Since the primary goal is polar imaging and the pole crossings are not typically at closest approach, this is not accurate; probably what you saw was a placeholder since we take little power and only image for tens of seconds at a time.

If someone wants to simulate the Juno orbit (public information is rather thin but see http://juno.wisc.edu/mission.html ) and see if any satellite observations are possible given that the spacecraft is spinning, I'd be happy to advocate such observations.

Because it's not a part of the mission goals and could potentially either take enormous amounts of delta-v or lead to unacceptable constraints on mission timing?

Also, Junocam only has a requirement to last for seven orbits.

Isn't that what I said in post #279?

At any rate, does anyone know what the current orbital geometry really is? For some situations beta=90 (constantly over the terminator) could be the worst case, since it will always get solar input on the same side. beta=0 is stressing for lunar IR.

Bad translations at a minimum. The main variable for thermal design is "beta angle", the angle between the sun and the orbit plane. For most systems, beta=0 is the worst/hottest case, so they may be in that geometry now.

It's counterintutive, but yes, the Moon radiates in the IR on the day side a lot. And the huge surface temperature excursions make simple dayside heat rejection hard to do without cooling off too much on the nightside. This was a big challenge for us on LROC as well.

There were seven sites coming out of the third landing site workshop, and three of these were eliminated on 5 Nov, so I'd say that this counts as news.

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/index.html

Gee, sorry, I guess you are eligible for this contest.

Since it seems inevitable that we are going to have to listen to everyone's opinion about what the name should be, you might make an effort to at least conform to the rules:

"If your idea is the name of a person, the person cannot still be living."

The contest is only open to US students in grades K-12, so all of you adults and/or foreign nationals can keep your ideas to yourselves.

The contest is being run by Disney, so a dignified and appropriate name is practically guaranteed.

Unfortunately my reading of the rules is that none of my immediate family members are eligible.

If you just want an SNC, shergottite is only about $500-$600 gm; see, for example, http://www.meteoritemarket.com/SAU008.htm

I will note that US Patent D505105, "Skycrane landing system", held by a bunch of folks at JPL, uses this term explicitly. I'm not even sure who said it was a "misuse" to call it the skycrane, but I'd wonder what their motivation was. I could imagine some lawyers in the Caltech office of the general counsel decided it was trademark infringement or something, but IANAL.

I'm having a hard time seeing the ongoing relevance of this discussion, so we might be prepared for Doug to intervene.

Not evil, just a little obsessive/crazy.

I think it's inevitable that it's going to be called the skycrane by many, even within the project, and the only reason to not do so is because "Skycrane" may be a registered trademark of Sikorsky. I note that the current licensed manufacturer of the S-64 calls it the "Aircrane".

Cool, thanks! But I don't think this would work for a camera without a good bit of technology development, because it'd be very difficult to make the transparent material optically flat.

I don't recall this reference, could you point me at it again?

This is all getting pretty off-topic for MSL; the hardware is built and doesn't include any kind of active dust removal.

I'd be willing to bet that the tank to contain the gas would weigh more than an entire Mastcam camera head. Not really practical given the mass constraints.

If by "flat field" you mean something that merely multiplies each pixel by a single number, I agree. But these sorts of stray/scattered light problems can be addressed with more sophisticated techniques, for example the way the NEAR images were recovered after the front elements were covered with monoprop burn products. See "Inflight Calibration of the NEAR Multispectral Imager II. Results from Eros Approach and Orbit" by Murchie et al in Icarus 155, 1. I'm not sure the MER images are bad enough to require that level of processing though.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/0930_Ma...ate_Spirit.html

It looks like the effects of this contamination could easily be taken out with a proper flat field, and I'm a little surprised that they haven't done this.

That said, owing to the configuration of the Mastcam I think it will be far more resilient to this sort of problem.

There was never any serious consideration given to adding a cover mechanism to the Mastcam, and nothing I see in the Pancam data would justify the added cost, complexity, and risk. I wouldn't even know how to begin to implement a "wiper" that would work reliably under martian conditions, and some kind of roll of clear material that could be driven past the lens would be problematic for all kinds of reasons.

Because the cameras aren't on Earth. Designing a mechanism that can survive for many years under martian conditions and not fail in some way that degrades imaging is not worth it, given the low chance of dust contamination as I have already described.

The cameras are normally stowed pointing down. Was there some period on MER when they were left pointing up?

I'm unaware of any quantitative analysis of how much dust buildup there has been on Pancam; maybe others know more. I had thought the dust buildup was mostly on the hazcams, which are much closer to the ground.

As for Mastcam, the current fixed-focal-length systems have the lenses set quite far back inside the sunshades (if you look at http://www.msss.com/msl/mastcam/index.html the front element is at about the front of the lens barrel, color-coded red), so the path for dust is quite long. MAHLI, of course, has a movable cover.

Yes, of course. As far as I know there is no issue at all with the flash, the problem is that the spacecraft clock keeps getting reset to 0. The explanation about the spacecraft thinking it's before launch isn't what I would have expected (most missions have "mission phase bits" that are kept in a nearly-bulletproof type of non-volatile memory) but I don't think any of this has anything to do with the contents of flash.

Technically, Ed Danielson was using the PFUEI (Prime Focus Universal Extragalactic Instrument), which was a cooled CCD camera based on the TI 800x800 sensor used in the first WF/PC on HST.

Ed went on to be the instrument manager on the Mars Observer Camera.

Huh? It was recovered on 16 Oct 1982 by Ed Danielson and Dave Jewitt using the Hale telescope at Palomar. Perihelion was 9 Feb 1986.

In fairness, it's proven quite difficult to find much objective comparison between HST and ground-based capability; my earlier message was probably a little too hard-over. And like so many things it's probably a false dichotomy anyway, because if HST were shut down tomorrow, it's not like the money would be spent on ground-based telescopes.

The main justification for NGST is in the thermal infrared, measurements that are very hard to make from the ground because of atmospheric emission. NICMOS, so far as I know, has not been very successful for a variety of technical reasons and has probably been mostly supplanted by SIRTF anyway. I'm not sure about the role of UV; people seem to have concluded that with current detector technology it'll be hard to do a lot better than HST for a while.

http://www.stsci.edu/institute/conference/...HSLprogram.html is a good source of information.

Knowing several people who worked for BlastOff! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlastOff!_Corporation ) I'll believe it when I see it.

From Stern's article: "When the National Research Council's Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission for priority funding, it assigned a cost level of $650 million."

Feel free to read this report: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10898
and decide if it was ever intended to be the basis of real funding plans. IMHO it is disingenuous to cite the report for this purpose.

Note that the report was written in 2003, well in advance of any MER results and long prior to the payload suite of MSL being selected.
I don't even see where MSL was assigned "medium mission" status. The report explicitly assigns "large mission" (>$650M) for "preparation for Mars Sample Return".