Thing is - everyone will have evolving theories on what we're seing. To say "MAKE CHOICE NOW" is a bit harsh - and not how this sort of thing should work really.

Doug

If you like DEM's..
ftp://ftpflag.wr.usgs.gov/dist/pigpen/mars/usgs/topo/moc_na/

Doug

I wasnt advocating the dispatching of probes to other stars, I was suggesting it's better to do a systematic study of them from here, to find out what sort of planets there are, how many there are, getting some spectra of them - find out how many habitable places there might be...hell, find out how many habitable places there in our own back yard might be a good start. We don't even know how many times life started here...and we're trying to find it out there?

Doug

Utterly brilliant stuff.

I scrolled my way around the mobility data for all of Opportunity (I still don't understand how they got back from Pan Pos 2 to Karatepe before going in ) - and actually, it's not too bad, a few 'burps' in the data

Not sure if it would be any use, but there is new data from OSU that puts each site and drive into an accurate global frame...

http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/anteam/merb/merb.htm

I'm off to bribe my ISP so I can download thousands of XYLs

Doug

I saw the very same thing on a flight from East Midlands to Malaga, I think possibly Didcot Powerstation was to blame.

Doug

The fence is quite painfull - but I'm staying right on it.

Doug

I am not against the actual process of hunting for life 'out there' far far FAR from it, but I fail to see the potential benefits in basically, standing in the solar system with a hand cupped behind one ear.

Call it CIOESPFH (arguably the greatest acronym ever made )- Catalogue and investigation of extra solar planets for habitability. That's what I think is the sensible course of action if we're going to realistically find out who our neigbours are, or if we even have any. Maybe that's still 'Seti' - but just a different way of doing it.

It's an embarrasment that we don't know what numbers to put into Drake's equation...you can quite comfortably get anything from 10^-10 to 10^10 without even touching the boundries of feasability. Let's spend money filling out the blanks.

Doug

Forget the voting - I think Phil and Tim Parker should arm wrestle for it

Doug

1) SHAME ON YOU

2) One of Stu's poems is in there.

DOug

Thought I'd have a bit of a play - and to be honest, I'm sure these images have been presented a thousand times before - but pretty pictures are pretty pictures

This is from LO3, two frames stitched from their scanning process.

Doug

I've got a few of the interesting Tif's coming down - I might have a play later.

Doug

6.6 Megish...
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...nd_dem_phil.wmv

Not happy with the compression though - I'll try a H264 Mov at 720p and half 720p later

Doug

And - check out this months Planetary Report

Doug

Ah - it's just about the Beacon...put me down as don't know then. I thought this was about the feature below it - what looks like the near side slope.

Doug

Ahh - so Path offset is the number of site's of mobility data that are shown before and after the site or sites you've added! I was trying to think of a word to describe it - but I can't

One thing - have you tried some of the XYL's and RSL's from Sol 1? The ones that are only 256 x 256....it just crashes when attempting to add the file for me.

Doug

You're trying to make something out of nothing to be honest. All software ever written could have had another 20 years of testing. This forum software needs it. Win XP needs it. The firmware of our Sky+ Box needs it.

In the case of spacecraft - you have a budget of time, a budget of money. You do as much testing, as much intelligent design as you can within those constraints and hope it's enough. Sometimes you learn a lesson not in as much testing as you can...but the hard way. The lesson is learnt, you fix it, you move on.

I'm sure the software team sit in their coffee breaks dreaming of a massive project for a self-manageing highly autonomous, bug free uber-release of flight software....but realistically...given that they have limits on what they can do...it's not going to happen.

Doug

I used the Ascii files with Surfer, but then 3dem with the bin files to generate a Terragen mesh from which I made a Tif which I used as a displacement map

There's what, 250k points on the End one, 7.29 million in the Eag one - so it's 30 times more data than the End one...not suprising it's a bit big.

I wondering if perhaps, just perhaps this little easter egg of data is in response to the email I sent to Prof Li a few months ago asking if he could do elev maps for us nutters

Attached - the dem at the best res I've got it into 3ds, and the res I actually use it at
Doug

A proportion, yes. Sizeable..not really. The search engines are intelligent enough to search through the 'lo-fi' version of the forum which has no imagery and so is one hit per page. Per visit - that automatically makes it 10% the size of a human. I actually have stats on the regularity and size of bot visits - but that's for another thread, another time.


Doug

I think we could go for the Italian-American style of a brief man hug with two back slaps. You have to wear a leather jacket for full effect though.

Doug

What would be good is to be able to present the mobility traces without any wedges at all - I know it might seem odd, but I'd like it

Doug

Obviously there are artifacts in the Endurance DEM - so I've used a mesh density half that of the actual DEM to help cull some of that - after all there is a disclaimer on the page saying that once they get a chance to sit down and catch their breath they'll get these tidied up etc. Who knows...we might end up with one of the Southern Basin, or Victoria Crater

I think probably the most appropriate 'res' for something like this lies between the two densities...something like 1 million points is essentially 'plenty'

Doug

Good effort Ted - I think it compares favorably with Jim'n'Co...

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...t/superres.html

Doug

Seti has nothing more to do with exploring the universe than looking at a photo of Everest has to do with climbing it. I'd rather we made a systematic survey for habitable exoplanets than just sat waiting for the phone to ring.

We have no data with which to make a judgement as to if it's fundamentally futile, or destined for rapid success. I'd rather we did the science to fill in more of the blanks of Drakes equation rather than just assumed there was something valid at the end of it.

Being a member of TPS, I pay for Seti as it happens, and do not begrudge it at all, nor Optical Seti - because there's every chance that spinoff science may occur in both cases that has nothing to do with SETI whatsoever - for example Seti@Home spawned a plethora of similar systems for medical research, and indeed Stardust@Home. Optical Seti has produced some excellent new chip technology and the data that it generates could offer some interesting studys into variable stars and so on.

It's simply a case of opinion - you're clearly very pro Seti - I'm not. Nothing wrong with that.

Doug

I've begun to make some progress - it's getting quite interesting Some piccies of Endurance later perhaps

Doug

What happened to scientific curiosity, exploration and boldness?

Easy...

Their budget got cut.

Ask Joe Public if he wants to spend vast swathes of money looking through a haystack for a needle that we may or may not be able to detect and which may or may not even exist - and he'll say no - it's a waste of money - and you have to admit, it's a perfectly valid point of view.

The finding of life in this solar system is clearly an important goal within space agencies across the world - but it costs an enormous ammount of money so it has to be done frustratingly slowly.

Finding life elsewhere - imho SETI is going to come up blank however long you try. The maths just doesnt add up as far as I'm concerned. The haystack too large, the needle too small, our eyes not powerfull enough.

However - programs such as TPF, Lisa etc - programs dedicated to finding the sorts of bodies around the sorts of stars at which would be familiar to us - again, are interesting and worthwhile exercises. Let's search in a sensible way - lets get that first spectra of an earth like body around a sun like star and find what's going on. Carefully, systematically, intelligently looking for interesting things 'out there'.

But at the end of the day - go and say to 1000 members of the general public "We need to search, pure and simple" - they're going to ask why...what good would it do them? And they have a point, they really do.

SETI may be a bold and important and honourable thing to some, but to many it's just pointless nonsense.

Doug