Maestro is to SAP as Photoshop Elements is to Photoshop CS2

There was a movie of Spirit driving up near the summit, that was from SAP / RSVP ( similar thing)

Doug

Well - you're describing SAP - the 3d environment in which they program the rovers activities. Sadly, it will never make it into the public domain, nor the huge ammount of data needed to drive such a simulation. but oh boy, wouldnt it be amazing

Doug

MRO will be able to identify the airbags if they are there. 1 - 1.5 m across would be a minimum of 3 full pixels across, potentially 9 to 12 pixels of area for each airbag, and almost as imporantly, some element of colour.

Compare my simulated images of Oppy at MOC-CPROTO and MRO-HIRISE - granted, these are probably a little optimistic, but hey...





Doug

I've got three talks I give for local Astro Socs and the BAA, a Spirit one, an Opportunity one ( as each rover has far more material than can ever be squeezed into an hour as it is ) and '33 Cameras' which covers Viking landers, Pathfinder, MGS, MO2K, MEX, MER and MRO from a more technical point of view...

But, I'm giving two talks to the BAA in the near future ( Oppy talk at the end of Jan in London - boiled down to 45 mins...eeek ) and then I'm talking at the Out of London Weekend a little later in the year.

Having given my Spirit talk and my Opportunity talk to the BAA at that point, and 33 Cameras to the BAA's Instruments and Imaging section, I think it's time for another talk. Something slightly more light hearted perhaps, but with a message in there, so I've come up with some ideas for what I think could be a fantastic talk in the 45 - 60 min bracket - showing some of the cock ups that have happened in the past, and the success that has occured despite these cockups. i.e. the Near trajectory, Genesis, Stardust Filter Wheel, Hubble mirror, Galileo HGA and so on and so forth - show what went wrong, why, and what was done to drag things back. I often get quite a few laughs during my talks as I try to keep them as light hearted but informative as I can ( I have suffered enough hour long talks of utter dead pan boredom to know that I never want to give one ) . I dont want to turn this into a stand up routine, but I think this talk could actually be good down to seniors at school as well ( 16-18ish ) and get people to realise the challenges and achievments of these missions. Look what NEAR managed despite totally missing it's first rendezvous with Eros, look how DS1 met Braille despite having no Star Scanner, look what Galileo did without an HGA etc etc, Look how, despite being a laughing stock, Hubble came back to glory etc etc

Whadda ya think and what do you think I should cover. I'm not too sure about covering TOTAL failures, Contour, MPL and MCO - perhaps I should, especially where there is a lesson to be learnt from it - but it'd be interesting to see what you guys think of the idea and what I might throw in there.


Doug

I dont mind it being at UMSF, but it was in the wrong sub-forum. It wasnt manned spaceflight (i.e. Soyuz, Shuttle, Shenzou etc) - it was more the off-topic forum called EVA MMU

Doug

Perhaps what he meant is that it wont be able to navigate itself to a specific point (i.e. Land in Eagle Crater) - but it does retain the ability to find something safe whereever it DOES end up.

Doug

This is from entry up to sol 249ish - plenty of work AFTER doing this but it works really well.

Similar maps for Eagle, and the Heatshield are future plans, but I'll do this one properly first.

Doug

It's not too bad at the moment - I'm moving it though, it's not manned spaceflight.

Doug

Happy Holidays,

or as they say down the road in Birmingham

"Happy Winterval"

(I jest not)

Make sure you all take at least 10, 15 minutes to close Firefox and remind yourself what your family look like during the Festive Period

Doug

And of course, the ratio doesnt have to be perfect, as whilst the moon orbits the planet, the planet wobbles a little to return the favour, that wobble may take a calculated measurement away from a perfect figure.

Doug

It's odd - I can have a graph of posts, members etc per month

But post views is just a total totted up subforum by subforum.

BUT

I could go back and poll it for the stats up to each month in turn and do it that way

It'll take a while, I'll see if I can do it tonight inbetween banzai Opportunity Map Making

Doug

Sept 14th - 1,000,000 total views (in 18 months of forum life)

December 21st - 2,087,967 (so an extra million in 3.5 months)

Wow

Doug

Oh, dont tell me they think ETAL is part of Marco's name instead of et al (meaning and others)

Doug

This is what I'm working toward with the mobility data - each sol they drive has a map, but they use different scale maps depending on how far they drive on any one sol (so a 1m drive might be on a map that's 5 x 5m, but 50m drive might be on a map that's 50m x 50m, but the map will be 500px x 500px in both cases)

My plan is to go around, pasting them one on top of the other, for the whole Endurance campaign Once it's done, I'll then make my own, tidy version over the top with a rover for each end of sol position and hopefully, a phil-o-matic Endurance map under it

I'm thinking of keeping it around 5cm per pixel, which would be a 4k x 4k map of Endurance.

This is sols 264 to 271

Doug

R257 are Stereo Red ( so can be co-registered with previous imaging ) and Near & Far IR for geology.

Doug

Unfortunately, only the data sets for EDL are out, and not the derrived onces such as altitude, speed, temp, pressure etc etc. Once they are, I'll put some graphs together for all three ( MPF, MERA, MERB ) - and see what story they tell. Infact, I dont know if they actually will be out - I'd have thought if they were going to be, they would have been by now.

Doug

They'd never do well on Countdown

Doug

I agree - it's not much and certainly far from conclusive..

But, given fairly comprehensive MOC coverage of the landing ellipse, it's basically all there is. It's not much, I know, but it's arguably the only target worthy of HIRISE's attention.

Doug

Ohh - I'm already working on a little something

Doug

I cant help thinking of a Mid '90's TV series called El Dorado...it was utterly TERRIBLE

Doug

And indeed part of Spirit's deck pan that went into the Summit Super-Pan - in exactly the same location as on the Opportunity one. Not quite as clear, but visible.

Doug

It can be seen in the previous Opportunity deckpan as well

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...ment/bdeck.html

Doug

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pa...E1P2741L1M1.JPG

Odd patch of fuzz in there - any ideas?

694 p2741.05 10 0 0 10 2 22 pancam_nighttime_opacity_L1R1


Doug

Data from http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r16_r21/im...6/R1602082.html Courtesy NASA/JPL/MSSS - go play 'spot the chute' - I cant find it, then again, I couldnt find the Pathfinder one either.

The lables are my best guess from the description on the BBC News website

Doug

It was due to a failed Solid iirc.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9701/17/rocket.exp...xplosion.36.mov

"We have had an anomaly..." Yup - that's what it was

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/safety...its/12_5_05.pdf has good details also.



Doug