You didn't hear us chatting about it before I hit the metaphorical record button It was hillarious"

"MY BEAUTIFUL PANORAMA....!!!"



Doug

I think we all know and acknowledge that we're just speculating. We don't know enough about what we're looking at - it's just interesting idea-hopping. Analyst- you seem to be making something out of nothing - can I suggest you just chill out on this. No one is claiming to know anything certain - it's just idle speculation because we're interested.


Doug

Having watched some of the video - I can see why you might go "wow - material" at a glance....but then over about 30 seconds, you see if breaking up through sublimation, and if you'd seen it in the past, you'd immediately recognise it as ice. A very freaky structure and behaviour though.

Doug

Please do

I did these way before I set up this place, mainly in reference to Beagle 2 ( as I'm only 5 minutes from where Beagle 2's 'PAW' was put together ).....but I'm sure you'll get a kick out of them as well......apologies to Scott Adams

Doug

Some of you may enjoy this - just grabbed it of my NTV webfeed, MCC audio loop during launch..

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...aunch_audio.mp3

Doug

It's not much to look at, but we were talking through this in the live chat section...

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im.../121_diff_3.mov

That;s the difference between each frame and the frame preceeding it - thus anything moving comes out white.

The attachment is all the appropriate frames, stacked on top of one another with a 'lighten' layer filter, then flattened and stretched. You can see the trajectory of two large pieces, and two potentially related bright points on the right wing leading edge,

Doug

(PS - I think I saw, on the screens of the MCC on a very very bad NTV feed - footage being downlinked that showed a large piece of material, with several long straps hanging from it - potentiall the object mentioned here.. http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts121/060704fossum/ )

And the OMS was on the money....cracking

Doug

When you do the maths, 888 sols is essentially the mission baseline.

Thanks for popping in Rob......now go make Skycrane work

Doug

Special thanks to Emily, as for obvious reasons she's more than a little busy at the moment!

As you can tell from Jim's last few words, he's enjoying doing these - and I'm having a blast - add them up and we've had 2hrs 41mins of Pancam-o-rama.

Kudos to Jim for working on the Monday that most people take off for a 4 day Indep. W'end

Doug

Current shopping list - but what I'm doing is going through and 'ranking' the Press Confs based on the matching press release for each one - and will cull them until I have more like 15 hours and about $250-300 worth of duplicating fees from the JPL media guys. I have to make the project financially sensible, and price it at a figure that I know will recoop my costs of getting the footage, and burning the media. Currently, I'm hoping for 50-100 sales at £20 per two disk set. It wont include ALL of the below....I'm going to cull probably the 6 least interesting items on the DVD-Rom disk. The press releases and their imagery will all be included for the peroid in question, which is now the title for this project..

"Spirit : Impact to Egress"

Now - before you start going "can't you add this video." etc etc...each clip on that list is costing between $20 and $25 - so I have to be realistic and a little more modest in the scope of this first project - keep the costs manageable. I would love to have every conference etc - but it's going to be too much footage and too great a cost. Perhaps - if this is really succesfull - I'll try and do something like it for Mars Pathfinder, and perhaps all the Pre Launch ATLO footage for MER I can find as well...who knows....depends how worthwhile this becomes

HOWEVER... I2E will include EVERY live commentary session ( including EDL, first images, egress etc ) and the key press confs ( Post landing, post first images, first Pancam postcard, MGS sees Spirit, Post Egress ) plus as much as I can afford / fit on the disc.

Format will be Region 0 NTSC DVD for Disc 1, and then PROBABLY ( but not for certain ) 360 x 240 H264 Movs AND Xvid versions on the Disc 2 DVD Rom.

Only real decision in terms of contents that I need from potential buyers is this...

On the DVD-Video, there will be the 2hrs+ of EDL commentary, plus room for one other 1hr-ish event

Which do you want that to be? The Egress commentary, the first comms pass commentary, or something else. I tried to change this threads poll but I think I borked it up...so just comment below


Doug

It's looking much much better this time isn't it - here's hoping.

Doug

Pah
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1

And two friends of mine from the world of Sim Racing who helped test the forum before I went a bit more public
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2

For the Doug Bio... http://doug.unmannedspaceflight.com/about.html

Doug

I think the mass of the paint would be a problem - when you've got big truss payloads going up, they might be fairly payload limited.

Doug

Well - that image from the JPL beacon map isn't 'out' yet....

But..

