I'm guessing you want at least an equiv to a 35m dish.

What's the pricetag on one of those anyway - and would an array of smaller dished adding up to a similar or larger size be a cheaper option

Doug

AH...acronym heaven

Doug

Now to be fair - they're with-holding nothing. It all gets dumped into ESA's version of the PDS eventually.

They're with-holding no more so than say, Mini-TES or the MOC teams

They ARE bad at Public Outreach - and I'm trying to put together a paper to explain what and why the public should expect from them.

In terms of Data Disclosure, they're no worse than NASA and infact, some MEX stuff was available publicly in a period 5x faster than some Cassini stuff.

Just because One instrument set on Cassini, and the 10 Cameras on each MER get dumped online fairly rapidly doesnt mean that that's the agency wide policy.

ESA is lagging - yes - but it's still doing it's part w.r.t. proper raw data.

JAXA however, is the worst of the lot

Doug

ooooo Nice stuff, far FAR better than the Tes efforts...but...7 months since anything

Doug

I'm not going to get all draconian - but technically I think it's breaching some copyright of Nature's to do so.

By all means talk about it via email ( I have - they're great ) but not here

Doug

I think what Steve's updates, and the Pancam site show us is that they're the driving force behind the publicity of this mission. Steve and Jim have clearly done and wanted to do so much in terms of outreach..

But the Legacy pan from spirit speaks volumes - they supplied it to the Photojournal and the JPL web team not long after it was taken....and they just never put it online.

They've done a better job of outreach on this mission than any other unmanned space mission in history...but

We've seen next to nothing from the Mini TES team - I appreciated that P.C. is a busy guy - but the last update on their site is the Haematite map taken from Opportunitys lander. THe Mossbauer and APXS teams I can understand - they're based in Germany and actually - we've had lots of graphs from them...but again, a blog type entry like Steve's would be superb!

I think a mandatory outreach budget as a %'ge of the mission budget. Only a tiny ammount - but it should be in there.

I lookforward to how Hirise manages to be the Peoples camera - will it be as fast as MER for getting stuff online, or more like, say, Odyssey which is about 3 months delayed - or somewhere in between.

Doug

Transverse Impulse Rocket System ( I think?)

and DIMES was Descent Imaging Motion Estimation System...

Ladies and Gentlemen - welcome to acronym heaven

Doug

I HATE Philae - Roland was much better

Doug

Hell yes - they it would be madness to throw away a fantastic instrument in space with so much opportunity to do good science. Be it an Asteroid, Comet or BOTH flybys

Genesis - granted - not much it could do ( and I believe it's now officially retired, and drifting into a slight earth leading solar orbit )

Stardust - it's going to be a tired, fuel-starved vehicle when it gets home.

But this is almost brand new

Doug

Well - the only pan I can think of that is taken but not there- is the Independance pan - and to be fair thta's probably not on the ground in its totallity yet.

The only think I'm sad about is that they never really took a nice backward looking mosaic ( say 4 x 3 ) at around the fram / anatolia area - showing the crisp tracks leading back to Eagle

Doug

Yeah - this is one TINY asteroid - I think Dactyl ( Ida's tiny moon - an asteroid that Galileo flew past en route to Jupiter) is the only thing even remotely on the same size - but the asteroid Hayabusa is visiting is even smaller than THAT

It's like visiting a single block of houses.

Doug

The mighty....GERICOM

(no, I hadnt heard of them either - but it's been fine since day 1 )

Doug

Once they get samples back from Rosetta they'll learn a lot of things like..

How in hells name Rosetta brought a sample home when it's not a sample return mission

Doug

Still a long way to go

Several km's - 3 perhaps

Doug

It's true - 1.7 Gig Centrino, 80gb HDD, 1440x1050 screen, 512mb of ram ( which I've upped to 1024) and a DVDRW drive

£799 at Christmas

Doug

The supermarket bit is already true for my laptop It came from Aldi

Doug

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...b_al_khali.html

Same 'format' as the Lion King pan - it's a beauty

That makes it 8 1/2 pans to Spirit, 6 to Opportunity (including two halves )

Doug

Well - I've done EXACTLY the same thing with an aviation map of the cotswolds - I can make a greyscale elevation map using the contours as a basis - basically shade each 'band' of contour a different grey scale - then blur the whole thing to make it smooth

Doug

To be honest - I dont know - but with a bit of thinking, I could make it 1x accurate - at the moment I'd imagine it's 5x exagerated.

Doug

Different filters, different times of day, different opacity conditions etc etc

Doug

I've taken those contours - generated an elevation map - and came up with these...

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_images/elev_1.jpg

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_images/elev_2.jpg

Doug

And if you do - could you consult people here w.r.t. whatever the 'stretching' algorythm might be for them

As we so often find with MER / Cassini imagery - a badly stretched image is not worth much more than no image at all

doug

they alternate between backwards and forwards every couple of sols

Doug

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_images/o_indep.jpg 270kb

The slides in a viewmaster disk are very small arnt they? You could probably squish two, or maybe 4 onto a 35mm transparancy - and you can have those printed quite cheaply.

I was thinking of fashioning something myself to drop into the one we have.

Thinking about it - I believe I have a relative who is in Surveying who has, tucked in his shed somewhere, the stereo viewing sort of hardware they used to use with aerial photographs. I may give him a bell

Doug