Hopefully - HiRISE will spot some or all of the EDL hardware to help nail down the failure to a specific time frame of the EDL sequnce.

i.e.

Found : Impact only
Failure during entry and before chute deployment

Found : Chute & Backshell and no heathsield
Entry survived, possible shredded chute / heatshield sep failure

Found: Chute & Backshell and Heatshield but no lander impact.
Failure of lander seperation from backshell

Found: Chute & Backshell, Heathsield and Lander impact
Failure of terminal descent (favoured failure mode after investigation)

Found, Chute, Backshell, Heatshield and a non impacted lander with deployment evidence
Failure of comms / systems onboard

Hopefully, the same will be true of Beagle 2 ( although with different criteria) - and given the results of MOC in finding MER hardware - as long as HiRISE can cover enough area (and even if they just 2x2 bin and jsut use the wider swath width ) they should be able to identify SOMETHING from MPL.

However - HiRISE obs of Pathfinder might be usefull - as I've not seen evidence of Heatshield or Backshell & Chute at the Pathfinder site from MOC, which is somewhat suprising given how obvious they were with MER.

Dust deposition remains an issue, but repeat MOC obs of Spirit and Opportunity might suggest that two years after landing, their hardware remains very visible.

Doug

Just throwing this one into the mix...

Did the lamp start to fade before link-loss with Cassini, and thus could changes be as a result of that as well.

Doug

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/feat...ion_policy.html

There's a .mov at spaceflightnow ( subscribe if you dont have access to NTV - it's very very much worth the price ) - of a Q'n'A with the Administrator

Doug

When you say three-fold, do you means MPL and the two DS2's - as they were mounted to the cruise stage and deployed 18 seconds after cruise stage sep from the lander shell - so a common cause would have had to occur before cruise stage sep.

Perhaps high instability of the DS2 entry during the entry phase might have introduced a tumble or similar that caused the thing to present the ( I believe unprotected ) back of the entry capsule to re-entry and killed them there. The MPF capsule was the same proportions as the MPF and MER ones I believe, so one would expect it to have got thru entry, even if it were as rough a ride as we are told it was for MER.

Were such instabilities noted during MPF entry I wonder. (or, for that matter, V1 and V2)

Doug

Bjorn - time to bitch slap the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4860912.stm

Doug

Bingo - you can't export from it at all - but it is an excellent viewer. Long term - being able to convert from PFB's would cut the workload on these things by an order of magnitude - I would actually worship at the feet of anyone who could pull the info out of those. It would make Pancam wedges worth using - as they, obviously, are 9 wedges for every navcam equiv. wedge.and are just too much manual involvement at the moment. In terms of doing Endurance crater - I think Pancam is a must, simply to get the range I need - navcam wedges basically drop off after about 10m.

Trying to rotate the wedges using the header info is obviously doable, but to be honest, by the time I've done that, I'd have rotated them into postition manually anyway


Meanwhile, just a bit of fun, 720p WMVHD - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...le_rotate_1.wmv

Doug

And to add to this - the APXS's on MER can't detect hydrogen, and if your trying to find peroxides........

To carry on JR's analogy - It's like knowing how many of every letter EXCEPT E there are in a paragraph, and wondering what it means.

Doug

Well - I'm focussing on Opportunity first - as I want to do something with Eagle, Endurance, the Heatshield, possibly Fram, possibly Anatolia, and possibly Naturaliste and Purgatory (Purgatory in 3d sounds like a nice idea to me ) - for an April talk on Opportunity in Liverpool.

Then, I want to document the traverse from the Spirit lander to Bonneville. Thereafter, drives got too long to actually have navcam 'areas' that overlap from sol to sol - but again, some areas such as Larrys Lookout, or the foot of West Spur, might actually work as well.

Doug

One of the squillion little projects I'm trying to do is to put together an animation of the MER entry up to the lander seperation event which would hopefully demonstrate the sort of occilation that talks about. Thanks for the headsup on the PPT - interesting reading. Mars really is a nasty planet to land on. Not Titan, not the Moon, just a nasty middle ground.

