I've been trying to figure out where the bus would have ended up - and I think actually - (after one considers that it's such a complex structure with such a variety of materials that it is essentially impossible to calculate this) it would have mostly burnt up, with some remaining debris falling short of the landers.

Consider the size of the cruise stage compared to its weight. The MER entry capsule was actuall quite 'dense' so it would want to push it's way through the air for longer (i.e. more kinetic energy per unit of drag )

BUT - there are parts of the cruise stage ( fuel tank, thruster clusters ) that would have survived much of entry I'm pretty sure...but until they 'fell off' the cruise stage ( which when they're bolted on strong enough to survive launch and a 60rpm spinup is going to be quite 'late' in the entry ) they would have slowed down quite quickly with the rest of the cruise stage. Thereafter they'd probably have just dropped to the surface.

All this however - constrains the debris in the line of flight - (i.e. down the long axis of the landing ellipse - roughly East-West) - so I can't imagine the cruise stage debris being >6km (and out of the landing ellipse ) to the South

BUT - all that is pure speculation. If there WERE any cruise stage debris, its impact ( typically objects hit the martian surface at 200mph..ish) would have created the sort of ejecta we saw for the heatshield impacts both at Meridiani and Gusev - both highly visible in MOC imagery.


Doug

Now THAT




is genius

Doug

It'd have to be expensive ( it costs quite a lot to get footage from JPL ) - something like £20 a copy. It's a 'autumn' project I think

Doug

Well - you could look at it 1000 ways, but I have no doubt whatsoever that ITAR would restrict any detailed transfer of information in some way...but there's also another factor

ESA "Hi, we're building a rover, we want some help in the design stage"
JPL "Sure, give us a really big fat chunk of money and we'll show you how to do it"
ESA "Oh- you want money. Umm. Arrr...that's European Tax Payers money and they'd rather we spent that in Europe on European engineers and technology"

Or...

EU Public "Why did they give all that money to pay for American stuff...why can't we build it ourselves here?"

Now of course, you could then argue "hmm - we spent all that money and it didn't work, why didn't we get the JPL guys to help build this thing" retrospectively...

Part legal, part political. I would love the EU just to go to JPL and order one 'off the shelf' for a sensible figure - but to be honest - building the rover isn't the problem.. EDL is.

Doug

I'd rather make 30m more progress to Victoria than have a 30m baseline for fairly useless imagery at this distance

Doug

I imagine they've read the book - but seing as the most primitive drawings of the MER design were metaphorically ripped out of my hands by Cal-Tech Lawyers, I very much doubt there could or would be much feed-forward of informationa cross the pond.

Doug

I was looking at the price of getting all the early MER live coverage and dumping it to DVD as a small commercial exercise - I wonder how well it would sell.

Doug

We don't know if the saw message is on the back of the HGA. Personally - I think it probably is.

Everything else about the rovers is identical. The lego characters on the landers left behind at Eagle and west of Bonneville however, are different - you'll have to visit TPS's website to find out how

Doug

Well - at sunrise you'd have the east exterior slope and western interior slope illuminated. At sunset, the western exterior slope and eastern interior slope

Unfortunately, we're coming from the north so we won't have that facing-east-at-sunset-with-sun-behind-us illumination we had at Endurance.

HOWEVER - a time lapse of Pancam imagery centered on VC would be interesting.

Doug

OK - this is tragic...making colour mosaics from the tracking thumbnails

Anyway - it shows the extent of the sequence.

Given that we're stretching a few tiny pixels into a whole swath of detail... I wouldn't say anything is 'clear' yet.

It's still very confusing really - why do we only see an elevated area for half of what should be the near rim. What do we see where there isn't an elevated area. etc etc etc

I swing toward what we see being the near rim, but it's a whole lot of infering from a few stretched pixels.

Doug

I think we'd argue that one to death - because it's basically a pixel or three - and I can imagine someone arguing that those pixels had a contribution from near and far rims together as the crater resolves itself.

Doug

I'm not sure what's going on on the left (I don't think we have the imagery to tell yet) but the lump to the right is the near rim, I'm increasingly sure of it. The features on it are orientated 90 degrees out from what they would be for far rim features.

Doug

Someone's been watching QI

Doug

Panic not - my co-admin Nico (Nix) is from Belgium as well ( Ghent )

I'm not sure how far you're thinking of taking all this - but the ability to export to a common 3D format ( )would be a hugely exciting feature

Doug

LIke Zorro - he strikes...and he is gone.

Doug

I've figured out why I think it's the near side of the crater.

The features are running down and to the right - which is what I'd expect if we were looking at the western half of the near side rim because of the slope. If they were on the far rim, then I'd expect them to be running down and to the left.

Just my 2p's worth - but hey - we'll only find out in a couple O months

Doug

Name the LV

Ah haaa - Upper stage of a Delta 2 by XSS-10
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/46/1
http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/reshor/rh-ss03/sp-xss.html

Umm - because I think what we're seing is hte near rim and not the far rim. I might very well be wrong - but at the moment I think we're seing the near side of the crater - not the far side.

Doug

Well - we had 'Genesis' and that wasn't very popular.

I think names with any hint of religion are probably best avoided, when there are so many names in the world, why pick one that might offend.

Doug

I went to Mt Teide twice as a teenager - it's an astonishing, barren, beautiful place - the plateau on the top of Tenerife from which the final tip of the volcano spikes upwards.....

Anyway - I spotted this vid at the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4767403.stm

Doug

Well - I'm not one for fence sitting ( get a sore backside doing that ) - I don't think it's the far rim, I think it's the near rim

We'll find out soon enough
Doug

I feel the need to use words that I would have to ban myself for...such as

Holy .... that's ........ amazing

Dare one mention words like release...sourceforge....public consumption...doug WANT

Doug

Actually - I was given a Tamagochi (you know the ltitle electonic pet things) - I killed it by putting it in the freezer overnight

Doug