So CTX behaved well then?

Doug

I think we've seen that in the long term, dust deposition isn't really a problem.

Doug

Sorry - educationa and outreach is the #1 thing I would NOT cut.

Doug

See - I'd TOTALLY forget if you didn't put in here. I'm useless at things like that.

Things I want to get to next time include - autonav and visodom
Albedo measurements - what they actually achieve
How much of a mission could there be sans-Odyssey

and as an aside, CTX and MARCI performance with their test images.

and anything else you lot come up with

Doug

Well - go and put it in the right place and I'll ask next time around

Doug

Chill - these things take time. We've waited since the launch in August for these first images, another day or two isn't going to kill anyone.

Doug

Well - the usual morning uplink ( before the beep ) I THINK it possibly two-way on the HGA.

But of course, that's been interrupted by dsn channel clash with MRO

I'll try and see if I can find out if they still do two way tracking.

I remember them joking about doing the first 'honk' - which was a 10 minute beep during a drive. They jokingly mentioned that they didn't spot a doppler shift as the rover started driving

Doug

Don't forget that the pressure is approx 1.5% that of earth's pressure. It is exceptionally unlikely that liquid water, even one highly rich in dissolved minerals, cound exist at that surface temperature and pressure. Ice, if present, would most probabyl sublime to the gas phase.

Nick Hoffman explained it best over at THZ when replying to Robet.

Subject: No




Doug

They have a daily low gain 'beep' to acknowledge the transition to the new sequence, I imagine tracking could be extracted from that.

Doug

two months, two words, one dune

Purgatory Situation

Doug

That'll save quite a lot of mass, volume, power and thus money

I think it's fairly safe to do so, you have MRO as primary, Odyssey as backup, MEX as backstop. I'd have thought perhaps an LGA might be usefull just for redundency and acknowledging the transition to a new daily sequence.

Doug

Didnt work for me either. I wonder if theres an OS project for reading those somewhere.

MEANWHILE

I'm going to start my first little project with this stuff - reconstructing the area around the heatshield impact site using wedges from multiple view points to eliminate visibility shadows etc. I wont be using the highest res LOD - it's utterly utterly bonkers - but it'll all be Navcam stuff to start with, with, perhaps, Pancam imagery added later. Mainly it's for the april talk I'm giving to the BAA - it'll be a nice movie I think.

MaxSt - I can not thank you enough for your work in this. It's not perfect, it's not ideal - but it's wedges, in 3ds max, and it is STUNNING!!!

Thank you a thousand times over.

Doug

Honestly, I am as excited about HiRISE imagery as I was about the rovers landing.

It's just all SUCHHH good stuff

Doug

Yes - Spirit can't really afford the power of HGA DTE passes long enough to give the downlink capacity for imagery to allow safe driving. She's safe where she is, and can look after herself for now. Once Odyssey's back up and working, she'll be fully charged, and the team will have had plenty of time to look at and plan for the next few drives toward the hill.

Doug

Well - the short term solution is what they did back a year or so ago - schedule an HGA pass for the afternoon to get the basic data back you need to keep using the rovers. You can't get much down though - it's very limited. 12 minutes of 256k UHF pass takes a long time at 8kbps DTE. Also DTE on the HGA takes a lot more whrs/mbit and with Spirit being so low on power, that's not something you want to have to use much, if at all.

Medium term, Odyssey will be back up by the end of the weekend, long term, if Odyssey didn't work, perhaps MGS could be called back into doing some of the relay, and Mars Express might be able to help also - but I don't think they'd want to interupt MRO's primary science mission for relay duty.

One could - if you had long enough DTE passes - operate the rovers on DTE alone - a lot LOT less imagery obviously - just the essential imagery needed for driving - but it could work - progress would be a little slower, but it's entirely feasable.

Doug

So MOC non-cproto res so far ( with the centre in pseudo-colour of course )

Doug

I don't think we're expecting this stuff to be particular high res are we?

Then again - 400km was one suggested altitude at the time of taking, what are we talking, a nominal 60cm/pixel?

Doug

Not for me there isnt.

Anyway - there were three MOC NA images within one degree of the target I put in

One was a tiny Geodesy image, the others are these..

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_m12/im...7/M0701521.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m13_m18/im...3/M1300036.html

Doug

Oh my
http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/first_images/...ICT0093-med.jpg

Look at the size of THOSE scroll bars

Doug


http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Atlas/d...TRUMENT_NAME=NA

The MOC NA images of the quoted target area.

Doug

Yeah - distance from Hazcam is a very hard one - but it does look quite good

Doug

Look at the size of the scroll bars on there - that image is HUGE

Doug

B)-->

The one with Janus is just greyscale images in a movie I'm afraid.

Doug

Woo yay

Here's one for you

At the top end of each folder ( i.e. http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mer/mer2mw...ancam/site0011/ ) there are some VERY big files - are these essentially mosaics of terrain wedges?

Doug