I'm a coauthor on the LPSC abstract and you can't really get that level of detail out of those figures IMHO.

There's no debate that there are slight color differences between the cameras. They are not intentional. We didn't do anything to explicitly balance the colors; the raw images are just what's coming out of the camera. The differences are caused by the spectral transmissions of the lenses and the slightly different bandpasses of the IR cut filters. I spent quite a bit of time on the color-corrected archive products, which have been delivered to PDS, but I don't know when they will be released. And there will still be some uncertainty about what "color-corrected" means; I tried to be explicit in the documentation about exactly what the processing entailed, but radiometry is complicated and these instruments are cameras, not colorimeters or spectrometers.

Quite. Also, we acknowledge that the uncorrected color between MAHLI and Mastcam is slightly different. wildespace, you can stop making this point. The PDS delivery will have color-corrected versions of all images, and then you can argue about those if you wish.

Who's insisting that? Not me, see post #270 in this thread. There are (IMHO, minor) differences in color and I have explained why.

The LEDs become very dim at distances of more than a few centimeters (inverse-square law). You could potentially take an image of something like the RSM with the LEDs and a long-enough exposure, but I question if it would be that interesting.

Depends on what you mean by "slo-mo". If I take a 1 frame/sec movie and play it back at 1/2 frame/sec than that's technically "slow motion" but it will look pretty jerky. The Mastcam frame rate at 720P resolution is only something like 10 fps, and even tiny subframes can only speed that up so much. I wouldn't call the results "slo-mo" relative to the standard commercial 30 fps video rate.

The paper says that only about 5% of the total dose MSL saw in cruise was from solar events, the rest being from galactic cosmic rays. GCR dose rate is thought to be weakly anticorrelated with the solar cycle.

They do point out that "the SEP contribution could conceivably be many times larger in a different time frame" (i.e., closer to solar max.)

Unfortunately there is no public information I can point you to about all the video modes and options; this information will be in the PDS release which by the schedule should occur next month. For now I'll just say that your conjectures are perfectly reasonable.

I can't parse this completely, but note that these are raw images without any flat-field correction. I was unable to find any sensor crud in this image that wasn't there before launch.

Huh? Are you talking about sensor crud? Prove to me that you see something that hasn't been there since before launch.

I'm not following your reasoning; the entire tire is one piece of aluminum, beefed up where the flexures attach.

Maybe the slide I referenced will be useful.

Doug has seen the damaged VSTB wheels in person and I haven't, so he's in a better position than me to know if the anodizing is actually broken off or not.

It's not really a linear process. The tire is one solid piece of aluminum. It would have to be ripped all the way across so it started unpeeling from the flexures before driving would be impeded. Like the viewgraphs I linked to earlier said, localized rupture in the tire was expected.

We're talking about sharp pebbles, I don't think driving around them would be feasible.

Anodizing is an electrochemical process whereby the top layer of aluminum is converted to alumina (AlO2) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anodizing
There are several types and they tend to produce different thicknesses of alumina. In my experience, you can get a thin layer to pop off if you work at it, but I suspect that these dents are just specular highlights off the intact anodizing, since the black anodizing is not very matte.

See slide 32 in http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...4/1/12-0690.pdf

I won't speculate on these images, but the wheels are pretty thin (I don't know what the actual number is) and the loads can be pretty high on a sharp rock.
Aluminum isn't that hard.

That's a nice empirical observation.

Somewhere in a review package I expect there's a detailed analysis of how the wheel was designed, with allowable levels of damage, predicted damage and margins. I haven't seen that package and if I had, I couldn't post the details anyway. So any assurance I could offer on this forum wouldn't really be fact-based, but I assume the designers had it under control.

Over on nasaspaceflight.com someone proposed a drinking game based on how many times this comes up

It's easy to take shots at this admittedly sloppy writing, but I'm not sure that even sites like http://solar-center.stanford.edu/singing/singing.html do all that good a job of explaining how SOHO actually measures "sounds" from the Sun. Calling any periodic behavior a "sound" seems like be a source of some confusion.

It was a different version of the same software, not completely different software.

We've always talked about ground software and flight software. It's descriptive and unambiguous. It's hard to think of alternatives that would be better.

It's also the same software that was flying the spacecraft on the way to Mars and during EDL.

Potentially these were sent up to and stored on the orbiters during conjunction and are only now being downlinked.

Climatologists love the faint young sun paradox because it gives them an interesting problem to work on. They're not astrophysicists so they can't work on the possibility that the Standard Solar Model is wrong or incomplete.

I am neither an expert nor a big believer in age dating by crater counting, especially on Mars where we have burial and exhumation and complex erosional processes to worry about. Certainly Malin and Edgett assign most of the sedimentary rocks to the Noachian; see the whole discussion of age relations starting on page 1929 of "Sedimentary Rocks of Early Mars" Science 290, December 2000. But I'm not convinced anyone really knows in detail.

I reread Haberle ("Early Mars Climate Models", JGR 103 E12, November 1998) and it has plenty of "escape clauses" for how early Mars could have been warm enough to have large amounts of liquid water, so I think the motivation for a more exotic mechanism is not absolute. That said, the last few paragraphs of Malin and Edgett they advance a somewhat "Kite-like" hypothesis (before Kite did, obviously):

I'm not convinced that a lot of geomorphologists would agree with this statement. If the mound is an erosional remnant instead of being formed in place, I'm not sure it's that remarkable on its own.

The paper is well worth reading, but as it says in section 6.2, it really doesn't address the valley networks and alluvial fans. (It tries, but doesn't completely succeed to my taste.)

As a general rule, explaining Earthlike morphology with non-Earthlike processes needs a high level of motivation. ("If it looks like a duck", etc.)
IMHO, section 1 oversells that motivation in the case of early Mars, though I need to read Haberle 1998, which I hadn't recalled was so definitive. But as a jumping-off point for discussion, the paper is very good.

I think you're forgetting about the IAU prime meridian definition.