Now give me one example where that's planetary science. (Or even science at all, but that's another question.)

More volume and more mass, maybe. Way lower altitude than many sounding rockets, almost certainly. (A Black Brant XII can lift 500 lbs to nearly 1500 km.) Being able to tend the payload in real time -- seems very marginal to me. t's not like you'd be able to fix any anomaly during one suborbital flight.

Pardon me, but that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny IMHO. Far more cost-effective to use a thermal/vac chamber. Testing in zero-gee is rarely anything more than an excuse to get a free plane ride, not an engineering need.

Sorry, still not seeing the connection.

Pardon the skepticism, but I fail to see what suborbital research has to do with planetary science in anything but the most general way.

I remain to be convinced that this initiative is anything more than a solution in search of a problem.

Since Clementine was launched from VAFB and wasn't a NASA or commercial launch you may have trouble, but best of luck.

And continued by CTX far more than by HiRISE.

Normally anthropomorphizing spacecraft leaves me cold, but check out http://xkcd.com/695/

Right, but each pass only lasts a max of 7-10 minutes, and I don't know what duty cycle of transmission they were using (since I can't find any documentation that such a mode even existed.) Maybe they send tone for a few seconds every few minutes? Mark, do you know anything about this mode?

Is there a source for this information? As best I can tell from this document -- http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...4/1/06-1429.pdf -- PHX will never send without receiving, so ODY listening without hailing is useless.

When I was working on Magellan we were using radar stereogrammetry (see http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/1253.pdf for some recent work.) Stereogrammetry is always preferred to photoclinometry if stereo is available.

Interesting that it took the "People's Camera" all the way until now to implement this.



You mean again, right? Considering that we did this for years on MOC.

On the Magellan project this was known as "radarclinometry" (do a google search.) It didn't work all that well IIRC.

More recent applications are described in http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/1071.pdf

Not to be dismissive of this, but as Nirgal pointed out himself, SFS/photoclinometry has been used in the planetary science community for a long time but just isn't very accurate in a lot of cases. While it may be sufficient for pretty visualizations, do you have any sense for how truly accurate your algorithm is?

In the mission plan, it was to be raised at the end of 2010 (end of the relay mission) but I haven't heard anything about that recently. If consumables are doing OK I expect that will be delayed as long as possible. They never did raise the orbit of MGS AFAIK.

Also, MRO's breakup analysis showed there were no planetary protection issues if it did crash; there was some sterilization to insure this (e.g., cable bundles.) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008AdSpR..42.1108B

It's required to keep the orbit "frozen" at a sun-synchronous precession rate (this was one of many permutations possible.)

255 x 320 km, and no, there are no plans to lower it.

Because this is a HiRISE-only thing, I'm thinking it's not likely to be publication-related, since that would usually be coordinated with the rest of the MRO payload (and yes, there are other instruments on MRO. Sigh.)

And frankly, IMHO this is not a very professional way to "announce" anything.

I'm not convinced of that since the accounts suggest the batteries were dead at wakeup from running heaters overnight. At any rate, the batteries are very likely to be useless from being frozen at zero charge -- http://www.edn.com/blog/1470000147/post/510028451.html -- so I think we will probably not be able to use them. I think PHX can transmit with a dead battery. One could look at when the ODY overflights are relative to when one would expect max power on the panels to figure out what the most likely recovery time would be.

It has to be sequenced, memory has to be allocated for it, etc. I forget if there are flight rules that require some of the other instruments to be off when the UHF is on due to EMI concerns.

And let me remind you that Odyssey doesn't just listen, it has to "hail" the lander by transmitting.

I think that may depend on your definition of "entire landing ellipse"; there were several based on various assumptions of atmospheric conditions and entry state, some larger than others. See http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/1_24_0...nder/index.html though I am not sure what current thinking about this is.

http://marsjournal.org/contents/2010/0001/

Useful to remind yourself how many "HiRISE discoveries" were actually made by MOC.

The MARCI weather reports are back.

http://www.msss.com/msss_images/latest_weather.html

I am in total awe of the amount of work this is and how well you have done it. I've never seen anyone try to render cable bundles in this much detail. Even those of us building the hardware rarely try to model them in any but the most schematic terms. For example, if you look at the external harnessing on MAHLI -- http://www.msss.com/msl/mahli/index.html -- we never tried to model any of that.

That said, and this is not a criticism at all, I note that you don't seem to have modeled the flex that connects the navcam/hazcam optical head to the main body of the electronics. http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...ng_testing.html has some pictures of the Pancam that may be of use (the electronics are the same between Pancam, navcam, and hazcam.)

Definitely an understatement. AFAIK, there is no guaranteed ground path between the rover chassis and Mars. The rover has a number of small "lightning rods" that help to discharge it (see http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/moonandmars/mer.html ), but I could imagine that potential differences of a few volts could still be sustained. There may be a detailed description of the power bus grounding architecture of MER on the web someplace, but I don't have time to look for it right now. It doesn't sound to me like the current issue has much if anything to do with any potential difference between the rover and Mars anyway.

My recollection is that there's a fuse between chassis ground and the main system ground and that this fuse ended up being blown before launch (this was described in ROVING MARS, as I recall.) So this sounds like some kind of triboelectric charging thing, perhaps caused by the wheels spinning, and not a recent deterioration. But I could be misremembering.

The link referenced in post 34 of this thread says they will try "early next year". I thought I heard January at one point, can't find that link now.