps ) has commented that terrain that looks smooth in VIking imagery is typically rough at the MOC resolution - and vice versa.

Doug