It can only do this if it has power to do so. And remember that Phoenix can only communicate when an orbiter is going overhead, which only happens four times per day for a few minutes each time. So communicating at a deterministic (Earth) time is not something that makes much sense in this case, without the lander remembering a lot more stuff than it would be a good idea for it to rely on to remember (like exactly when the passes are predicted to occur for a long time into the future.)

If you do things based on an absolute clock, they had better not fail if that clock goes nuts. It's easier to rely on things you can directly observe.

The Discovery MOO seems like a stretch, as the program is really designed to fly on missions that would exist for some other reason: funding a mission by flying a MOO on it is sort of the tail wagging the dog. And NASA's interest in COTS is rather notoriously fickle. This, and the fact that the X PRIZE Foundation retains media rights for all of the data obtained in order to win the prize, makes things pretty tough (admittedly you can have separate data/instrumentation, but that just makes things that much harder.)

That said, Phil, I have to admire your optimism for assigning any credibility to GLXP at all.

You answered your own question: this would have cost money. Also, the only thing extra this is costing now is time; if they had identified this 5 years ago it still would have been an intermittent problem and hard to fix.

Frankly I don't know very many astronomers who think HST is worth the money it costs to run any more, not even counting the cost of SM4, but apparently it's "too well-loved" by the public to just let die. You have to admire the STSCI's ability to do PR, if nothing else.

So much so that it would frankly amaze me if any of these teams fly any hardware of any kind, ever.

What part of post #1 is confusing?

If you do a google search for RAD6000 and read the BAE product brochure, you'll see that these boards also have 3MB of EEPROM.

The latter. Mercifully nobody ever asked me to implement onboard mosaic construction (and I don't think it would save much downlink anyway.)

Also, keep in mind that that's taking a mosaic quickly, not downlinking it quickly.

The description of the Mastcams has been updated; see http://www.msss.com/msl/mastcam/index.html

MSL MAHLI delivered:
http://www.msss.com/press_releases/mahli_delivery/index.html

Like a "scientist" would know how to interpret the results of a vibe test anyway. Beakers.

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/nicmos/localNews?...SafingAndStatus
But I guess this hasn't been updated since the SI C&DH anomaly happened.

Because I don't even know how successful or unsuccessful TEGA has been, much less how much of that is due to poor design and how much to random variation in circumstances.

Of course, maybe you know a lot more about the instrument design and all of the tradeoffs and how it's behaved in flight than I do, which is entirely possible. If not, then I'd say you are jumping to conclusions if you think that TEGA was certainly "poorly designed."

Let me know when you guys develop the ability to predict the future, because it would be a great help in mission planning.

Honestly, I think the jury is still out on how well TEGA will end up meeting its mission goals, and whether the design and fabrication were as good as they could have been given reasonable expectations of soil properties. I doubt if the TEGA team will be pulling any punches in the self-criticism department when they write their final result papers.

Well, duh. (For non-native English speakers, that denotes a reaction to a very obvious statement.)

This was done for every instrument on Phoenix. It's just that you really can't test one-shot operations that will be performed in conditions and with materials that simply can't be replicated on Earth, if they are even known in advance. Is TEGA in 20-20 hindsight poorly designed? I have no idea. Was it "extensively tested"? Of course it was.

This is *never* done for a cold-spare system. You'd feel like an idiot testing side B only to find that it didn't work and side A broke in the meantime.

When MGS was lost, the side B MOC electronics had never been powered during flight at all.

http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/23848 may be of interest.

It's got nothing in common with the Planetary Society microphone, but it's not 8 bits.

"DSP561xx processors are noteworthy because they include a sigma-delta codec on-chip. The sigma-delta codec provides linear, analog I/O with 16-bit resolution over a bandwidth of approximately 4 kHz. Motorola states that the codec has a signal to noise-plus-distortion ratio of greater than 60 dB. "

As always with ADCs, though, caveat emptor about how many of the stated bits are actually significant...



Indeed.

Let me try to lower your expectations. The audio is only digitized at 8 KHz (telephone quality at best), so even if it does work, IMHO it's not going to "make a dramatic backdrop" to anything.

Thanks for the CSV file! Apparently very few extent JPEG viewers can read the EXIF tags for some reason.

No, like what exposure time a specific image was taken with.

Does anyone know where the SSI exposure times might be tabulated? I need them to compute some exposure times for another instrument on the surface that may be operated soon

Is this view based on anything except your opinion and reading of the media reports?

I would suggest that further discussion on this thread wait for the outcome of the NASA HQ review.

From the article referenced upthread:

"If the science lander is delayed, it could be launched in 2010 and parked in a solar orbit until 2011, when Mars is again in range of Earth, Green said."

Snow was observed by MOLA on MGS:

http://ssed.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/clouds&snow.html

PHX injected mass was 670 kg, but one always has to be careful about the specifics of the transfer orbit for any given mission, since the C3 to Mars can vary by a factor of 2. You need more information than a single number to assess mission feasibility.

MSL injected mass is, according to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/spacecraft.html, about 3400 kg.