Certainly nothing more challenging than Payson, there'll be routes up to it's other side I'm sure.

Just out of pure curiosity, I found the orig. data for the Ol.Mons MEX image - this is the full res colour image. Obviously, the ESA releases are the higher res ( typically 4x higher res, sometimes a lot more ) ND channel 'colourised' by the lower res colour data attached.

Doug

I've just found that 'Oki' make some fairly large pan paper - A4 width of course, but 900mm long

Doug

Well - I know that he started with the Mars 2001 animation, which then moved on into the very early MER animation, and thereafter the MER animation we know now.

Then, he did the Contour animation, I'm fairly sure the Deep Impact animation is his ( it has his style certainly ), and the Phoenix Animation is obviously going to be derived from the old Mars '01 animation sequence and rushes of that are at the Phoenix website

However - I've not heard anything about an MSL animation yet.

I've swopped a few emails with Dan in the past, not only is he an animation genius, he's also a damn nice chap as well!

Doug

I went totally nuts...down to the local camera store, and splashed out on some slightly better binos...

Some 7 x 50's..

FOR FIVE POUNDS

Very good pair actually, clearly very old, 2nd hand, but built like the proverbial masonry outhouse. I'll try and spot these damn things again tonight

Doug

I'm a big fan of the blue marble collection - it's fabulous work with the data sets to produce some excellent material.

To say it's an animators god send is a massive understatement

Doug

"The incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form."

I don't see anything wrong with calling it MSL - I really don't. It's descriptive, unoffensive etc.

Doug

No - HiRISE is off until aerobraking is finished.

Doug

No - I meant 5 fingers....i.e. a hand with 5 fingers and 1 thumb.

Doug

Superstition and things of that nature were HUGE during Newtons time - for instance people would draw a 5 fingered hand on the wall - because anyone who HAD 5 fingers was declared a witch and a witch could just knock on your door and demand accomodation...just inside the door at Woolesthorpe is scratching on the wall of a 5 fingered hand so if such an event were to transpire they could say "sorry - already got one staying here, look - that's her hand"

To have dismissed superstition and even the belief that God was all powerfull and all controlling in the late 1600's would have been considered very very strange indeed. The plague would have played a major part in life in Britain during the pivotal period of Newtons life and superstition, alchemy, witchcraft etc were rife in that period.

Lest we forget, Galileo (who's life story is of course highly exagerated w.r.t. house arrests and torture and the like) died just lest than a year before the birth of Newton, and I have no doubt that Newton would have felt a need to 'coform' to the 'system' for fear of being silenced, arrested or worse.

It's a common symptom of intellectual brilliance - strangeness.

Just because he wasn't a model citizen, hit achievments are not to be underestimated - and his heavy mercury doses because of his alchemy work could well explain much of his behaviour.

Doug

ljk - Stu knows that, which is why he said 'ducks' afterwards as a metaphor for the incoming slap from me, as I'm usually the one who shouts "OI - IT WASN'T BLOODY DUST DEVILS"

Doug

I posted on TPS's Members forum in response to someone basically asking what the hell ITAR was and why we should care - I replied...

Well - I don't know the specifics of ITAR, but as I understand it, it's an array of rules dictated by legislation intended to prevent foreign countries aquiring advanced military technology or hardware from US manufacturers. One can understand the motive and justification for such laws given the global military climate...however...

The problem is, the legislation gets in the way of totally innocent 'civilian' activities, things outside the scope of the military. For instance, the legislation makes it very hard for the people working on a Canadian instrument aboard the 2007 Phoenix Mars Lander to get the information they need to control their instrument from the spacecrafts computer...i.e. the hardware and technology of the spacecraft is under the remit of ITAR regulation - so they spacecraft engineers can't share information about how it works and how to use it to the Canadian team who want to do nothing more sinister than control their instrument.

If you search for ITAR on Deborah's blog about Phoenix, you'll see first hand information about this.
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/features/we...eborah_bass.php

So - what does all this mean? Well, why would foreign engineers and scientists want to get involved with US led missions when this legislation makes it so hard to trade the information they need to cooperate? If ITAR had been in place in the late '80s and early '90s, it would be hard to imagine the Cassini Huygens cooperation ever being possible, or even more simple projects like Ulysses or SOHO. ITAR legislation needs to be modified to allow information for projects like these to me traded without limitation. It's easy to see why the advanced technology of spacecraft might be considered to be of a 'military' type - but sometimes panic-legislation can be too broad and unspecific for it's actual requirements, as is the case here.

The irony is, of course, that those who want to trade in military hardware for malicous purposes will do so despite any legislation that might be created.


Doug

Just to give a sense of time and scale...let's say the wind can move an average spherule 3mm per year - less than it's own size. Over 3.5 billion years of the current Martian geological period - that would equate to 10,500 km travelled

Puts it into a bit of perspective.

Doug

Just 2 days from Mu Herculis here

Doug

Oop- yes

Doug

I wasn't suggesting we would encounter 1 gramme particles - I was just using that as a simple figure from which to demonstrate the way the energy ramps up with the square of the velocity.

Doug

Actually - Tim Parker will be yer man for this one - see if we can have an unannotated version of that image posted and we're sorted

Doug

Well - consider a 1 gramme projectile at 10km/sec - that's 50,000 joules of energy

Consider it moving at 185 km/sec - that's 17112500 joules, or 342 times as much (i.e. 18.5 ^2 )

Doug

Ahh - yes, that S11 obs might have Victoria at the bottom - but we'll have to wait 6 months to see it

Doug

--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Toma B @ May 8 2006, 03:46 PM) </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> I know this is somewhat of the topic but if I understand things correctly...
When MRO becomes operational in autumn this year, we should see 2x the resolution of this VC image in color...?!?!?
Or am I wrong? [/quote]

Well - MC might argue otherwise... but...

Technically, yes. The sampling resolution of HiRISE is approx 30cm per pixel in each dimension, whereas the best MOC resolution is 50cm downtrack and 150cm across track. For every pixel MOC takes in CPROTO observations, HiRISE should take about 8 pixels (and more like 25 for a normal MOC observation) But - there is the limiting resolution of the optics, the atmosphere, the stability of the spacecraft, the quality of the TDI process and so on and so forth.

My personal estimation is that the real 'pixel power' of the camera will be something like 50cm per pixel - and so we should see an increase in resolution by perhaps 2, or 3, or maybe even a little more over MOC using HiRISE, and perhaps 4 times over non CPROTO observations - with, of course, the near IR, Red and Blue-Green filters.

This recent image reminds us more than ever that MOC, despite it's age on orbit, and age since being designed and built, is a fantastic instrument that continues to produce stunning imagery - and will continue to have a valuable role to play even once HiRISE is in action.

Doug

There may have been a cproto image taken since the last MGS MOC data release - it's an astonishingly good image!

Doug

I'd wager there were at least a dozen of each of the following..

Beavis and Butthead
Wallace and Grommit
Tom and Jerry
etc etc.....


Doug

I was hoping you'd post that list, I've regularly opened it up for a serious laugh - makes you proud of our youth eh

Doug

Well - wasn't sure if it was creative licence on behalf of the script writers, so I wasn't going to say that Lovell said it incase it was just added for effect in the movie

Doug