Well - I have a tiny little piece of spare Beagle 2 Heatshield material...it's just like the cork you might make a cork board out of, but a little more fiberous and fine grained. I've always been more interested in unmanned spaceflight than manned spaceflight ( although I do love a good EVA ) - and so if I was going to smash some cash on something - I'd really really like a tiny bit of the Stardust return capsule, or a bit of spare MLI from New Horizons - just a little bit of the 'stuff' from which these dreams are made.

Other than that...er... a ballast slug from a Renault F1 car and a smashed piece of Minardi F1X2 wheel rim from a race at Rockingham...ooops - sorry, wrong subject - but they're cool

I like yours - I think someone's done some little relief maps of mars that you can buy - I'm tempted by the Gusev one

Doug

If you can pencil in the sol-ranges for each 'section' I'm sure someone ( well, I'd do it ) could produce FHAZ and RHAZ movies for each section in turn.

I showed a little FHAZ movie of the first 495 sols of Spirit at the talk I gave on Wednesday evening, and it got child-like giggles out of these 50, 60+ year old experienced astronomers, they LOVED it

Doug

Stroke of genius if you ask me, I hope some people get recordings of its signal for us to enjoy.

Doug

I'm waiting for the Jennifer at the MER notebook to pull out the course png's from the mobility reports before I make a series of very very big, very very accurate route maps of the rovers, and actually they'll be split into sections about the same as the suggestions here It'll be a big project, and probably a few months in the making, but it might make a sensible addition to a big mer-report.

I'll probably split them into smaller chunks that a 'tell the tale' story might do however.

As for our own MER movie...well...I've done some technical experiments in to panning around MER panoramas at WMV-HD 1080i resolution. 720p resolution is probably more realistic in terms of platforms that will play it, but it is, again, a huge huge project. I would very much like to put together a little Sol 1000 movie but wouldnt dream of trying to put anything over the web at 720p res. In my mind it goes to specific music tracks, but copyright reasons would preclude me including that, and it sort of ruins the effect

There's so many ways to tell the story, so much story to tell, and so little time to spend telling it

Doug

I'm trying to convince Jim to use headphones

And yes - I'm going to try and do a transcript to match - but I've got a bedroom to re-decorate so I'm a bit pushed for time...

oh - and our car was broken into last night, so we've got to deal with that as well.

If someone could coordinate a transcribing effort, then I'd be happy to wrap it up as a PDF like last time.

Doug

Thor-Able was a precursor to the modern Delta LV's iirc, and there's one about 5 miles from here at the National Space Centre

http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=47689

Doug

It's super resolution imaging. It's hard to make it worth-while when you use the JPG's - but if you have the RAD's it's quite a 'profitable' exercise. They did it back at Bonneville with Spirit looking at the old Heatshield - and I barely got any results using the JPGs -but using RAD it was much much better

Doug

For some missions - getting off the drawing board and onto a launch vehicle is much harder and filled with more pitfalls than the launch and flight to the target.

Doug

I figure that if I hide well enough, no one will come up, ask me to do another talk, and re-decorating the bedroom get's delays another week

Doug

I suppose you have MRO there to image the crater afterwards - it could be interesting - I wonder if they'd have imaging capacity on the impactor

The orbiter to go with it could be another usefull relay platform


Doug

LOL - I was HIDING

Doug

Attaching a thumbnail is sensible enough - but remember, there's plenty of those over at JPL as well

We dont need to have a formal guideline about this - it's just a matter of considering UMSF like the IDD's on the rovers...a consumeable

If you make the thumbnail of it < 200 x 200 - then it wont actually make a thumbnail of itself at all, and that would have the storage space, and reduce server loading.

Doug

That went really rather well - didnt get too long, about 30 minutes, but there was a good reaction, and they particularly enjoyed the astronomy that Spirit's been doing.

Roll on April

Doug

Anyone noticed how innacurate the tracks are in Endurance crater

Doug

Physically impossible

You can find members of our species who would find Classical to be utter tripe compared to Drum and Bass, or those who find Drum and Bass the work of satan himself compared to that of Schubert. If the opinion of people within a single species w.r.t. its creations vary so hugely, then one can not even being to imagine what they might be elsewhere. There is no means by which one could possibly gauge any reaction to the contents of these things nor the signals we have been sending out for 50 years or so by a species other than our own. Any suggestion is pure random speculation and infinitly more likely to be wrong that right.

It could range from "ug" to "INVADE AND DESTROY WITH OUR PHOTON BOMB"


Doug

Can't remember off hand, but on the EDL live coverage, Wayne Lee mentions that atmospheric entry occured fairly high, but deceleration didnt occur for about another minute or so, and I'd only expect to be able to see a plasma trail etc after deceleration starts to occur. perhaps 75km?

Looking at this
http://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/mpam_0001/edl_ddr/edl_ddr.tab
and this
http://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/mpam_0001/e...dr/r_eacc_s.tab

The peak decel was at 30 - 40km

Doug

Looks very very similar to Humphrey rock which they looked at 2 years ago, nothing odd in it really.

Doug

I probably should have said something sooner. I downloaded a backup of all the attachments today ( I do this less often than the database backup which is now daily ) - but the attachments are now at 390MB

Anyhoo - Homeplate---YEAH----wooo....


Doug

Remember - Mars is much smaller than earth, so the horizon is much closer as well, if the exact path of Stardust were replicated on Earth, those lines showing visibility at specific elevations would be much much closer to the entry track

Doug

The raw JPG's are too bad to even worry about - but one image catches an utter bulls eye of the transit.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...KSP2669R8M1.JPG

If you think about it - for Discovery money, you cant' really do anything Jovian or beyond.

Mars is out, Mercury's done and it's unlikely you'd get a nod for another Mercury mission the next decade or so ( at least until Messenger has lived out its primary mission ) - and VEX is likely to teach us what else we might like to learn about Venus, but not for 5 years or so. Then you have Lunar missions - with LRO basically stealing that scene for the next few years.

So you're left with Earth orbital and L1/L2 type missions (Genesis, Kepler), or Comets and Asteroids.

Doug

Not trying to offend anyone here - but what's the point in attached two images to a post, when we all know that those two images are at the Exploratorium. Much better all round, to simply post the links isnt it? It's un-necessary to add those files to the ever growing attachments folder of this place. It adds to peoples browsing bandwidth by having to load the thumbnails, the server's loading by having to make the thumbnails, the server bandwidth by delivering the images, and the server's storage by hosting them. If you've made something new, annotated an image or made a map, a mosaic etc and have no where to host it, then by all means attach it - but to attach raw MER imagery when we all know it's sat on other servers is a bit wastefull of resouces.

Doug

Such a response is equally likely from the plaque. They might find the sounds from earth on the disk just as offensive as the sounds of reality TV

Doug