Doug

This stuff is WAY too much fun. I'm finding that, suprisingly, the LOD2 is the best to use - the others probably do contain more geometric information, but not so much as to make the 10 fold increase in poly count worth it, and they have a lot more poly 'drop outs' so to speak. I've done a few bits and pieces with it - getting them aligned to one another is still a bit trickey (PFB's would be AWESOME for this) - but attached (later) will be two pictures, my 3ds max Eagle crater, and a PFB eagle crater. Yes, that is a frame number of an animation, yes, that is a MOC image underneath so yes, you can probably see where I'm going with this

Doug

Is she Cat-IV clean?
http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/pp/about/categories.htm




Doug

Well - given that they will want to conduct instrument checkout and so forth, I cant imagine them having a second CPU unit in there - it would be a bit of a waste. The rover's guts will have all the interfacing and grunt the spacecraft would ever need I'd have thought. 4.5m entry body...wow...it's a big animal.

Doug

Interesting - I've downloaded and installed the demo version of SGI OpenGL Performner, and indeed once you've done that - the PFB files just douple click and open up ( attached ) - you can scroll up and down the LOD - the LOD is then dynamically managed depending on range (close = high lod, far = low lod ) - and if you have the PFB and the RGB's of the site in the same folder, you get the whole thing textured as well.

The genius of this is that the PFB contains multple VST's all mosaiced into the right place. My experience so far with playing with these things is that getting the VST's into the right place is actually quite hard. Importing them with Blender, 3ds Max or Polytrans - they all end up being in the same 'place' and tilted 'down' by about 70 degrees.(also attached) Given that it happens across multiple platforms, would it be worth checking the obj convertor, see if there's something going on in there - of if we can move over to meshed-from-the-point-cloud XYL's which might be bettere referenced. . Alternatively - II wonder if the PFB's would be 'consumeable' by a derivative of the work you've done so far, given that they seem to essentially contain multple VST's bundled with their proper geometry. It would mean we could import and entire sequence in one shot instead of 3, 5 10 images etc.

Anyway - I've attached two piccies to show what I'm talking about. One is a PFB in Performer, and one an OBJ in Max.


Doug

Thankyou

Doug

Ahh - another thought.

I've seen drawings that show the cruise stage to include a small-ish HGA ( on the order of 50cm or so ) which will be used, I presume, for the normal cruise phase downlink of healthchecks etc.

Perhaps that dish has its own transponder which requires an ammount of power greater than the constant output of the RTG - and they'll want constant downlink for tracking during the cruise I'm sure.

Maybe that's it?

(BUT - those new drawings dont show the little fold out HGA that I'd seen previously.)

Doug

Are you refering to this one?
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw...riplet.202a.jpg

Doug

I think they've given up until they get to some nice slopes - then they can spend some time doing more engineering experiments on it - but it does look fairly terminal

Doug

How about the first sol at which observations are made from whichever site number is used for the 'big pan' that will obviously be taken. It may be a few sols before that, but it would be an un-arguable point of reference.

Doug

One of Rosetta's instruments will be able to observe it as well I believe.

Doug

Looks like a hatch there behind the rover to mount the MMRTG on the pad, like NH.

Here's a thought. Why does the cruise stage need Solar Arrays when there's the MMRTG inside the aeroshell? It's not as if pulling power from it would 'use up' the RTG.

Doug

Well put by MSSS I think

It is important to note that both the channel and floor relationships seen in this image may be formed by other processes, and that there is also the possibility that they may not be related (i.e., that the fluid from the channels did not emplace the dark, ponded floor material). It is also important to remember that a fluid other than water, for example, fluid lava, could be responsible for the features seen. Indeed, lower resolution Viking and some MOC images suggest just such an alternative explanation. The absence of craters may reflect the difficulty of the materials to preserve such features, or their burial by dust. Finally, the environmental difficulties of having liquid water seeping from the wall of a south polar crater are quite formidable. For these reasons, caution must be exercised in adopting any specific hypothesis.

Maybe it wasnt - I was sure there was a link there in some way - I do remember that old site being quite usefull though. Amazingly, there are still some interesting images at http://marsweb.jpl.nasa.gov/2001/lander/index.html including this..



Doug

From ISS
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images...ss012e21351.jpg
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images...ss012e21343.jpg

Wasn't it the same guy who then went on to argue the case for a Pluto mission as well - and infact, I think he may have popped in here once or twice as well ( but I can't remember his username )

Doug