The slides said only: "Rover power system design does not meet present mission requirements, requiring additional battery capacity, and possibly solar array".

I haven't heard any details about what solar options are under consideration and what constraints they might place on the mission. But it certainly hasn't been definitively decided to have solar arrays, and in my uninvolved engineering opinion, it seems pretty goofy to do so.

Neither can you say that it's good as a blanket statement. Cassini is an excellent example of the significant technical risks: look at the communications bug that almost resulted in a total failure of Huygens, and the miscommanding of the recorder commands that caused fully half of its dataset to be lost. While I'm not saying that those things couldn't have happened on an all-US mission, I think they're less likely.

I'm somewhat skeptical that ESA had a lot to do with the non-cancellation of Cassini but I'd need to do some research to recall the particulars.

The cost savings are also very hard to quantify. Interfaces, particularly, are much more expensive. I can still remember having to puzzle over poorly-translated Alcatel documents for the relay on MO/MGS.

From my admittedly biased perspective as a US instrument provider, instruments on joint missions are sometimes not selected competitively. I'm happy to propose in a free and open competition, but having payload elements be guaranteed to an international partner prevents that (of course, I have no idea if this agreement says anything about that.)

And finally, these sorts of agreements sound good, but talk is cheap, and these don't always result in actual missions. I think this is the third or fourth NASA-ESA agreement on MSR over the past 15 years.

There are always map uncertainties, but in the case of the Apollo landing sites the ALSEP laser retroreflectors allow very accurate knowledge of the site position in the Earth reference frame.

But I believe the spacing at the equator orbit to orbit is about 30 km, so slewing off-nadir would be required for arbitrary targets.

You won't notice it on summed images because for those the even and odd pixels are averaged in the instrument. And as Doug says, you have to zoom all the way in to see it on a full-res image, and even then it's less noticeable on some images than others.

Beware anomalist thinking. The sun angle is likely to be so low that these could well be quite ordinary boulders or clumps. Without knowing the sun angle and even the local topography, you just can't tell.

As with CTX and MOC, even and odd pixels go through separate signal chains and the offset between them is still being adjusted in these early images.

BTW, the story of how we were able to make NAC run almost 4x faster than CTX with only minimal changes to the hardware is yet to be published

http://www.ravenmaps.com/prodinfo.asp?number=LW is fairly nice.

The current orbit is 30kmx199km. Periapsis is at the south pole. The science orbit is nominally 50km circular. So this image, assuming that the resolution is listed correctly, was taken at a lower altitude than the science orbit. The nominal resolution is 50 cm from 50 km (1 m summed).

That was silver FEP (Teflon), not Kapton.

I'm quite doubtful that LROC will be able to resolve the state of the blankets on the Apollo hardware.

You realize that the LCROSS impact doesn't happen until October, right?

Too soon to tell:

"NASA managers want to get Endeavour off as soon as possible to avoid downstream delays for upcoming space station assembly missions as the shuttle program winds down toward retirement in 2010. But the LRO mission is a high priority as well and it's not yet clear how NASA might ultimately resolve the conflict."

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts127/090613scrub/

That must explain why aircraft are never used on Earth for geophysical surveys now that we have satellites.

Our Mars airplane proposals were never primarily about imaging, but about things that were difficult or impossible to do from orbit like electric field and gravimetric sensors. But I agree they are tough missions to justify at our current level of technology, cost, and budget.

It's important to note that there have been many Mars airplane proposals with various combinations of proposers and many different mission profiles. The Gusev land-and-take-off-again proposal was all NASA Ames, I believe. MAGE was a traverse of Valles Marineris with no take-off capability and was a team of MSSS, NRL, OSC, and Ames. The last one I know of, ARES, was managed by NASA Langley and involved a whole bunch of groups (but not Ames).

MAGE: http://www.msss.com/mage_release/index.html

If that's the way you feel you should just close the thread.

Is the expression "curiousity killed the cat" common in other countries or just the US?

Not the fabric so much (it's just normal nylon and polyester AFAIK) but the dye process. Dyeing nylon requires heat, and I suspect qualifying the process without a critical engineering reason to do so wasn't high on anyone's priority list.

Perhaps this shows my age, but I can't hear this one without hearing Steve Perry singing in my head
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(band) for the youngsters. "Don't stop//believin'"

Well, maybe I'm that superstitious. Especially when a leading hypothesis about her loss is navigational error.

I won't argue semantics about whether Earhart was an "explorer" or not.

That said, I agree that it's probably the best of a bad lot.

Again, how are you ignoring the "mysterious disappearance" aspect?

I assume it was, and I wonder about the utter tone-deafness of choosing the name of a person whose main claim to fame is her mysterious disappearance.

I'm stunned at the awfulness of all of these candidates. (For calibration purposes, recall I was also underwhelmed by Spirit and Opportunity, though I see people using them with a straight face every day so they must work at some level.)

Can anyone point me to some raw Galileo images that have significant radiation noise (pixel hits)? All the ones I can find have been processed.

Asking for forgiveness is different than apologizing, I think.

One last (?) word on the Mastcam mechanisms. A mechanismless system would be more reliable, certainly. But it would also have compromised performance. We looked at fixed-focus systems like Pancam and concluded that the performance hit was too great (Pancam is really slow optically and it's only in best focus at 2m target distance.) Our mechanisms are as reliable as we know how to make them and make as much use of MER heritage as possible. We tested them for 3x mission life and they passed with no issues. If people have residual reliability concerns, I'd be curious to know how they think we could address them. But you'd probably have to know more details of the mechanisms than is publicly available to have a well-founded opinion.

If our cameras fail there will be plenty of B&W Navcam images.

Forgive me if I lose patience with armchair engineers.

At any rate, the fixed-focal-length but adjustable focus Mastcams, like MAHLI, are mechanically very similar to the original zoom design, they just have one fewer motor and one fewer cam. From http://www.msss.com/press_releases/mahli_d...ery/index.html:

"MAHLI focus is controlled by a precision mechanism developed by Alliance Spacesystems. This mechanism uses a stepper motor to position the internal focus group by means of a cam."

We're very confident that these mechanisms are not going to "lock up".

The article could be more clearly stated. It says "A redesign of the MASTCAM zoom system ... was essentially complete and ready to ship." That would be better stated as "A redesign of the Mastcam system without the zoom" -- see http://www.msss.com/msl/mastcam/news/index.html

Did you trust the MER Pancam filter wheel or the MI cover to not lock up? There's little mechanical difference between them and the zoom. (You're basically saying that you don't trust MSSS to build an instrument that works.)

I wanted to make sure that everyone interested sees Adrian Brown's articles at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1319/1 and http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1318/1 about the technical and budgetary problems with MSL that led to the launch slip. While I can't claim to be privy to the budgetary and political issues at the mission level, the technical discussion seems like a fair summary of the situation as I understand it, at least as good a one as can be gathered from public sources.

People in other forums have complained about errors in these articles, but without giving specific examples or providing any factual basis for their objections. I don't find that very useful. If there are real flaws in this account, I'd be quite interested to know what they are.

p.s. I guess we need to change the name of this subforum.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1314/1 is a very good summary of this event.