There wouldn't have been schedules of driving and untargetted remote obs if they were rebooting into new software...I think.

Doug

6 Thumbs and 2 subframes from 902, nothing on 903 ( the drive sol ) and nothing so far for 904 ( looks like untargetted remote obs )

I'll give it a few hours till 'plenty' past the time when one would expect the 904 PM Odyssey pass to have come down - which will be getting-into-work-time at Cornell, and drop Jim an email to ask if there's somethign going on.

I don't think it's an Odyssey safing event ( no troubleshooting or de-safing uplinks in the Odyssey log, and Spirit still producing images ). I don't think it's a data pipeline issue on the ground ( again, Spirit stuff coming through ) - so perhaps they had some uplink trouble with Oppy and she safed or something or other...who knows....hopefully we'll find out later!

Doug

I was hoping you would pop in here MC

Doug

I was thinking of something along the lines of feeding forward for future missions

What would be the suggestions for someone designing cameras to fly on a future mission

What suggestions for operational protocol and commanding would you have

What ideas for outreach and press engagement would you suggest....

Phoenix and MSL camera's would fit into that general theme - so I'll see what I can do

Doug

5 days - sounds like one thorough IDD campaign to me.

Doug

Boys...

Behave.



Doug

There is no suggestion that they are driving to Victoria yet - none at all. There is work to be done at Beagle first.

Doug

Great work from both of you - it's a 4-times-a-year-highlight flicking through Dan's new release in MMB

Doug

Indeed -there is intended investigation of the things around Beagle before heading off again - RN - you've jumped the fun in a serious way

Doug

Great work - some of that Commanche imagery is just sublime.

Doug

31 months of Spirit
>30 months of Oppy

61 months > 5 years

Doug

I like how much of the tracks you can see...it'll be nice in colour when it's down...looks like a sort of 'Lion King Lite' format - 2 frames tall, with extra frames for Beagle.

Doug

Bruce Banerdt, project scientist for the mission, said team members were looking forward to collecting more science data as a result of having more electrical power. NASA recently agreed to extend the Mars Exploration Rover mission for another year starting in October.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20060807.html

Oh bloody hell...another 12 months

Doug

Well - no night time UHF passes ( Oppy has to deep sleep to save that 100Whr/sol ) - but they saved up on spare flash memory to take the whole thing...it'll come down..it'll just take a while.

As of now - it's all been taken - and tomorrow is a drive sol.



Doug

I'm spending my days looking after this place and setting up my new office so that when the sad day comes...(i.e. we wave goodnight to the rovers) I can begin in earnest to do them justice on paper.

I also hope that that means I will be able to include a HiRISE derived route map from which people will be able to cross reference and understand the geography and terrain.

Doug

People got very bored of Apollo very quickly - and there have been people living in space near continuously for two decades....and very few actually care. Imagine how much they'll care once it could be classified as 'routine'.

Doug

I THINK...the Beagle Pan is a 'go'. A full 360 from our current location, L256 and R2..with L2/R2 being a higher priority so likely to come down more quickly. Here's a bunch of the L2's in situ courtesy of MMB.

Malmar - all the things you mention cost money. Where's it going to come from? I'd rather they made sure they could afford another mission extension..save every dime they can to run these things longer etc etc.

HOWEVER...

Some of the things you mention are already out there...

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...true_color.html
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...alse_color.html

not to mention MMB putting together all the mosaics and colour images. Calibration takes a lot of time and effort - to throw those images straight onto the web would be unrealistic, and not to mention jumping the gun w.r..t scientific process and the perogative of the PI's to do science with the data before anyone else.

Much of what you describe was also covered in the Maestro package which was a public version of the planning software used by JPL - but to highlight my point, they stopped releasing new data for it at the end of the primary mission because of the money.

For those of us who care about these things - the data is out there to make the things you talk of and between us we're just about getting there. For those that don't care.....well....they don't care - no ammount o f added goodies would change that imho.

Doug

Ahh - that's an all together different kettle of fish - didn't know that was the bigger picture you were looking at.

THAT challenge is even harder in that regard because look how hard it is to get people to acknowledge the damage we're doing to the environment !! Try and explain that at some point in the future, the Earth will no longer be habitable....and you'll just get 'huh'.

Doug

The problem is, and this is the very simple, very basic core of the entire topic.

Some people just don't care.

To us, that makes no sense. But I'm afraid it doesn't have to. I don't care about football and I struggle to understand some people do....but they do. I don't really want someone ramming football down my throat to try and make me care about it...because I just don't care. When it's on the news ( and it is..a lot ) I just don't take any notice.

Now - we might say "but that's just football...we're talking about a DIFFERENT PLANET with ROVERS taking PICTUREs...don't you understand how AMAZING that is?".... but I'm afraid you can just swap the words around and it's equally valid "but that's just space...we're talking about the end of season PLAYOFFS we might get back in the PREMIERESHIP and play in EUROPE". I've seen the same arguments made in a few fields on interest....but rarely do people admit that at a root level, the majority of people just don't care about what we're interested in - and no matter how you butter it, how you show it, what you say or the way you say it...they will forever not give a damn about it.

Are those people wondering why I don't 'get' football? I hope not..

I've given talks to astronomy societys and you can tell that almost all the audience love the subject matter and understand the implications and the wonder of it all.

I've given talks to schools and you can tell that most of the audience, 13-18, don't really care. Some do however, and it is very very worth while taking the time to engage with them, instill some knowledge and enthusiasm within them. But the rest, and indeed the majority of the public who don't give two hoots about space in general....I wouldn't describe them as a 'lost cause' - but I don't think we should expect to be able to change them either.


Doug

So why didn't the fire Space Ship One from the ground then

Doug

Another couple of weeks I'd have thought. You have to appreciate that instead of having an excess over survivability power of around 750 Whr/s per sol for science and mobility, that excess is near zero currently - so they have to do things very very very slowly.

Doug

Same size, roughly, as the Lion King panorama.22780x4496

Doug

We will probably get that - that's the baseline..we had it on getting to Husband Hill for instance....I asked what MORE would you have them do.

Doug

I would have thought that as well - you can get quite a lot of crap getting thrown around during a GEM or SRB jett - which might get in the way of the signal. I'd have thought if there were a moment during the launch of a rocketcam that were ITAR sensitive they wouldn't show the whole thing live or wouldnt install them at all.

Doug