The shape of the moon itself. Where does 1st contact occur on the moon. Where does 4th occur. That will also challenge interpretation.

The rover DOES stop and turn. Autonav and Visidom mean the maximum distance per hour is typically 40m.

100 + 7,730 + 38,340 + 2,852 = 49,022

50km here we come


D

There are good reasons to doubt both the ground and the MEX PFS based observations - this paper takes them to task thoroughly.
http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Zah..._CH4_Doubts.pdf

Sniff. She was a good ship.

The very same, as an anaglyph

Den - please re-read the first post of this thread. This was for EPSC - which is now over.

Hopefully, as Voyager 2 has more instruments to bring to bear on the situation - it should help solve some of those problems.

So you're saying that New Horizons left the solar system as its third stage burned out, a few hundred miles above the Earth?

I don't think anyone would agree that's a fair assessment. Speed is not location. "Where are you?" "Mach 30"

Science (as well as the BBC, CNN, infact almost everyone) makes the wrong claim ( left the solar system) rather than the claim the paper that science is publishing ACTUALLY makes ( entered interstellar space )

The two are not one and the same - very important distinction to make.

In terms of the number of objects orbiting our Sun - Voyager will be passing them by for another 300 years.

No different to radio - you need to know where you are, and where the station is. MRO has to know where the Earth is. Goldstone has to know where MRO is, for example.



Same as radio - by programming in the appropriate information. It's a simple geometry problem.



I don't believe it can. Higher freq radio struggles with rain. The increase in bandwidth more than makes up for the times when you can't communicate (i.e. 10x faster, but maybe you drop 1 day in 10 is still a 9 fold increase)



No different, again, to radio - you just need slightly tighter pointing control. Spacecraft-to-Spacecraft laser has already been tested, as has orbiter to ground with Alphasat and ESA intends to use it in their version of TDRS. LRO has received data via laser into LOLA.

Doug

The arm, the rover chassis, the suspension, the organic blanks, the spare drill bits, the dust observing tray, the wheels.

Some, one, none, or all of the above.

It would probably damage solar panels quite badly. Moreover, you're then hung up on a rock with the arrays - you need to get 'off' that, which will cause more damage.

Nope - the data almost all comes down from MRO or Odyssey - there is very very little downlink via HGA ( it's slow, and in terms of power - expensive )

Data comes down in a prioritized order - vital engineering data first, then critical data to plan the next sol ( such as Navcam etc ) then science data.

I'd think that the SPICE update is simply a symptom of an automated script that runs at a point picked to be assumed as after downlink of the afternoons data from both MRO and Odyssey ( it can take Odyssey a while to downlink a full UHF relay session from MSL. 256kbps to Odyssey, but sometimes less than a quarter that speed from Odyssey to Earth )

Scrubbed for the day.

I know of a few people here who will be entertaining the idea that Curiosity is attempting to become member #3 of the Martian Meteoritic Society.

Oh interesting - great stuff! I thought I was going to see an animation of the depth-map that MAHLI sometimes makes. What software did you use for mesh generation?

We will find out when we get there.

Any HiRISE DTM (and I assume HRSC DTM ) gets matched to the reference MOLA data. In same cases, there might only be one or two MOLA points within an entire DTM with which to do that.

The uncertainty of MOLA, the sparsity of its data compared to the HiRISE or HRSC footprint, the size of a MOLA footprint, and os on and so forth - this results in the differences between neigbouring DTMs.

It's a non-trivial task to remove those differences - one which I know some developers here on lab have tried to solve using a gradient domain solution that took several months.

Which we know there will be several of. And software upgrades. And terrain differences. Extrapolating from the driving so far isn't really a great measure.

Get StereoPhotoMaker. It's free and you can roll-your-own in lots of different formats.

They have put out an AO for interested members of the scientific community.

With MSL - the pointing problems mainly stem from frying ChemCam with too long a sun-point.

It's a weekend.

VIIRS isn't going to give you globe - it's a pushbroom sensor from which new texture for blue-marble like graphics could be made (and indeed have for night-side imaging) but it won't inherently give you what you're looking for. Not even slightly. This - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegaller...ature_2159.html -for example, is a CGI rendering no more real that what you posted in the first post of this thread.

The best you are likely to find is Rosetta OSIRIS imaging from its Earth flybys - that's two 2k x 2k framing cameras that have taken some full earth views.