Shatner's let himself down I'm afraid - he's been appearing in a rather bad breakfast cereal advert here in the UK "One bowl......two weeks!".

Doug

If we were to add a person to give scale to MER images....who would you want? Steve? Jim? Emily-a-la-Mars-Suit?

Some day being Apollo 12

Doug

The various iterations of Pluto missions had lots of names (PKE was my least favorite) but NH is a fairly sensible and appropriate name imho. Same as with MER - lots of different names get batted about, but the one it flys with seems to make sense once it's under way and doing its thing. I hated the names Spirit and Opportunity - but now I couldnt imagine them being anything else.

Doug

It'd be cheaper, and the results would be better to just bolt on instruments to another spacecraft rather than trying to rescue another one

Doug

Steve used Big Ben when he presented at DPS iirc

Doug

All sounds a little bit Nozomi-ish really I just hope they can keep the think held together for another 5 years

Doug

I hope no one refers to here as the blue forum...because that means something else all together

Doug

This is a UK only joke

I'll overlay the Meridiani route over Norfolk - they match

(Norfolk is notoriously flat)

Doug

LMFAO - I gave a talk on Opportunity last night - and said "right now they're running their first proper science sequence with the arm since the trouble started, but I had to leave a little too early to find out if it worked"

And it HAS worked. Thank GOD for that!!!

Doug

I put Spirit's traverse to date onto a map of London a while back - it takes it from Oxford Circus to the Imax Theatre in Waterloo - I'll try and dig it up from a presentation


Doug

I'm off to give a talk tonight, so I'll miss the rest of it, I hope someone else can grab a few choice moments.

D

Bye bye...

Working inside the fairing must be a nightmare! I hope with the huge press the KSC press team are giving to the RTG that we get to see some photos of that being done - it must be like trying to take the engine out of your car in a shed that's 6 inches bigger than the car is. Seems odd that they've left a dummy structure in place - perhaps that's to do with keepin the whole thing balanced and not jar the contact points between NH and the payload adaptor on the 3rd stage.

Looks like the first half of the fairing is being put in place...

Anyone figured out if/when NH will overtake P10/11 V1/2 ?

Doug

And an RTG, and Wheels, and a mass budget of 1500kg and a $3B budget and Pancam, and........

Given the expected conditions, the mass, volume, data, financial and chronological budgets....I think they did fairly well. The initial mission design really didnt have very long on the surface before dropping the link, so there was little sense in designing anything for any sort of surface duation.

Did Viking tell us everything about Mars? Nope - we have to go back with new questions to ask

Doug

I thought Olivine couldnt last long in water - hence the dissapointment when the rocks out on the plains back in the early days contained plenty of it - bog standard olivine rich basalts.

I was at the Natural History Museum again yesterday, going round photographing all the minerals samples - there's THOUSANDS

Doug

I am reminded of an episode of Father Ted....

The idiotic Father Dougal can not understand why the little model cow on the window ledge looks to be the same size as a real cow a few hundred meters away on a hill, and the long suffering Father Ted tries to explain it...

Ted : Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These (pointing to plastic cows on table) are very small; those (pointing out of the window) are far away...
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/St...ounds/small.wav


Now concentrate....Alan's head is small, and NH is FAAAR away...


Lovely photo - kudos to which ever KSC/JHU/Press person took it, it's the sort of thing you'd put on your wall, and in 20, 30 years time show to young relatives "this is what we did in 2005"

Doug

NH will be able to see Pluto at a resolution better than that of the HST from 12 weeks before fly-by



Doug

A major fuel depot caught fire - millions of gallons of fuel burning away. 20 individual fires in all, 10 of which are now out, the remaining ten may take up to a few days to put out.

No sure how or why it went up yet - but the explosions were heard from miles away.

Doug

Smaller SW heading plume today

http://130.92.54.203/rsbern/noaa/dw/realti...c-corrected.jpg

0900 :
http://www.btinternet.com/~wokingham.weath...sg-0900-uk.html

1200 :
http://www.btinternet.com/~wokingham.weath...sg-1200-uk.html

1500 :
http://www.btinternet.com/~wokingham.weath...sg-1500-uk.html

We were at the Ice Rink outside the Natural History museum at about 1230 and we saw no sign of anything in the air then - it was a lovely clear day - and the train we took would have gone very close, certainly under all that smoke, but we didnt see a thing. I'm just amazed and glad no one has died.

I'll try and collate all the imagery over the next week and see if I can make a big fading movie. It must be like a horror film down there...


Doug

We were in London this weeked - and we looked very hard on the train on the way back to Leicester (should have gone fairly close) but we didnt see anything...it was dark so we'd probably only have seen flames, but we saw nothing. Quite a few people injured - million of gallons of fuel went up, supposedly heard in HOLLAND

I'm hoping for a clear day tomorrow so that Modis on Terra and Aqua see something.

http://130.92.54.203/rsbern/noaa/dw/realti...ent/n1bcurr.jpg

WOHHH
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets....terra.250m.jpg


Doug

iirc - Galileo actually entered the atmosphere out of visibility from Earth to the very last moments wouldnt have been visible.

Doug

I'd have said Endurance and the Heatshield

Doug