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r22_s04/im...2/R2200640.html

Solar longitude (Ls): 99.27°
Local True Solar Time: 14.49 decimal hours
Emission angle: 16.71°
Incidence angle: 45.18°
Phase angle: 58.47°
North azimuth: 92.96°
Sun azimuth: 41.85°
Spacecraft altitude: 384.57 km
Slant distance: 399.70 km
Get out your calculator.

Pancam Update 6 Trail

Black screen....SFX:Heart beat

Voice over man in deep voice "100 million miles from Earth, 4 cameras sit on the surace of Mars"

Fade in full image of mars globe, in time to heart beat background noise

Voice over man in deep voice again "Two men tackle the burning issues of......."

In time to heart beat, fade up and down of JB and DE faces lit from below, then, on cue, fade to v.close shot of Pancam Bar attop Spirit on Husband Hill..

Voice over Man "PANCAM"

Cut to shot of DE sat on his sofa, laptop on lap, headset on "...cool.... "

Voice over man "PANCAM UPDATE...coming to a Planetary Society website near you, July 3rd 2006"



There you go - a trailer.

Well - they'll be coming on NTSC VHS (otherwise what will be a bill of about 200-300$ would be become more like $1500 or more, then add on an NTSC Digi-Beta deck hire etc ) - and VHS is technically something like 240 lines anyway...A good, sharp, 320 x 240 video would be the best way of getting file size down to maximise how much I can cram into one DVD.

Of course, I could always do some NTSC DVD specials...perhaps just the live landing and first comms past as full res DVD to bolt on.

I'll always have the NTSC VHS origs to return to if I need to - but I'll be capturing at 720 x 480 MPG1 (4mbps) which is DVD quality, technically more than the quality of the VHS itself.

Hows about a two disc set. Disc 1 - DVD-Video (NTSC - region free) of Spirit landing live, + the first comms pass live, and the live egress if there's room. Then Disc 2 - DVD-ROM of 320x240 QT/Xvid/DivX/WMV/whatever of as much footage as I can get of that first two weeks..impact to egress.

Doug

Right - all done - it's a 34 minute monster - EL's out of the office today, but with a bit of luck it'll be online a bit later

Re the Pancam FOV issue - I thought I'd type up the answer, Jim did a good job though...

Anyway - it's in here
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_..._Pancam_JGR.pdf

Basically each pixel 0.273 milli rad +/- 0.003


Doug

Just looking at the H264 video that was put on Spaceflightnow.com of the recent press conf - it's 8 minutes long but only 4 meg. Consider all the 60 minute and 30 minute MER press conf's.....I could get a lot of them on at that sort of compression

Doug

That's the real bug isn't it - putting people and payload together. I'm glad they're splitting them for Ares I and V.

Well - hopefully they'll figure it safe to go tomorrow. An interesting process to go through, and one wonders how much more water/ice/foam interaction there might have been which has gone un noticed to date, and is ready to pop more foam off on the way up the hill tomorrow when it gets a bit of a shake.

It's not as bad as I was thinking, but it's still foam coming off before it even gets of the ground, and even if from just a media perspective - that's a bit of an embarassment.

Doug

Unfortunately, all the high res MOC images will have been from pretty much the same time of day (intentionally - MGS orbits at a particular 'local' time relative to the surface it's overflying) - roughly 2pm I think

Not too sure if there's anything else really to bring to the table - even Odyssey imagery's taken from pretty much the same time over day each time, 4pm - but is much lower res than the MOC imagery.

HRSC MEX imagery is lower res as well - different times of day for that, but not of much use really.

Doug

45 degrees is the point where they are stable - but to actually drive, it's something like 35 degrees - strongly dependant on surface.

Doug

Unfortunately - that format is out from the start - it is horrid in terms of quality I've found. The players are also fairly horrific pieces of software, virging on bloated spyware in some regards. I certainly wouldn't buy it if it were in Real format

DivX would be a good one actually, but as I said, I'm going to try it on some NTSC video I have here first, do a few sample movies for people to try, and see what happens.

Doug

Looking at the geometry...that would actually be a really really bad place for foam loss w.r.t. chance of hitting leading edge.

Doug

I'll certainly experiement with different formats and infact I'll provide short samples here before making a final decision.

I've bought a nice USB2 capture device that does a superb job on NTSC video from my VHS deck.

Doug

I've heard that was an urban legend, and that NASA got special dispensation to continue using the older CFC based foam.

(Press Conf now scheduled for 10 minues time - 1800GMT, 1700UT, 1300ET)
Doug