Two 30"'s is a sight to see - I had a play with that at the Apple store.

Dell have updated their 24" (1920 x 1200) - and it's not TOooo pricey now - it used to be >£1K - now it's more like £550-600

Doug

I've got one of the Zalman's in my desktop rig at the moment. Totally silent and does a great job. When I grab an E6600 Core 2 Duo rig in a few months...it'll have a Zalman cooler

Doug

Ah haa - someone else with a penchent for Zalman CPU coolers

Doug

I prefer the 'fish eye' look simply because to me, that is how the rovers see things - odd - but there you have it.

Doug

Here's one way of looking at it - very very flawed - but it compares the scale of things - very rough numbers - but relating to reality in some way..... Yes - I know the accesable or visible outcrop wasn't in the full circum. of each crater - so consider these figures to be a 'potential outcrop area' figure...


Eagle crater was about 25m diam with say 0.5m of outcrop.
Endurance was about 150m diam with 7m of outcrop
Victoria is about 700m diam with 20-40m of outcrop.

Let's calculate the total 'outcrop area' as circum * outcrop height....

Eagle - 39 sqM
Endurance- 3300 sqM
Victoria- 44000 - 88000 sqM

Yes - it may not be a view like that from the summit of Husband Hill or the rim of Barringer Crater....but it will be stunning in itself, and introduce us to a little bit of Mars that Opportunity will call home for a long time.

Doug

Given the 'neigbourhood' clause of the IAU definition - anything they find out at those ranges will not be classified as a planet.

Doug

Ah haa...someone else listened to Phil on Skepticality today

Doug

It's difficult to say when Restricted sols are due to start - they're typically a week or two out of every 4...ish

Opportunity will be on the road again probably next Mon or Tue - after they've finished the IDD work they scheduled for last weekend - but I'm just guessing.

Doug

What it looks like to me is that the mars.jpl.nasa.gov index.html file has been uploaded to the marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov subdomain - and thus all the relative image links are broken

i.e. go to marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov - then change the url to mars.jpl.nasa.gov and basically all the images just fill in.

Doug

eek - how random, you're right. It was fine a few hours ago.

Doug

I've always visited here
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Doug

Hence the point of a circumnavigation.

Imagine Victoria as a clock.

From 12 O'Clock - 6 O'Clock is 700m away.

From 3'Oclock and 9 O'clock - it's only 495m away.

As you get closer, the angle closes - but I'd have thought 4 pans from around the perimeter would allow reasonably good observations of every edge of the crater - for mapping / surveying / DEM generation.

Once we have a good DEM we can then consider slopes and sun angles etc etc - and perhaps go down one slope during one season and back up another 8-12 months later.

Doug

If you look around this forum - someone has already made a utility to convert the data released terrain wedges into a 3d format...

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2456

Doug

I think you're right on the priority and compression. And I must admit - I can't remember the last time I saw an MI image taken with a closed cover.

Doug

The Education and Outreach sessions are something I'm very interested in, and poster sessions sound like a good way of getting through a lot of subject matter in a short ammount of time.

For obvious reasosn - I want to cover a lot of Mars content - but anything I can dig up about Hayabusa is a must - and ditto Huygens. Also - anything about Cubesats or other small platforms I find fascinating (and I think Cubesats are under-spoken about )

Astronomy - I'm less likely to pay attention to - as I have very little idea what I'll be looking at or listening to

I know there's a lot of lurkers from the engineering field at UMSF (you know who you are...and I know who some of you are ) - if you're going to be attending and wouldn't mind a quick chat about what you're up to, then drop me an email ( doug@rlproject.com ) and we'll hook up and put the world to rights over some conference quality coffee.

Doug

To use the biological analogy 'Planet' is like 'Bug'

Bug can mean all sorts of things in common english - Bacteria, Virii, small insects etc etc.

In common english - Planet can mean Terrestrial, Gas Giant, KBO etc etc etc.

Perhaps there's an argument to be made for not trying to define the word 'Planet' at all.

Doug

Thanks to the efforts of Emily and Jen at TPS....I am now registered as Press for the '06 International Astronautical Congress in Valencia.

The 2nd announcement contains the most information about the line up for the week
http://www.iac2006.com/pdf/2nd_Announcement.pdf

However Monday AM is going to be a highlight. The heads of NASA, ESA, RSA, JAXA, CNSA ISRG and CSA will all be there.

If anyone spots a particular session they want to hear about - let me know as I'm trying to schedule my week as well in advance as I can!

Cheers
Doug

Well - Endurance was almost 16m deep according to the published DEM

I'm expecting Victoria to be somewhere between 35 and 45m deep - just guessing.

Doug

Thanks for the heads up Jason - always nice to see a science team stepping up to the plate and spreading the wealth

Full disclosure is always appreciated - we have quite a few members who for one reason or another wish to remain comparatively anon. - and that's fine - but it's alwyas nice to know exactly where someone is coming from.

Doug

That's what they got.



Doug

You would have to design something with the capacity of the VAB to lift the ET, the SRB's, and then the shuttle itself all on the pad, and indeed on both pads. There is also a lot of work in retracting the undercarrage, getting the Shuttle vertical and attaching it to the other hardware.

Makes more sense to build it all at the VAB if you ask me.

Doug

I'm just confused now

Doug

Again - I'm left wanting to use words that would cause me to ban myself from the forum

Once we know how the IDD's doing....we'll do some science and then get a move on

Doug

Indeed - even the name 'dwarf' is inappropriate as the clause which puts things into that catagory ( clean neigbourhood ) has little to do with size.

Earth is more of a dwarf compared to Jupiter than Ceres is comapred to Earth.

It's just a very very broken definition.

Doug