Oh - I think we all know what he'd say - and we're all thinking it - but it doesn't really need to be said, as I think you know what it is.

Doug

There was no 'working' of the problem to be done. The spacecraft essentially vanished.

What you are speculating is IF the failure had not been fatal ( which it was ) AND the navigation had been wrong ( of which we have no indication ) THEN they would only have had 3 days to correct any problems before arriving at Mars.

But they were going to be arriving at Mars in 3 days anyway - the three navigation options are impact or flypast. Either of them were coming up 72 hours later, navigation right or wrong.

I'm not sure what point you're actually trying to make apart from being intentionally hyper-speculative and obtuse.

Doug

Contact with Mars Observer was lost on August 21, 1993, three days before scheduled orbit insertion. Navigation has no part to play.


Doug

I wonder what sort of mission design you could do there.

A smaller spacecraft to visit Enc rides piggyback on the Titan orbiter which would I presume have a v.large HGA for radar and downlink. It could then act as a relay for the smaller craft.

Doug

I guess it means they'll chuck something on top, but not a 'customer' payload.

Doug

Phoenix is just arrays, they will be almost parallel to the ground - but it will get 24 hr sunlight early in the mission (check the website for an animation that shows this) so a tilt would be a bad idea as you would get from one side only what you would drop on the other.

Phoenix is going to be a short lived mission, the very long, very cold polar night will kill it.

Doug

He has no money. Having been told to do X things, by date Y with Z dollars he has no options left but to cull a lot of other programs. It sucks, it is very wrong, but it is the only thing that he can do given the parameters than have been handed down to him from on high.

Doug

Yes - but how long to accelerate to 666000 kph ?

Doug

Good point, well made - we don't know where it is or why it's gone...we had a couple of fairly serious hacking attempts a few days ago, and it would coincide with that - still investigating.

Doug

Or better, the craft called 'earth'. Radar observations of NEO's, the moon and even, I believe, Mercury have been done from Earth using dishes like Arecibo and the DSN.

Doug

Under your pillow, but they're broken from when your head hit the pillow

Doug

Interesting new release
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre.../20060501a.html
or
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_.../low_ridge.html

Notice how the JPG'ing of the raw releases don't retain the same level of detail as calibrated data... tracks visible in the proper release, but just not quite there in the JPGs

Doug

Wouldnt the ejecta look essentially like the 'stuff' it's ejecting. Consider Fram - yes, I know, very very small - but the small ammount of ejecta there was basically the same stuff that we saw inside Eagle and Endurance - the light coloured sulphate rich rocks.

Are the dynamics of a larger impact really so different that they would render that stuff almost black? Or is there, deep below the light coloured rocks of Eag and End, something alltogether different.

Doug

Emily will have some goodies to show you in the not too distant future re: the Dust Devils in the White-Rocks image...but meanwhile - another Gusev observation, this time Orbit 637, and I've changed my channel-mixing technique. I find using Colour Balance just on mid-tones is very effective ( +53, -10, -15 for those interested )

Doug

Might it be a vertically oriented image, but with a cover or piece of structure blocking the first part thus giving the illusion of a horizon?

Doug

Giving 200 Whrs as basically the cut-off of survivability, it's more like 90-150 sols on your graphs

Doug

It has - these are much larger dunes and other features than at Meridiani - but that image is no higher res than the best images of Meridiani.

Doug

Top stuff Dan - much appreciated.

Doug

I suppose you could add in calib-target images into the equation - that would add a lot of images to it

Doug

I think 1500 images in 13 filters, that's 115 pointings. The Lion King pan was 93 pointings - so there's an extra 22 frames in there somewhere.

Doug

Hopefully there will be a bit of overlap

Doug

The map interface for the PSA is crappy, and the classical PSA is as bug ridden as hell - null this, 1>=0 that, blah blah.....

Yuck

Doug

A bit of Val.Mar joy before bed

Doug

To be fair, the samples may be scrap, but the aeroshell is recognisable - but I don't think they'd want to display it by any stretch of the imagination. It would be like exhibiting the dent in your bumper before getting an insurance quote for your car.

Doug

Landed with the Viking landers, but iirc, V1's never worked, and V2's didn't detect anything worthy of note.

Doug