No word yet

They'll go through to the point at which they'd restart the count I'd imagine. (t-9mins)

Doug

1926 GMT (3:26 p.m. EDT)

"I don't hold a lot of hope," ascent flight director Steve Stich says about the weather.

(from www.spaceflightnow.com )

Doug

VERY cool

Doug

Hi All,

Get Java, get signed in to the forum, and I'll see you all tonight in the 'Live Chat' section of the forum ( see top right - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...utocom=chatpara ) - mainly because I think we could manage coordinating watching STS if it's clear after launch.

Only a 40% chance of a go for the liftoff with the weather, but they've got a go to start fueling....but hey - 100% chance of quality chatting

I'll be in there from about 1800UT (1900 BST) Launch is set for 1948UT ( 2048GMT) I think.

Doug

Ahh - no - I said no TPS naming contest ( or the poor thing would be called Pixel or Hephaestus or something )

Doug

For the second time in two days - if I wrote the words that came out of my mouth when seing a post, I'd have to actually ban myself..

Let's just say "Holy...............that's.................amazing"

Yeah - I think I can get away with that. Nice one James. You know what's brilliant - to see how you've come on from your first mosaics, to something like that...utterly astounding

Doug

Isn't it amazing - we are so close to Victoria Crater now, almost the range of Eagle to Endurance....but we can essentially see NOTHING of it.

Doug

I'm not sure of the actual units, but a high number is murkier, dustier air.

Doug

Perhaps the cunning technique that would have been used with Beagle 2 for the first couple of sols.....a parabolic mirror with a single camera under it.

Make it a 2k x 2k CCD, and a good sharp mirror - and you'd have the equiv of something like a 1000 x 500 pixel 360 degree panorama. You also could seperate the camera electronics from the actual field of few - tuck it down in the body of the spacecraft, shielded, looking up through some think optics to the mirror at the top.

Doug

Well - dust-allowing, there's lots of sky colour samples - part of the sundial is a little mirror

Also - there's lots of sky observations and the genius of Slinted + midnight mars browser puts them into place...I'll do some screenies over this w'end if I remember!

Doug

The Mars exhibition I saw at the Manchester Museum thingie was good - it has a little cylindical unit with a load of dust on the bottom, a clear lid, and a fan you could turn - and in the space of just 5 minutes, the entire dune system totally changed....not to mention sand slips on the sides of dunes that looked JUST like the sort of thing some say is water seepage on crater walls

We need an aerodynamicist....given a sphere of radius 0.1mm - what is velocity required at 1000mbar to produce the same drag as 20m/sec at 15mbar

I've seen various equations, some have the velocity squared, some don't.

Doug

I visited this data early on, but there's 600+ sols worth now, so I've revisited it

I thought it would be interesting to comapre Tau values form both rovers at the same time - so to that end I added 21 to the sol number of each Opportunity tau observation to bring it in to line, within a sol, of Spirit observations.

What does it show? (remember to subtract 21 to get ACTUAL Opportunity Sol numbers)

Well - both rovers experience a large increase from around Sol 350-370, but for Opportunity it peaked briefly significantly higher. Spirit experienced two local events, 380 and 420, Opportunity a long, small peak around 450 and another, shorter one at 480, and the share the big spike at 510ish.

Interesting stuff anyway - when you match them up, time wise ( i.e. +21 on MERB sol numbers ) they match quite closely.

Doug

What I find most strange is criticism of writing a Book. Roving Mars and Jim's forthcoming title will both do enormous things to outline the achievments of MER second only to the Imax movie in terms of outreach ability.

Doug

What we need is a 16 mbar wind tunnel, with 10m/s wind and a pile of dust in it.

Doug

Yes - that's Spirit's launch - it's an MER set of logos on the side, the non-heavy GEM's on the launch vehicle and it's in the daytime ( Oppy was at night) Strange short shot of a Saturn V launch in there for half a second - very odd.

Doug

I've talked about Rover cleaning in Rover talks Certainly it'll get mentioned.


Doug

Billy - if you took the time to look at all the things Steve has taken the time to do (you've done that right? you've seen the lectures he's done that are online, you've watched all the press conferences, the radio show appearences etc etc...I assume you've consumed and calculated every single iota of outreach he's done to establish that he's not doing enough) , such as the hour long interview we conducted last autumn...you would hear his comments regarding another book.

I've met him only once. He gave a lecture to the BAA in Cambridge last year that the BAA president described as the best lecture he had ever seen. Steve had crossed 15 time zones in 5 days to be there - he was Spirit SOWG chair three days before - flew to Washington for a press conference, then flew to the UK for the DPS meeting. The guy should have done the lecture and then retired to his hotel for a well deserved break before the busy DPS week thereafter. The guy had industial strength jet lag and a HUGE week of presentations and science meetings ahead of him - and he was as relaxed, friendly, interesting, exciting as anyone could possibly be. He'd cleared the entire evening to have a chat with me so that we could share as much MER info as possible via the MP3 and writeup that I did.

Just because it's a governmental operation, it does not render every member of that team your own info-slave.

Personally - your suggestion that they should somehow be banned from writing books about it, your general attitude about them stinks NO mission has had the outreach efforts of MER. NO team has worked THIS LONG and THIS HARD to get information out to the public...MER has TOTALLY REDEFINED what a mission can do in terms of outreach and education.and you STILL have complaints. I have words I'd like to use, but I'd end up banning myself for using them. You should start showing them some damn respect.

Doug

(PS - a further critical post from BillyMER, despite a suspension for an utterly disrespectful attitude in the past, combined with a clear lack of understand or acknowledgement of the work the MER team have done has resulted in him being removed from the forum. Criticism toward those who do not pull their weight is justified and welcome. A total lack of respect and unjustified criticism, despite being asked to refrain, is not)

LOL- it's an excellent MER model...but with two arms....and called Beagle 2.....how random

Good lander base with egress aids as well - clearly Opportunity as it's straight forward off the lander

Looking forward to it though - should be cool!!!!

Doug

It's going to be unmanned....currently on the menu...

SOHO Recovery
Galileo HGA
Spirit Sol 18 + wheel lock
Opportunity Arm Heater + Steering Actuator
MER 'chutes and 'bags
Genesis
Stardust Camera
Hugyen Relay and mission redesign
MPL
MCO
Mars Observer ( which gave birth to so many missions thereafter )
MEX Marsis antenna and SRC for HRSC
Hayabusa for sure - and given that I've only got an hour typically - that'll be plenty


Nothing too old ( because frankly - I wann't even alive at the time)

Dec 16th in London
http://britastro.org/baa/component/option,...y,16/Itemid,26/

Doug

The sooner England are out, the sooner the media here can stop pretending we actually have any chance of winning the thing and life can return to normality

Doug

UPDATED

About, Links and Talks all brought a little up to date

Doug

Panic not - there is progress

Not going to happen. Ever. Want a place to talk about manned spaceflight in a major way, make one yourself. The manned spaceflight section here has been THIS CLOSE (fingers close together) to getting culled, because it's the place where 90% of the arguments, flame wars and resultant bans and mod activity have to happen.

There are plenty of places that disucss manned spaceflight...but very few that do what this place does.

Doug

I was ploughing through some ACS / WFPC2 Jupiter observations, one sequence includes Ganymede appearing from behind the limb of Jupiter and there's little or none of the distortion I was thinking might be cool - but I have no doubt that some of these Hendrick moments will be cool - I really loved that Cassini move of Io's glowing voclanology

Doug