You're arguing against yourself. MER was neither cheap nor simple, and a spare wouldn't be either. The whole concept of a "back pocket" project is, in a word, ludicrous.

The media reports simply don't have enough detail to allow anyone to assess how the project is proceeding. I'm working on it and I don't even know

Not my personal opinion but still somewhat amusing:
http://xkcd.com/473/

Those areas are outside the rover body and there's no obvious way that RHUs could heat them without lots of additional mass and volume for insulating enclosures of some sort.

The microphone is more or less omnidirectional, and pointed in the same direction as the optics. You can see it in photos of the instrument; for example http://www.msss.com/phoenix/mardi/illustra.../phx_mardi2.jpg (you probably knew this already.)

I don't know where the prevailing wind is from.

FWIW, MARDI is just about exactly behind the met mast as seen from the SSI, and it's pointed 22 degrees outward from nadir.

This is required for all Mars Scout orbiters, so yes.

I don't recall what the total number of bits was supposed to be in the AO, nor do I know what DISR proposed and what their actual data return looked like relative to their proposal. I do know that the number of bits ultimately returned was supposed to be 2x what it actually was because of the Cassini commanding screwup.

I think we could have figured out a way to return some better imagery (onboard autonomy to pick good images from bad could be part of it), perhaps at the cost of multispectral coverage, but obviously this is just idle speculation.

I have no insight into why one proposal was selected over another. If I had to guess, I would suspect our proposal didn't seem very technically mature and perhaps somewhat risky, given that our only other hardware effort at the time (MOC1; this was 1990) had yet to fly.

FWIW, the MSSS proposal for Huygens had considerably higher resolution than DISR. It would have used a custom framing CCD for the descent imaging below the cloud deck. The fact that DISR used one CCD for everything and fiber-optic bundles to feed light from different optics was pretty constraining.

That said, the post did have a lot of misconceptions. We certainly made no specific provisions for landed ops in our proposal, since even surviving the landing wasn't (IIRC) in the baseline.

Since when has that been a constraint on this forum?

The bioburden of the room is fairly irrelevant, as the requirement (<300 spores/m2 for a Class IV Mars lander mission) is obviously on the stuff going to Mars, which is much more extensively cleaned than the room is.

Perhaps not this particular crater (I didn't search the MGS fresh crater catalog), but certainly there are many such similar features in the MGS captioned releases; see, e.g., http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2006/1...te14/index.html

This is old news.

Exactly! This is why I don't understand why we can't use a definition that keeps Pluto and doesn't make previously-known non-planets like Ceres planets. Calling anything Pluto-sized or bigger a planet would have that attribute, however "unscientific". I'd be happy to call Eris a planet.

But I also agree that we are saying the same thing over and over again in this thread, and I could imagine closing it for our own good.

I'm not sure I would use "arbitrary" and "good" as opposites like this. Many (most?) uses of terminology are "arbitrary" but have managed to avoid the emotionalism and controversy that this one has caused.

If it were up to me, I would have just said that everything Pluto-sized and bigger was a planet and everything smaller wasn't, but somehow this has been dismissed as being too "unscientific".

The whole thing reminds me of the vociferous debate I was involved in about whether longitudes should be positive to the east or west (also horribly confused by the IAU.)

It's only a few 100's of m/s delta V different from what their GTO satellite AO-40 was capable of. See http://www.amsat-dl.org/p5a/p5a-to-mars.pdf
But A0-40's propulsion system failed so there's some work to do there.

As indicated, it's getting the free launch that's probably the biggest issue.

Of course, one might wonder why JPL, which as far as I know has a team of several people to do nothing but "visualization", would need to do that in the first place.

The LXD is an equatorial mount and will require some manual alignment setup. Meade Autoalign/Level-North is essentially a computer-driven alt/az mount with GPS and magnetic orientation sensing so it figures out how it's oriented automatically. If you don't want to do any alignment at all and don't mind paying a premium for the capability, it's probably great (I've never used one.)

As usual it depends on what you want to do with it. This is an acceptable scope for astrophotography, although more aperture would be better for deep-sky and this may be overkill for anything you can do with a DSLR (uncooled, you'll be limited to fairly short exposures). I'm not a huge fan of the Schmidt-Cassegrain or fork mounts, but it's the easiest way to get a relatively portable telescope. Meade and Celestron are probably about equal in quality and both are somewhat overpriced IMHO.

For more visually-oriented use, I would suggest something like a 12" Dobsonian, but it would be useless for astrophotography.

For general observing, I kinda like the Celestron NexStar 6. If I had to get Meade, I'd probably get an ETX-125, but it's too bad they don't make a little larger Maksutov.

Unfortunately having had access to professional telescopes over the years has ruined me for ever getting anything this small myself, but YMMV.

To give credit where credit is due, contractors like Convair, Douglas, and Martin did most of the work. NASA usually just buys stuff, and provides oversight (sometimes usefully )

It's mostly to do with total energy for heating of things that aren't warmed by the RTG waste heat. There are also DTE and relay geometry constraints. The site I linked to has details (in the PDF document http://webgis.wr.usgs.gov/msl/docs/MSL_Eng...uide_v4.5.1.pdf .)

True, though the limits are not entirely based on temperature. All sites must be within 45 degrees of the equator and meet other constraints. See http://webgis.wr.usgs.gov/msl/Engineering.htm

Where, according to Cowing, we are in "smug elitist mode"

I honestly don't understand that guy sometimes.

I'd have to say that reference is a little questionable. For Mars an areocentric latitude can be almost 0.4 degrees different from an areographic one, which corresponds to a distance of over 20 km. It may not matter for what this thread is talking about, but there are plenty of times when it does.

Remind me not to let you navigate my spacecraft.

Portions of Ohio are, of course, in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

That number sounds low to me even in 196X dollars. It'd be interesting to know what the true savings of deleting the two missions, if any, was.

NASA usually doesn't do a very good job of realistically accounting for the actual incremental costs of flying a mission (witness the estimates of how much a single shuttle flight costs; I've seen numbers that span nearly an order of magnitude.) I could imagine that any published figure was low-balled significantly. Of course, it'd be harder than you might think to compute the costs.
Even figuring out retroactively how much you spent can get hard on a big project

This is getting pretty off-topic for LRO.

No, that's a remove-before-flight shorting plug on the heater connector.