A full-up system operating in the expected mission environment (temp, pressure, etc.) for at least 3x the desired mission life would be an absolute minimum.

I know of two "official" websites: the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/ and the project website http://missionjuno.swri.edu/ Both have been updated more recently than 2013 and I'm not sure I'd call them redundant.

If you're referring to the JPL website http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/juno/ it just has links to the two above.

Gee, you've managed to skip over my entire professional career from Mars Observer on. The only "exciting" things that have happened since 1990 were Huygens and Rosetta?

Perhaps it's more often the case that the elbow actuator is on the other side.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8856 is a link to the original paper.

This seems of limited utility; conventional Hohmann transfers use less energy for orbits of usefully low periapse or landing. It increases trip time but does allow for more flexibility in departure time.

Instruments built by universities cost NASA as much (or more) as those built by industry.

Hasn't the notebook always been this way? I'm sure somebody thought it was a good idea.
As data producers we have no control over how the notebook is implemented, so complain to Wash U.

If you had bought a commercial flash card in 2002 and used it on Earth as heavily as the flash on MER has been used, it would most likely be non-functional by now.

Testing how the flash degrades over time and validating one's flash management code when, say, half the flash blocks have failed, is quite a job. I wouldn't have done it for the short MER mission, so it's great that it's worked as well as it has.

That said, I'd be curious to know the root cause of the problems so they can be mitigated in the future if possible.

You may have to wait for the PDS data releases for some of them.

We have narrowband filter data from 200 to 1100 nm but if the filter is only 50 nm wide there's not much point in showing all the out-of-band values (which are all down at the noise floor), so I stripped them out to make the document shorter, and this is a line that I missed.

Everyone's subjective opinion about what the images should look like notwithstanding, the PDS corrected products represent the best way we know of to remove instrument signature. If you want more insight into that, I've tried to exhaustively document the radiometric properties of the cameras on the PDS volumes in the file MSL_MMM_CAL.TXT on each PDS volume (for example http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/msl/M...MSL_MMM_CAL.TXT )

True, but by coincidence the MAHLI correction factors are around the same as post 166's flawed non-linear values for Mastcam: BGR is about 1.16/1/1.05.

I don't know how to answer this question any more clearly than what I wrote in the PDS SIS and discussed ad nauseum in this thread, see, e.g., post 401.

A PDS color-corrected image of a white target imaged under terrestrial sunlight would be white. The closest thing to a white target we have ever imaged on Mars was the rover body in early sols before it got dusty.

From http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2014/pdf/2449.pdf "MARS COLOR CAMERA ONBOARD MARS ORBITER MISSION: SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES &
EARTH IMAGING RESULTS", A.S. Arya et al:

We have almost no idea where MGS or Viking are by now, so the chance of spotting them in a random search is nearly zero. We can't even see orbiters with certainty when we know exactly where they are. We couldn't find MGS with HiRISE right after it was lost.

This discussion should be moved over to "images and cameras" where I thought we'd beaten it to death already. ADMIN: It has been.

Technically you can't just multiply the square-root-encoded data. The PDS correction process linearizes the images and applies the corrections. That said, working entirely in non-linear space may be OK for the dynamic range of the typical image.

I don't know who's right (I tend to believe Doug) but these statements aren't mutually exclusive: you can be in a hyperbolic escape orbit and on a collision course at the same time.

The first. http://www.msss.com/all_projects/mmm-dea.php

It's the time on chute that is uncertain. http://www.spaceflight101.com/msl-edl-reconstruction.html -- "For the Entry, Descent and Landing Sequence, the time under parachute was the biggest variable. It could have been as short as 55 seconds and as long as 170 seconds."

JPEG is not lossless. Lossless after decompression is exactly what came from the camera head. At least the first ~650 EDL frames were sent lossless.

All of the EDL thumbnails were returned in the first few days, and then selected full-res images in JPEG form, and then eventually in full-res lossless -- but the whole process took months. The last wasn't sent down until Feb-Mar 2013, and I don't think the post-landing images have ever been returned lossless (though I'm not sure myself, it's all in the PDS by now so someone could check.) The dataset I usually use only goes to shortly after touchdown.

There are many times when the rover is sending low-priority data because nothing higher is available, and most of this was sent that way, so any impression that this was starving out surface data is mistaken.

A paper about Junocam in Space Science Reviews is online at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s...hor/onlineFirst

I'm not 100% sure this is true, as it was discussed as a backup in case of Navcam failure during development. But it's certainly not assured; Mastcam is not even allowed to be powered on during driving at present.

As has been pointed out, there seems to be some confusion about how night vision works. I know of three flavors: image intensification of ambient light ("starlight scopes"), near-IR with active illumination in the near-IR (seen in some security cameras, baby monitors, etc.) and thermal IR. We can't do any of those with anything on MSL and the longest exposures we could take would be unlikely to even detect the ground. Near-IR works no better than visible for ambient light -- worse, because the sensitivity of Mastcam in the near IR is quite low compared to the visible. The best we could do is use the MAHLI LEDs for illumination, but the arm can't be deployed while driving and in the stowed position the LEDs aren't pointed in a useful direction, and they're not all that bright anyway.

It's an interesting idea that slip properties might change as a function of temperature, but I don't think there's any evidence that this might be true, and I don't think there are any known examples of it for terrestrial analogs.

You're right, though we could have a discussion about the definition of a global dust storm versus a planet-encircling dust event, etc. At any rate the 2001 storm was much more severe than the 2007 one and current thinking is that these are somewhat random and hard to forecast. I think that the 2001 storm would have killed the MERs almost certainly.

It's an interesting question as to how long a solar-powered lander would be claimed to last at this point and whether MER experience could be used to lengthen that beyond a few months. I'm skeptical that the MER experience could be banked on.

[This discussion is off-topic for this thread but I think there's some new and interesting points being made, so perhaps the mods could move these items elsewhere if they wish.]

There have been no cleaning events at Gale as far as I know. I think that if a MER had landed at Gale it would be dead or dying from power loss by now.

Also, there hasn't been a global dust storm since 2001, but if there had been, there's an excellent chance that the MERs would not have survived it.

The Junocam images of the Moon during Earth flyby are very similar to the best approaches of Io in terms of size and resolution.

It's too early to say what the satellite encounter distances and times will look like for the real mapping orbit. By intent we don't get that close -- see http://www.trylam.com/files/AIAA_2008-7368...uno_Mission.pdf