Ahh - mid '90s websites. I love them. I'd much rather have that than a crappy flash intro.


The genius that is my colleague Josh has helped me (well, he did it ) fix the site for IE. IE doesnt 'do' CSS properly, so you have to botch it apparantly.

Doug

Reminds me a lot of good 'ol Humphrey.

The driving terrain from here to HP looks fantastic.

Doug

I'm psychic

Doug

Can anyone remember or find the little cartoon that had some little martians watching the second rover landing and saying something like

"SWEET - Now we can race 'em"

I wanted to use it at the end of my talk on Spirit tomorrow as a prequel to talking about Opportunity in April

Doug

MSL's landing site HAS to be a good one - I dont think they can make the call until MRO is there. There's be some case for Meridiani I'm sure, or perhaps other Hematite sites - but I can't imagine them wanting to use a low altitude site given all the money and effort being spent on making higher altitude sites accesable.

It's not a decision I'd like to make.

Doug

Personally, I like the concept of SCIM if they try again, the science from just a CC of returned martian atmosphere would be huge.

Doug

That discussion re: using NH to search for KBO's has been had I think, Alan confirming that given the apeture of LORRI, compared to the apeture of ground based observatories, even given the proximity of NH to the target, the maths just doesnt add up and ground based obs are a much much better way to do it.

Doug

It niggled away with me as well, I guess when you're getting THAT much of a kick, even 100m/s could be considered damn accurate - thanks for 'de-niggling' it Alan

Doug

It's taken long enough, but I've needed somewhere to point people when they want to book me for a talk etc

http://doug.unmannedspaceflight.com

I grabbed a great template from www.oswd.org and it's still very much a work in progress, but I wanted to get it out before my next talk on Wednesday Don't be offended if your particular website isnt in the links page, that will grow quite a lot in the future

I've noticed that it doesnt centre in IE ( but does in Firefox ) - I'll try to sort that in the next couple of days.

Doug

Ahhh - in that case, it's going to be just residuals from the LV I'd imagine.

Doug

I'd thought the same Alex - the Mars policy of targetting off-target, so that the fact you have a healthy spacecraft to adjust its course back to target means that it isnt going to plough straight into the planet - or perhaps in this case Europa?

Doug

Done

Doug

It's just an animation - I made a phobos-ish-shape ( not a very good one, just a slightly squished circle ) - and moved it across a circular white object, against a black background - and then added some blur to soften it appropriately, keyframed the motion of the 'moon' to my best guess of the real time, rendered out the sequence at the right resolution and badda bing.

Doug

It's called 'CFM'

Complete Madness

Doug

I believe MSL has Stereo imagery up on the mast http://www.msss.com/msl/mastcam/index.html - and it will obviously require some sort of Hazcam's for IDD work, but I'll try and ask about that one at some point. The more 'general' questions I'll save up, the one's that are a bit more 'here and now' are the sort I hope to ask.

Doug

I didnt - I just made a total simualtion of the event. In my little realtime .movs - it's all simulated imagery, rendered in 3ds max, trying to replicate, as best possible, what it might look like

Doug

Yup




Doug

You have to use Keplerian I believe, but I'm not sure as to which values count for which values within Orsa. The only other spacecraft I got working values for was Ulysses

Hal - you have a lot of very cool additions to yours Care to share an exported universe? How on earth did MRO and it's Centaur get so far apart

Doug

Polar version ( not done many of these before, but I thought I'd have a go for fun.)

Doug

Yes - the "OMFG it's coming back down" moment of upper stages. Ariane's do this quite a lot - they get to about 150km or so, then start pitching down and you think "it's coming down -it's all gone wrong" - but they're gaining a lot of speed to get it up to a GTO

Some of the down-looking Delta 2 rocket cams show the upper stage 'taking a left' sometimes - very strange. If you run them at 4x speed, or faster, it's very noticeable.

Doug

For those of you that use the pancam tracking site and are wondering what the 'live' and 'archive' buttons are.

If you're searching for things that are more than a sol or 2 old ( i.e. 'what's THAT image from last week?' ) - use the Archive option as it's much much faster and easier on the server than the live mode, which has to do lots of processor intensive searching.

I would expect that the site will stay online for as long as the server doesnt get too loaded - if that happens then public access may have to be turned off - so be easy on it

Doug

Not sure exactly how we'll go, obviously Jim will know things outside the realm of just Pancam, but obviously, it'd be interesting to keep it imaging related. No strict rules though - we'll see how it goes

Doug

You'll probably find them with Google Earth and get good lat-long that way.

I beleive they all have visitors centres that are open at least some of the time

and whilst I'm about 3 hrs from Jodrell Bank...it's not part of the DSN

Doug

Jim Bell's agreed to do a brief Q'n'A in a few days time, so similar to the one I did for Steve, I want your questions! Try and keep it quite 'current' if you can, as we're going to make this more a 'news' outlet than a look back type chat.

We're going to try, if this one works, to do these every couple of weeks or so, a bit of Rover news and a bit of Q'n'A each time, but we'll see how this one goes first!

Fire away people

If they're all crap, don't worry, I've got LOADS in mind.


Doug

Here's a bit of a pan of the view - not a great one, but I'll keep working on them later in the week. If I hadnt seen the place 'sans fog' in the past, then I'd almost have been a bit dissapointed as I know how amazing the view is - but seing this sort of view ( at only about 550ft asl ) was very very strange indead

Doug