I did the same - strangely the Voyager data sets dont start "0001" they start "0006" - and I'm guessing the first 5 are infact calib, checkout, and the images we're talking about.

Doug

We don't have a Mars GPS system, and we're highly unlikely to have one within a couple of decades - however some of the hazard avoidance and image interp. of the Darpa winners is fantastic and I'm hoping that the US Military doesnt keep it all to itself and some algorythms can make it through to potential planetary rovers in the future.

But - and it's a big but - and likely to be so for a very long time - those DARPA vehicles are using essentially mobile super-computers compared to anything put into space. Maybe it goes around in circles a little bit

No powerfull space-suitable CPU's available....so no high processing requirements ever made
No requirement thus no real shotcoming in the availability of more powerfull processors etc etc.

Doug

Just out of pure curiosity - what bit rate is NH chucking out at the moment, and for that matter what will it be like at Jupiter, and what are predicts for Pluto range bit rates as well?

Doug

We joked about it at the time, hoping that Enc. didn't actuall crash into the UK any time soon.

All very tongue in cheek ljk - I don't have any real problem with using analogs for scale definition, I just find some of them quite funny.

Doug

If anyone spots this mag in the UK - let me know

Doug

Hmm - looks a bit minataur with pegasus-upper-stage-ish, but I don't think it is.

Doug

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.


Any angle has to be express as a range to scoring a hole-in-one or the distance to which a dime would mark out that angle.

Power must be expressed in terms of 100w light bulbs

Anything larger than about 20 miles across must be overlayed onto the USA.

High speeds are expressed as X-minutes to cross the continent.

And then when this stuff is regurgitated by the press - any spacecraft or other piece of hardware is prefixed by it's cost.. (i.e. the $750M dollar this, or the $1.2 billion dollar that)



Doug

I believe NASA convention dictates that you have to describe the size as being a dime from X miles away, or the size of X across the continental USA

If you can get 'Tennis Court' and 'Washing Machine' in there, you win a NASA PAO Special Award.

Doug

Great news Alan! Did everything behave as expected onboard - she looked after herself?

Looking forward to those couple of pixels and a spectra or two

Doug

I've seen some photoinclinometry work from the new HiRISE stuff, and other stuff even on this forum - does any one know of any open source or freely available software that could have a hack at that?

Doug

It would have to be New Horizons...once's it's got that far

Doug

I was not refering to just the beacon, I meant the whole swath of features visible between the end of the dune field, and the rim of Victoria.

Doug

If they had more power, they could be more flamboyant with heating the filter wheel before using it. Having so little power, they try to power heaters as little as the thermal model suggests they need to to get proper operation - and sometimes they end up a little bit short. I'll double check with JB, but I'm guessing that's what happened this time around.

Doug

It's also a problem that worsens itself..

Winter = Cold
Winter = Not much solar power
Not much solar power = no much science in the day
Not much science = instruments not used much
Instruments not used much = cold instruments
cold instruments + winter = very cold instruments
very cold instruments require lots of heating power
Not much solar power....

etc etc etc

Doug

Not the first time - looks like the thermal model didn't allow for quite enough time to heat the filter wheel before using it. We talked about it in a Pancam update some time ago

Doug

Of course, with custom realtime OS's - the processing overheads for your average spacecraft are only a fraction of those for the OS's used by those 'mainstream' processors. I've not actually heard of computing performance being a limiting factor for spacecraft - but I may have missed such reports.

Doug

DOH - the circumference

Doug

The rough patches are the brackets within the middle and rear wheels that were used to bolt the thing down to the lander deck.

26cm is the wheel diameter I've heard quoted - 81.7cm is thus the diameter

I can make 9 'gaps' between them out until that turning point near the horizon on the left track, so that would be approx 7.4M

Doug

Increasing number of features visible, I'm still confused as to what we're seing.

Well - with 3ds Max (the package I use at work ) one could mock up all this and then ask 3ds max to 'bake' the textures using lighting, and thus generate a Saturn map that included the ring shadows....but I wouldn't know where to start in getting realistic shadow projection.

Doug

MPL and Beagle 2 made it to the pad....it's the hard stop at the other end that's the real challenge


Doug

I must confess Don, I've often looked at the occasional releases of your work that make it into the Themis IOTD release, and thought "ooo...pretty....let's get some data and have a go" - but the banding just got in the way every time , I had no idea you removed it by hand - truely a labour of love!!! - I thought there was simply a calibration process I was unaware of when using the PDS importer for GIMP.

http://www.dlr.de/en/Desktopdefault.aspx/t.../129_read-2681/ outlines much of the process, Jan-Peter Muller spoke to the BAA in Cambridge last year and said that the process is just about automated with a DEM, the projected colour data all processed within a few hours of reception.

I think, via on-board binning, the colour channels are 4 x 4 binned ( so typically 100m/pixel) whereas Nadir data is unbinned at 25m/pixel....ish

The only angles I've found for the instrument other than the extremes that Emily mentioned, are these from a PDF about the airborne version of HRSC...

Swath Angle 29.1°
Outer Stereo Angle ± 20.5° 520-760 nm
Inner Stereo Angle ± 12°
Nadir Channel 0°
Blue Channel - 4.6° 435-520 nm
Green Channel - 2.3° 522-592 nm
Red Channel + 2.3° 626-686 nm
IR Channel + 4.6° 780-850 nm

I'm not sure how, if at all, that matches up with the space-borne version - but I've noticed some fairly extreme miss-matching just between the IR, G and B channels when looking at harsh elevation such as at Val.Mar.

Doug

Guilty - I had that on my Nokia 3210

Doug

Not sure how many options for GIF saving you have, but you can do things like reduce the bit depth to say, 64 colours - that helps a lot.

Doug