The reference I quoted upthread has the launch in July 2020 and arrival in January of 2021, but that may have been with a different set of constraints.

True, but the small one could be a shrink of the large one.

Seems like there are two images in machi's last post, but I'm not sure where they came from -- video grabs?

Still

Isn't this just the same image replicated at different sizes, as was pointed out earlier?

If it was a full sequence, one would expect to see a big change in phase angle from inbound to outbound since the geometry changes rapidly around C/A.

[Unless the whole image sequence was taken a fair time out from C/A, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Still don't know what the camera FOV or IFOV was or how the spacecraft was pointed during the fyby. Was it just inertially fixed?]

What does "webcam-like" mean? A camera is a camera. These images might be a bit blurry, but they're a lot better IMHO than the science camera's on, for example, Deep Space 1. Most use of panchromatic or relatively broadband color imaging is morphologic and has little to do with calibration. As often as not, calibration is more about removing objectionable image signature, not data analysis, and these images look pretty good. I'm impressed, and even more so by the close flyby distance.

Can that be right? Navigationally I'd have thought getting that close was impossible without some kind of autonomous or at least very fast-turn optical navigation. Impressive if true.

As far as I can tell, this gets you to the raw pushframe data, which is going to be a little tricky to work with. It seems only the global WAC mosaic has been archived, not any regionals at different phase angles.

I'd email ASU and ask.

The usual reasons: cost, complexity, increased mission risk.

Volumetrically it's impossible to get a microprobe to weigh as much as a piece of tungsten. At some point it just wouldn't fit in the available space.

Not a foregone conclusion, since MSL probably wasn't using all of the C3 available.

In general I think C3 scales as the square of injected mass, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis of the 2020 opportunity. For 2018 there is a detailed breakdown in http://www.nap.edu/reports/13117/App%20G%2...gy-Explorer.pdf

Here's the C3 in km2/sec2 for the opportunities from 2009 to 2022. You can clearly see that 2020 is much higher (worse) than 2018.
Source: table 2 in Interplanetary Mission Design Handbook: Earth-to-Mars Mission Opportunities and Mars-to-Earth Return Opportunities 2009–2024, NASA/TM—1998–208533.

2009: 10.27
2011: 8.95
2013: 8.78
2016: 7.99
2018: 7.74
2020: 13.17
2022: 13.79

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...2011_216988.pdf is an interesting study of potential improvements to MSL; one of the options discusssed is replacing the entry balance masses with an actively-controlled trim tab. Of course it's not clear how many changes to the MSL architecture are going to be possible for cost and schedule reasons.

The Clementine cameras were all framing cameras with filter wheels, so no.

That said, slewing a pushbroom imager is not that big a deal; see http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/i..._98_phobos_rel/ Of course I don't know how CE2's attitude control system works.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but the idea that the science comes first in a mission is, in my experience, somewhat idealized. You can't sensibly design a mission without any engineering constraints. Usually there is a mission concept with total cost, rough LV selection and spacecraft total mass, then a science definition team, and then an instrument AO. This doesn't seem a lot different from that.

At any rate, I didn't think that criticizing mission selections was what this forum was about.

Do you separately account for the slight pointing differences between the cameras on the RSM and the RSM itself? If not, that will cause small errors, though maybe not enough to matter for your application.

pxform with the appropriate frames should give you what you want without the need to compute the SCLK (ckgp is an older, lower-level routine) but if ckgp works, no reason not to use it.

I am just a lowly engineer and I build what scientists tell me they need, but I don't see how this follows. It's not like the Decadal Survey has to be inviolate. We all have to adapt to fiscal and political realities.

I have yet to see a science rationale for what returned samples will be used for and how they should be selected with enough detail to inform engineering. Caching without return is clearly a waste.

If they haven't had their Critical Design Review yet, then the design is not "done". I don't think they've even had PDR.

There's no technical or schedule reason we couldn't have better imaging on InSight. As to cost, how much is it worth?

The instruments will be recompeted and while it would be nice if the landing environment were more benign, I expect that proposed instruments will be expected to prove their robustness to landing debris.

How could it be not OK to post a public URL? Hopefully they weren't relying on security by obscurity to hide this information.

BTW, for those wanting to develop software and not familiar with SPICE, once you have all the right kernels loaded, a single call to pxform will produce a rotation matrix that will transform a vector from one frame (say, MSL_MASTCAM_LEFT) to another (say, MSL_LANDING_SITE). See http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/toolkit_docs/C/index.html (though I like to use pyspice -- https://github.com/rca/PySPICE )

http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/MSL/misc/icarrasco/ I'm guessing.

Read it again, CTX found the targets; HiRISE just got higher-res views of them.

For example, Zent and McKay's 1994 Icarus paper "The Chemical Reactivity of the Martian Soil and Implications for Future Missions" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...019103584710475 says nothing about perchlorates that I can see.

I don't think so. At the time H2O2 or superoxides were used as explanations for the O2 release seen after wetting in the GEx experiment, and CO2 release in the LR experiment. I'm no chemist but I don't think perchlorates alone explain these results; see http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2011/pdf/2003.pdf for example. And I don't think that perchlorates are technically superoxides.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong but it would take an actual reference from pre-Phoenix to convince me that anyone had mentioned perchlorates in the context of Viking.

The press release says "We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy..." (italics mine.)

The question is whether any detected organics are from instrument contamination or from the surface. Presumably at some point they will run the Organic Check Material through the system to address this.

I agree that this has not been a PR triumph. IMHO the best course would have been to say nothing until there was more definitive news, but with media attention this is easier said than done.

It's not what I would call an "off-the-shelf" camera. http://eclipticenterprises.com/press_releases/928

As to not being "rad-hardened", it depends on what you mean by that. There have been several MSSS cameras (MRO MARCI and LROC WAC, for example) that aren't rad-hardened but can recover from radiation upsets.

What does "a little bit too dark" mean? Feel free to tweak the color however you wish, just don't claim you're doing something other than making the image fit your subjective taste, because you're not.

Radiometrically, I think the surface is more brown than pink. I suspect the MSL mosaic that Doug shows has been punched up and looks garishly colored to me. Photoshop white balance isn't radiometrically accurate.

I'm sorry to beat this dead horse again, and I'll quit if people just stop asking about it

The autoexposure is just trying to get the histogram to fill the dynamic range. When there's a bright piece of rover structure in the image, the exposure is shorter so as not to saturate the rover, so the ground is inevitably darker.

To make an accurate mosaic, one would decompand the image to 12 bits linear and then scale all images by their relative exposure times, and then convert all of the images to 8 bits using one's favorite gamma scheme for final display. Usually one doesn't go to that much trouble and just scales in 8-bit space in an ad hoc manner.

As to how bright it is, I could figure that out in radiometric terms, but I'm not sure that would mean much from a practical standpoint.