On the contrary, my sense is that the media loves the underdog spin and even if they don't do anything else they'll be viewed as heroes for having tried on their "shoestring budget."

I can appreciate that the tone of what they write is a bit grating, but I propose we treat them with rule 2.6 in mind as much as possible.

No; transponding is just getting a phase-coherent copy of the uplink carrier back on the downlink without modulation. But based on the last updates to http://spacecollege.org/isee3/ they have succeeded in commanding the s/c to send modulated data. Still not clear what if anything is being sent, but this is definitely very encouraging.

Good news, but I wish they said exactly what they have done. Sending command bits and getting a change in the spacecraft state would be more encouraging than sending an unmodulated uplink carrier and getting transponding, but both could plausibly be called "two-way communication."

Interesting, but somewhat confused by the fact that many images are of stuff on the rover (all of the cal target images, for example.) I assume you didn't filter these out.

Laughable probably isn't quite fair. For example, a lot of effort was spent on collision avoidance for the Juno flyby, a lot more than you might expect statistics to justify. But given the lack of knowledge of the trajectory, it's certainly premature to worry.

Now they're saying that they are waiting for NASA approval to transmit (which seems odd). I don't know if they have to explicitly command to get ranging or if the spacecraft will transpond just with an uplink carrier.

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...2/1/07-0166.pdf is a good reference for how ranging works. I don't know if they have access to the needed ground hardware or if they can fake it with SDR or if this is one of the things they're trying to pay for the DSN to do.

As an aside, orbit determination could be done without any ranging data (Gauss managed it in 1801 after all, see http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_97-01...orbit_ceres.pdf ) but I suspect that this would not be accurate enough to support their navigation goals.

The stated error is 250e3 km, presumably derived from RA/dec errors in pointing since they don't have any range data. Unless there's some data they haven't described, they really know very little about the actual positional error, and prognosticating impacts or approach distances is nearly meaningless at this point. They need ranging, and for that they have to command the spacecraft AFAIK.

One wonders how much of this is a real concern and how much an attempt to increase drama. The latter would be understandable but I look forward to the technical details.

Note that this was simply a detection, something that was done by other groups back in March. If they transmit and get a response, then that will be news.

True, but usually if they explicitly say this, it's code for "probably won't happen."

"If this program is successful and on time" is well short of "planned".

I tell the science team to discount any bright object in the UV that doesn't have an obvious color different from the visible leakage of the UV LEDs. These are just high-albedo objects reflecting leakage.

There's a flat window, an oddly-curved Schmidt corrector and the secondary, and then the primary. But I hadn't worked out how large a reflection from a flat window would be.

The Navcams have a flat ND filter on the front (they look shiny) so it might be that. I believe Doug when he says he was told the mast was pointed away during drilling, but obviously one could confirm this by looking at the SPICE kernels. I don't know what's going on, and I'm afraid to ask after the kerfuffle with the cosmic rays/pinholes/whatever.

That was my guess. (BTW, technically, it's a window, not a lens -- see http://mappingignorance.org/2013/03/05/las...ositys-chemcam/ )

What would you give as an example of a less conservative period?

Before Doug's version, the smear was serving as a useful amateur watermark. Soon we won't even have to bother to make our own processed version (though you'll have to trust me that our internal version is better than any of yours. )

I don't want to see mosaics that have sensor smear off the RTG this time.

Is it just me, or does all the arm hardware show up twice in this mosaic?

I sure hope there isn't any dust on the optics; the cameras are stowed pointed down and are well off the surface, and the lenses are recessed several centimeters from the sunshade apertures.

Most in-field scattering is either from residual reflections off the AR coatings of the lenses or lens surface roughness.

This recapitulates a discussion we've had within the imaging team. I tend to agree with Fred; we never characterized the Mastcams for stray light behavior at this kind of level.

I think you could do something with the sky brightness far enough away from the sun, and I believe that's part of the tau strategy. Phobos in the field, my guess is probably not.

Nice job, Thomas!

If my boss is listening: just once you'd think we could image the whole rover. This mosaic could have been iconic, but with the big black gap no mosaic ever will be IMHO.

I don't actually see what you're talking about, but these are focus-merged products and any poor focus areas are probably either from inadequate range in the original Z-stack or from glitches in the focus-merging algorithm.

I've never seen anything like this in an MSSS camera (can't claim to have looked). On our MSL cameras they are all internal except for MARDI, which is blocked from direct sun by its mounting bracket. In general if such a spot was localized (not linear like many cosmics), only occurred in a specific lighting geometry, repeated from one frame to another, wasn't obviously correlated to a surface feature, and was at a plausible angle relative to the vent filter, then this would be the best explanation.

Unfortunately I don't know of a public source of information about where such filters might be on the navcams (the round black thing is not an optics vent but an electronics box vent) and I haven't looked for them in published images of the hardware.

What you are looking at is not caused by stray light -- those are hot pixels being smeared downtrack by the Junocam TDI clocking.

The stray light hypothesis being proposed is through the vent holes that allow the optics to equalize pressure during launch. Most MSSS cameras use small sintered metal porous filters for these vents -- you can see them in many photos of our instruments, for example http://www.msss.com/images/science/MARCI140_cb.jpg where they're the small round apertures on the lens barrels just below the sunshades. If you had sun shining on one of these (not geometrically possible for our cameras on MSL) then you could conceivably get small focused spots from bounces off the optical surfaces.

I think you've done a very reasonable job. The actual sequence has a bit too much use of autoexposure and too little pointing overlap for my taste. We may be able to clean up some of the smear artifacts, but that might not work well with so much dynamic range.