Per Mark Lemmon, http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/lazarus.html

"So, Phoenix woke up and checked: safe mode, yes; low power, yes; clock reset to pre-launch, yes; landing sensor deployed, yes. Action: try to wake up on solar power only, at whatever time of sol that solar power was sufficient. When awake, listen for a beacon on the orbiters for 2 hours. Then, sleep for 19 hours, and try again."

So yes, checking on PHX will require active commanding of an orbiter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity-1_Space_Link_Protocol

It's about as stable as TCP/IP.

Phoenix has no direct-to-Earth link, so I presume that any listening to be done will have to be done by either Odyssey or MRO.

An all-sky pan with the 34mm Mastcam on MSL wouldn't be that many frames (about 100? Have to think about the geometry a bit) and would only take a few minutes to acquire, assuming that the remote sensing mast can actually point straight up. I'd be interested in taking it, bandwidth permitting.

The likelihood that there was a lot of water on Mars at one time is old news (Mariner 9 at least) and certainly lots and lots of work has been done on the escape rate of water (see, for example, "Water loss and evolution of the upper atmosphere and exosphere over martian history", Valeille et al, in press at Icarus.) That paper concludes that "a conservative estimate of about 10 m of water is found to have escaped globally to space over the last ~3.5 Gyr."

I don't think that it's very controversial at all that there could be a lot of frozen water on Mars, so I'm a little confused by your implication that this is some big revelation and/or recent news. There is a long way between "has water" and "Earthlike".

I don't know enough about the particulars of when VMC can be operated relative to the eccentric orbit of MEx to know how close to global coverage it could get. It'd be interesting to see these images map-projected. I expect dust storms could be tracked, at least large ones.

You might want to do a little filtering now. This is a GIMP unsharp mask, radius 40, amount 0.7.

Note that this is the only working wide-field camera at Mars until MRO gets fixed.

Well, I have some residual concerns about the detection methodology, and I don't think anyone knows if the amount of water detected was useful for resource exploitation or just a scientific curiosity. I'd think the public deserves the answer to that basic question.

I'm not following this analogy very well (don't all flybys work like that?), but Junocam can image anything within +/-35 degrees or so off the spin plane. As others have said, the issue is more that you'd have to be very close to a moon to get anything worthwhile given Junocam's low resolution.

I'll spare you my opinion of the subject publication...

I think it's premature to discuss the LCROSS results before a peer-reviewed paper is published. IMHO, the LCROSS team didn't do anyone any favors announcing their preliminary results at a press conference.

The balancing operation ugordon describes is something we've been playing with for Mastcam. But note that since Mastcam's Bayer filters are transparent in the near-IR, when we use narrowband filters in those wavelengths the images are effectively grayscale and there is no spatial penalty (we just turn the interpolator off in that case). Of course you wouldn't want to have a filter wheel on your engineering cameras.

Doug, you're right about the resolution. What we are really losing with the zoom is the ability to capture the entire surroundings in color with a small number of frames. As is, we will have only hazcam/navcam monochrome images to do that. And of course there's the 10 fps capability, which is really not that interesting with a narrow FOV.

Interesting comment about the Mastcams from Mike Ravine of MSSS over at http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/11/avat...i.html#comments

There is far more atomic oxygen being rammed into the target in LEO than on the moon, so the LDEF results are not very applicable. That said, try http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/index.html

Astronomers can't even define a planet, much less an Earthlike one

Rather than "Earthlike" I might suggest "habitable" and start with the criteria in the classic "Habitable Planets for Man" by Stephen Dole, now available online http://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB179-1/

Hadn't seen anyone discussing the MSL status report from last month -- http://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/images/...s1%20Li-MSL.pdf -- as presented to the Mars panel of the decadal survey.

According to Mark Lemmon -- http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...l=&pid=9656 -- for typical dust loadings the brightness variation from horizon to zenith is no more than a factor of two and wouldn't be very visible to the naked eye.

The size, perhaps, but not necessarily the visibiliity. See http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/docs/Colaprete....SS-overview.ppt page 14 for a discussion of the "vapor cloud" which contributes in some not-well-explained way to the impact visibility through excitation of OH- and H2O+.

I read http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/leagilewg...pm/Bart4050.pdf but it's not clear there how volatiles were expected to contribute to plume visibility; all of the predictions were based on 1%.

At any rate, I don't claim to be especially knowledgeable on this topic and could well be wrong, but to my eye these results aren't lending a lot of credence to the already fairly poor case, prior to LCROSS, for there being a lot of ice at the lunar poles.

The simplest explanation, completely consistent with all the available data (once you strip off the hype) is that there were simply no significant volatiles at the impact site.

Error correction both in uplink and memory make this quite unlikely.

Most safe mode entries have to do with loss of attitude reference. Flybys often provide opportunities for unexpected star camera problems from planetlight or occultations.

I suspect that the mission will be extended as long as the spacecraft systems can support the final disposal of the spacecraft, much like Galileo was. But the dose rates are pretty high, so Juno likely won't last a lot longer than its primary mission anyway.

The issue is whether the specific timing allows any providentially close approaches to the moons, but that probably won't be determinable until after launch.

To my way of thinking, you don't need forgiveness (frankly this forum would benefit from a little less uncritical adulation) but your idea that DSN costs are such a large fraction of total mission budgets is, so far as I can tell, wrong.

That said, DSN would benefit from some more modern infrastructure, and there could be some cost reductions after that initial investment (why do you think GSFC built their own system?) but I suspect the savings might be 2x, not 10x.

Certainly, and we could discuss the fraction of cost that went to DSN for a given mission extension, if we knew how much that extension cost, but as far as I know we don't.

I'm a little bemused about why this is so offensive when all kinds of technical misinformation, unfounded opinions, etc, to my ear more technically grating, go uncommented upon in this forum. Seems a bit fanboyish to me.