Quite - if you're asking for a certain 90 sols, you dont design FOR 90 sols, you design for much more. So you want 90, design it so you know it'll last 270, and then you KNOW 90 will be fine.

Remember - it wasnt a component failure that was assumed to be the ultimate fate of the rovers, but dust deposition. We've just been lucky in that regard.

The design life of the hardware, and the expected life of the power source and not one and the same

I've heard Steve mention that if you'd sat him down and given him truth serum the day they landed, he'd have said perhaps 180 sols would be when they'd ACTUALLY die.

Doug

I doubt it - Phoenix's landing site is going to be a long long way from the rovers. It'd be like trying to see the Stardust re-entry from Cuba.

Doug

Didnt pitchers mound get mentioned by Steve like, a year+ ago?

(not attempting to steal thunder here, but I'm sure he mentioned it)

Doug

Anyone got pics of the MSL model?

Doug

Actually - this is 100% true and accurate - if you put the landing site onto the place where I last gave a talk to the BAA ( English Heritage Lecture Theatre near the Apple store ) - the other end, if you rotate the route - lands EXACTLY on the new venue the BAA are using at Kings College London.

Freaky

Doug

Oo - that's a GOOD one. I was going to ask about 'dirtyness' - but to have a comaprison with Mini TES is a news to me, a nice angle on it. It's IN.


Doug

My Estes two-stage Mongoose would shame an Atlas V any day of the week

Doug

Quick update, Jim and I just tested Skype, and it worked great, so hopefully we're go for the first of these on Thursday Evening. More news soon.

Doug

So was I

Doug

Who's up for Top Trumps. I think Alan just won.

Doug

I think there's some potential for functional, if not 'mobile' Rovers come '07. I certianly think they'll last thru to MRO's science orbit, and as such could do simultanious observations out and into the atmosphere.

But that's a long way away, and a hell of a lot could go wrong between then and now, I wouldnt put money on it, but I wouldnt be suprised.

Doug

The Atlas V 551 uses 5 solid rocket motors + the RD180 engine, so considerably more than half the thrust at launch comes from solid motors.

Doug

I think it'd feel like talc in places. I know that it can 'appear' wet, but that's a symptom, I think, of the way that the dust pools in places courtesy of wind, and being darker, in little patches, it looks damp.

It's very hard to simulated amazingly fine, dry, dusty material on earth because the atmosphere contains so much water compared to mars.

I can honestly say I've never seen anything that's made me think of mud or damp soil at any point, and all the evidence suggests that only under very very rare conditions on mars might one get anything other than ice content within the soil, and more often than not the transition would be sublimation.

On a large scale ( meridiani planum's dunes ) and a tiny scale ( little pockets of gusev dust ) - Mars can play games with you, looking like vast oceans and/or little puddles.

Doug

I'm relying on Chris to get a better picture of me tomorrow

Doug

Not direct spectra, but they can look at a spectra during and after transits and do maths on those to pull something out of the actual planet.

I wonder if there's an effor to get the flash emptied out a little before getting to Homeplate. Some images of brushed targets from back on sol 690 just came down along with quite a few three week old+ images

Don't ask why (just a bit of fun really) but I had a play with one of the new sets that came down from a while back. Probably because of the slope and the pointing direction, it was an odd perspecitve, which looked 'small' - so I added a huge focus pull to make it worse.

Doug

No - after the first little bump to the interesting terrain, Oppy has been studying it for 4 days now

Doug

That's a good idea - thin-ish but large panels of aerogel that all fold out to form as large a sheet as can be squeezed into a launch vehicle, only problem is getting it to sit facing the direction of motion instead of weather-vaning in the upper atmosphere.

Doug

Just for fun, prepared for my talk tomorrow, this is overlayed to scale...

Almost exactly from the Apple Store to the new BAA venue It'll take about 15 minutes on the Tube, but I may have to change!

Doug

Here's the problem - how do you help clean up? Obviously, designing LV's that leave as few residual pieces as possible is a start, retiring orbital spacecraft to a sensible retirement orbit is good also - but how would one go about clearing up all the mess? Something to actively limit the current number of pieces of debris up there.


Only thing I can think of is going round with a giant whipple-shield-like-fly-swot in the most populated orbits - perhaps something that could be deployed from a small size, and consist of a few layers of typical whipple-shield material covering as large an area as possible to 'wipe up' the mess.

Or is that the wrong tactic - would it make more sense to track these objects very accurately and try and 'fry them' using lasers on the ground? turn them into a little cloud of vapour that can disperse.

I cant think of a means by which we can solve the problem, all we can do is try to slow up the worsening of it.

Doug

I was having a good search there earlier - a lot of MER finds WMD or ObL, or MER lands on Beagle 'toons. I might end up sketching my own little version of this one I think Beware - I can't draw!

Doug

Well - the key announcements in this field have been the detection of smaller and smaller planets. First super-jupiters, then jupiter sized, then uranus sized....there's not much left really

Perhaps better spectra extracted from them?

Doug

I must admit, I wanted to keep mine nice and slickand small, even in this broadband age There's only one image in the whole site, the b'n'w Endurnace Pan. Everything else is CSS

Doug

The closest thing to an electronic nose we have would be a mass spectrometer for compelx organics, which could then be mixed in an appropriate ratio back on earth.

The moon smells of gunpowder, some meteorites smell of sulphur.

Doug

I guess it depends if you want to include the journey for Galileo and Cassini from their last Earth Flybys to Mars orbit. It's cheating, and I don't know the figures, but it would be an interesting comparison.

Doug