Let's just say Mars has been fairly 'samey' in terms of condition for...shall we say 3GY?

And the air, because it's so thin, can move an average particle of soil perhaps 1cm per year

Over that 3GY - that soil particle could have travelled 30,000 km

Doug

Probably because it would throught STS scheduling out

Doug

Arrival has already been defined as the first sol during which the rover is at the site & drive number where the 'big' pancam sequence for that target is taken.

Doug

Has anyone been able to find something better than these figures?

Doug

Stardust's Navigation Camera optics include a periscope with a Mirror - so yet....it is mirrored

To put it mildly Ted...how the hell did you do that

Doug

They have to upload ALL of it before they can reboot into the new flight software Compared to the total size of the flash, it's not that big.

Doug

They're using HGA to UPLINK TO the rover...not downlink from it It's the simplest way to get the data up to the rover as quickly as possible with the least latency as possible. For UHF relay uplink, they have to have the data ready to go at the Odyssey uplink before the overflight, which can be some time.

Doug

Surely the process of being ejected, flying at very high speed through the atmosphere to cover a few thousand miles...that's going to melt anything of that sort isn't it?
Doug

Actually - the current interpretation of Moore's law is that processor density will double every 18 months. People read that as a double of CPU performance every 18 months, but that's not true.

Doug

Ahh - I misread 'more' as 'most'

iirc - it was 3 essentially 'full' days of DFE uplink for the uploads back in the sol 80ish timeframe - so you're right, plenty left to go.

Doug

The software upload is complete for Opportunity ( check the JPL site )

Doug

A servicing mission hasn't been set in stone yet - this next shuttle mission is still aprt of return-to-flight and there's still some way to go until they'll be happy flying the thing without ISS as a safehaven.

Doug

I confess...I've driven every functional RRGTM station I could find - and even made a little mosaic from one of them (long lost...but I might try and make another one )

Doug

(PS - attached one from the Davis Creek Elementary site....the TPS one worked for a bit, then the top half of the interface wouldn't refresh If I can get it working again, I'll do a pan from there as well....but I have to say, the calibration process is shocking )

Actually the CPU's in most modern spacecraft are more like 1/10th the performance of a Pentium 3....and what's more, there's not much requirement for anything better.

Now - you could argue that it's cyclical - the need for more on orbit computing power has not arisen because people have programmed for what is available and that's tended to be 'enough'. Also - spacecraft are tending to become little centres for distributed computer, with each instrument having it's own processor dedicated to the aquisition, compression and storage of it's own data - it leaves the CPU of most spacecraft doing the comparatively simple task of attitude control, data management, and streaming stuff through to telecoms etc.

I'm sure if there were something 10x faster availabel for on orbit computing, it would be utilised...but the fact that such a processing system isn't in place perhaps suggests it isn't really that necessary.

You drop the bloated OS, the graphics and so forth, dedicate the use of your CPU to on orbit computing, and actually, the mathematics behind a spacecraft are comparatively simple.

Doug

My current PC has a floppy drive that's more than a decade old.....so basically I've just been upgrading ever since

Doug

I was at the BAA Exhibition meeting in Cambridge today....and most agreed - and many even turned off at the point the astrologer first appeared - totally and utterly inappropriate in every way.

Tyson was quite funny ( I don't agree with his point of view ), but Alan was great as ever, and infact the shots from the base of the Atlas were indeed stunning.

Doug

Septic tank...


LUXURY


etc

Doug

But the writing of a sequence for Sat will occur today - so whilst there may not be much happening at JPL over the weekend ( and you are unduly harsh in that respect ) - both rovers will be busy.

Doug

It's not the position of the orbiting relay ( and they use Odyssey, not MGS ) it's that the Martian Sol has driften so out of sync with the Earth Day that the two don't match up and the rover data from Sol 1 isn't available in time to prepare the commands for Sol 2...so they can't command tomorrow based on todays data....

However - they will have 'thursdays' data to work with today...so they can program tomorrow to be a driving sol.

Doug

Actually - that's not quite fair - Sojourner and MER were both able to be given a target point, and make progress toward that target point, and would avoid obsticles in the way, navigate around them and return to the target point. There was one great example where Spirit actually gave up and drove backwards around an obsticle early on.

So yes - you couldn't say to Spirit "go to the top of Husband Hill " from the rim of Bonneville..it still requires people in the loop on a daily basis - BUT - it's a lot smarter than you give credit for really.

Doug

HRSC's all right

Doug

NOW we're talking


Doug

Having chatted to him a fair bit, not once has he failed to credit his team and those that have helped them...publishers are fickle sods, so like I said, don't judge the book by it's cover...they just wanted something snappy, if inappropriate, for the cover.

Doug

There are limits on the type of file that can be attached, but in terms of image formats...

JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF are all allowed extensions - what sort of file were you trying to attach?

Doug

Bloody hell Don, I don't know how you get such smooth data out of those released files!