That's a very odd motion - at first I thought it might just be a change in lighting, but it's genuine movement.

I've got to give a talk to some students tomorrow that will end with "and here's Spirit's wheel appearing to start falling off"
Doug

No you shouldnt. Change it back

Good to speak to Emily and Jason at the Pizza place, a chance to say thank you for their contributions as co-admins (essentially, my minions) off this place

Doug

At a first look - it just looks like dust to me - and the two sets of diagnostic images ( one presumes before and after a commanded rotation of the wheel ) show no change in the position of the wheel

Doug

That's an internal refraction - the optics bouncing a little bit of the sun around. A lot of the solar images show it as well.

Doug

They're lovely

Your best bet is going to be using the MOC Gallery
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ as then you'll have the projected images, processed just about as well as they can be, in a comparatively lossless format (gif) - AND - they're easier to find

MC might correct me, but I believe MOC is only 8 bits. MER cameras are 12, but MOC is just 8.

Doug

I inquired about getting the DEM of the MOC stereo pairs to do some nice flyarounds etc, but didn't get a response sadly.

Doug

Phil wins

Doug

So basically, your Discovery mission will get cancelled if it's over-running the budget, unless we really really like it, in which case we'll move it to another division.

Doug

I've followed the progression of that at the Space Modelling Yahoo group.

It's a total custom job from the ground up.

Doug

Voila.

So why has Kepler not been cancelled? A much much bigger cost overrun. It should have been cancelled before a Dawn cancellation was even considered surely?

Doug

No - read the first post - this is a brand new thing - literally yestersol.

The comparatively little movement recently has been because of the DSN conflict between Spirit and MRO so all commands for Spirit have had to go up via UHF which has a very long lead time - it's like super-restricted sols.

Tosol looks like diag.
Doug

The engine's just didnt quite provide as much punch as they expected during MOI, so the onboard software commanded the shutdown slightly later than they expected it to happen.

If you're only doing a tiny nudge, a few m/sec - then it would be hard to notice a 2% shortfall in the expected performance ( I don't know if TCM 1 was done using a delta-V accumulation or a timer but either way, it'd be a tiny error on a small burn ) - whereas with a burn thats more than a thousand seconds then it's going to be a lot more obvious.

Doug

If you have two days of consecutive driving, you know you're not in restricted sols. The definition of a restricted sol is one where by Sol n data arrives at a time too late to be involved in the planning of Sol n+1, so mobility planning can only occur for Sol n+2.

Typically, a period of restricted sols lasts about 10 days to 2 weeks.

Sometimes, however, due to bad downlink, missed DSN pass, an error on the rover etc - you can miss a sol or 3 just thru bad luck ( one sol was lost thru because a cable at a DSN dish had been eaten by rodents )

It's 5am 759 for Oppy now - and I'm seing 758 images that show a drive occured.

Doug

From the host

"Please note that the ip 10.89.23.254 is blocked in our datacentre. We have contacted them and they will unblock it as soon as possible.
And regarding the other two ips 152.163.164.30 and 62.104.210.47. Please note that these are not blocked in our servers."

If the second and third IP's are yours - try contacting your ISP.

Doug

Spirit's currently on UHF only due to the MRO/MERA DSN channel clash. I'm sure this will be worked around in due course, but the latest JPL update does mention it....

During the week, NASA's Odyssey spacecraft has been relaying commands from Earth to Spirit via the UHF link. Communications over X-band frequencies have been allocated for use by the Deep Space Network to track the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during its approach to the red planet. Next week, Spirit is expected to resume operations via X-band uplinks.

Commanding via UHF has a longer lead time, as uplinks to Odyssey are not a daily event.

Doug

(PS - at 360 whrs in a sol, it may be that serious activities such as driving etc are limited not just by comms, but also by power. A few days to ensure some very fully charged batteries will be good given that there may be some unforseen unfavorable tilt on the way to McCool)

I need the IP of any connection from which people can not get to the site from. As many as possible would be good. It is clearly a problem at the hosts end of the pipe, but they're attempting to deny it.

Doug

And I'm getting nothing back from the host either. It's annoying me more than it's annoying any of you, believe me.

Doug

The bandwidth wouldnt actually be an issue - if I can get something working that it registered members only ( irc or otherwise ) - then that's what I'll do. It was simply an experiement to see how MROMOI would go down as a chat thing, and whilst not too many people made it in, it's obviously quite a popular idea - so I'll continue to look into it.

Doug

No plans to use it at all is what I heard in press confs. First time it will be used is with Phoenix.

Part of me thinks it would be nice to use it during aerobraking, as they could have some good long passes then - but I can understand why they'd want to focus specifically on just getting aerobraking done properly.

To test the UHF systems, they usually use Stanfords UHF dish.

Doug

Hawkonian?

Doug

But not 'operating' at mars.

Doug

Oh - I don't disagree with anything you've said, #space is very very well maintained and is a lot more civil than 99% of IRC stuff out there.

BUT

It's at a different place than UMSF in levels of presumed knowledge - aos, lga, hga, tcm etc - someone will always end up asking "whats that", and whilst it's great to share the knowledge, sometimes you want to have a chat with people who already know the basics, it can get in the way somewhat. You'll have people say "my digital camera can take a colour picture, why can't the rovers" and so on, all valid questions for the beginner, but tedious after a while.

#space is great, but I've had a suprising number of people email me and ask if I am going to set up some sort of chat service for #umsf, and indeed, the very fact that it is the home of #space is the reason I went to freenode with trying out the idea of #umsf, more as an experiement more than anything else. A few people had difficulty getting in, but about 8-10 of us had a good chat during the evening and it was actually quite enjoyable.

Doug

MOI and aerobraking are very seperate. The difference wasnt anything to do with aerobraking, I think it was simply a slight underperformance by the engines, and the sort of underperformance you only notice if you have a really long burn ( i.e. much bigger than TCM1 was).

First post in this thread updated with all the info from the 0030 conf.

We now have 6 spacecraft at work at Mars, that is a great thing.

Doug