I remember seing a presentation by Tim Parker that described Victoria as a suitable 'end of mission' location. It's a sad thought - but it's a sensible proposition - you could spend a year inside Victoria alone - a couple of nice pans from around the interior - a fitting end. There's nothing that realistically could be pinned to the map as a suitable location after Victoria to be honest.

Doug

Sojourner?..umm....

I'm all out

Doug

Get creative with the current image urls, and bingo - they're all there
http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/first_images/...ree/images/JPG/

Doug

Ahh - it just shares the LV, it doesnt deploy from the orbiter...hadn't realised that.

Doug

Well - loitering means that the impact will have to be from orbit, thus it will have to have it's own means of Delta V and thus attitude control I presume ( perhaps cold-gas attitude control with a solid kick for deorbit? ) and of course, that means the impact speed will be lower than if they went 'straight in' on the outbound trajectory. AND - the orbiter will have to haul the impactor into orbit (thus extra fuel for the LOI)

Of course, we have no details - so it'll be interesting to see what they have actually proposed.

Doug

One presumes the colour part of the first large image, and the new one ( which I show a MOC overlay on above) just in greyscale. I'm not sure how many different images they actually took - and of those, which are 'valid' for looking at instead of just health checking, and of the 'valid' images, I'm not sure what binning, or colour options were used - but so far from what we've seen they took

One image that's 20k x 10k (unbinned) with central colour
Another images thats 10k x 26k 2x2 binned without colour.

Pity that the Marci image isn't too cool - I've always thought the MOC WA images during the break in aerobraking were some of the most spectacular images of Mars.

(while we're at it - just as a quite thought - how are global WA monitoring observations and the WA observations for context or other purposes combined in terms of scheduling etc - never quite understood that )

Doug

Well - we know they're good and sharp, and that's all that really matters. I'm sure the MARCI image is a wallpaper waiting to happen

Doug

The Opportunity one is cool, somehow you got through the whole thing without using the phrase "Eagle"

Doug

Well - there's evidence in so far as the only places Spirit has had major cleaning is near Larry's lookout. Perhaps it was local geography, but it got a lot of good cleaning there.

Doug

In an ideal world - you get to McCool hill - start climbing up it very slowly during the winter, and you hit some nice wind gusts up there to clean the rover over in Spring ( like Larry's Lookout )

Doug

Here's where the two overlap. I've not got the time to do a nice sharp line-them-up overlay, but it gives you an idea of the extent of the overlap.

Doug

I think Space Daily has the story as well -

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/JPL_Set_...ar_Mission.html

I'm guessing that it's a 'dumb' impactor - i.e. one not intended to survive the event. I wonder if they plan to do ranger style imaging on the way in, in which case it's the DI Impactor model basically.

Doug

The raised rim near the approach will be NW facing, and the ramps down into the crater will be south facing - ish...so there's a slope for every season

Doug

Some of you may have spotted Stuarts poem over in the 5-wheels thread, and rather stupidly I culled it ( in light of the new rules ) instead of moving it to here - because it's an excellent piece...hopefully he can repost it in here..

A bit of googling around and I found this

http://www.sffworld.com/community/story/1150p0.html

If you like MER, if you like Mars - read it...it's a stunning short story, almost had me in tears. Nico, you HAVE to read it, same with you Ustrax - it's utterly brilliant - it captures my visions of the future of the Columbia Hills very well indeed.

Doug

I'm guessing the scarey colour is using nIR as red, red as green and blue-green as blue.

If you use a channels mixer in, say, photoshop with these settings


You get something looking roughly sort of sensibly martian...ish (attached)

What's odd is that it's roughly 3k pixels across - not the 4k across I'd expect for a colour image from HiRISE. Who knows, one day, eventually, perhaps this decade, MM might release the MARCI and CTX images they took back then


As for the other HiIRISE image, http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e07_e12/im...2/E1201440.html overlaps it just about, I believe... not quite sure yet. (yes - it does - thru the middle just about - I'll try and match up and get some images up in a moment)

Doug

But his description is that they are growing, not eroding...
Windblown material sticks to the exposed fin, making it larger and stronger

Doug

There's nothing in the rest of the article that explains why now and now 3 billion years ago...

"Chavdarian and Sumner think that the fins are formed when water seeps into cracks in the sand, carrying minerals with it. The water evaporates away, leaving behind those minerals, which are exposed as the wind blows sand away."

All fits with the curreny accepted model of Meridiani..

"Windblown material sticks to the exposed fin, making it larger and stronger. If the cracks and fins seen by the Opportunity rover on Mars are formed in the same way as the features at White Sands, it would provide evidence for water at the surface of Mars away from the polar ice caps"


We already have that in the rocks of Meridiani, just not today, but many years ago. Nothing really new at all in what he says. It's a bit tenuous however - all he has is "they look like" - and that's not a great basis on which to make the judgement he has.

Anyone got a spare F5 key? Mine's all worn out.

Actually - I've been using this - http://www.btinternet.com/~markwell/webmon/ to track the HiRISE website, Steve's blog, etc etc - very usefull.

Doug

Shaka - the area you've labelled 'safe' is the exact opposite, that's a south facing slope. A few days on that and Spirit would be dead.

The slope that can be seen against the skylin between your A and B points is north facing and the sort of slope they require.

Doug

As Jason said - they're probably still processing them - they've got a hell of a lot of data to deal with, and they're doing all this for the first time with real data. 200 - 800 Mpixel images take some work.

The real problem is that the hoaglanderati will go nuts over all this, because they have no grasp of the realities of the situation. They've already imposed huge numbers of artificiality into the first image, and they'll no doubt be doing the same with the following ones, and then suggesting that the delay was an attempt to edit them out. They're predictable beyond belief.

Doug

This one's for those with bandwith and a penchent for data only

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

Great data sets - but I just grab the course.png which shows the path of the vehicle on that days drive - great

NOW - here's the problem - they're not matching up properly...i.e. I've been tracing the route around the edge of Endurance, and Sol 129 I should be right next to tracks from about 20 sols before when the rover headed out the other way. Somewhere, they've got out of line with one another.

Are all sites defined with X, Y and Z being in the same direction - or does a new site define a new set of axis for motion thereafter - and what am I missing to fall short of having these things match up. I don't THINK it's slipage etc - but perhaps it is. I don't know

Doug

Look at the phase diagram of water

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/ae...ha/T073590A.gif

At deep space pressures ( i.e. very near zero - and indeed anything below 6mb ) - water doesnt exist at any temperature.


Also - what's wrong with a central peak in a crater that is then backfilled with water?

Doug

MERB UHF Tracking data
http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/anteam/merb/merb.htm

I've whacked some of that into Excel in the past, it's interesting to watch the signal drop out during occultation by things like the LGA, PCMA etc.

Phil - do you know of a scale for your 2k x 2k endurance map? I've finally got round to trying to overlay the mobility plots onto it and I'm not quite sure how accurate I'm being

Doug

Ships of the desert Bob, ships of the desert

Doug

that little double peak is an interesting one...

I've phil-o-visioned it to verify that it is indeed, quite distant (beyond the local topography)

so - refering to the very large 10m res ellipse map..
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/0...Ellipse_10m.gif

Nothing immediately jumps out really.

The northern feature is certainly beyond Erebus, and could potentially be Endurance.

Doug