You'll forgive me if I call BS on this. A hallway conversation with somebody at a JPL open house? Media reporting? Are those figures with or without margin and reserves? Are they in real-year dollars? Do they include the launch vehicle? How about the RTG? How about foreign contributions? Is this through the end of the mission? What are the ops cost assumptions?

If you're going to condemn the whole project on the basis of cost overruns, you might want to really understand what the initial cost estimates were, what has actually been spent, and what is further costs are expected and authorized.

Out of curiosity, where do you get the $800M and $1.8B numbers?

CTX has a 12-bit ADC whose range is tuned to the fullwell of the sensor. Mars is low-contrast so the full 12-bit dynamic range is usually not occupied. I just looked at a contrasty image of the south polar region with frost and dark dunes, and it has 8-bit DNs from near 0 to 200, but that's fairly unusual.

One usually does the pixel response and flat fielding in 12-bit space, which results in some filling between the discrete steps of the 12-bit values. This is not averaging, though, but per-pixel scaling, and should not produce blurring.

The specification document should tell you all you need to know: the 8-bit archived data has gone though the instrument's 12-to-8-bit internal companding table, so it's not linear. There are response coefficients on the PDS volumes to clean up the pixel-to-pixel variation. I've never used the ISIS tools so I don't know anything about that processing flow, but from cartrite's example they seem to work quite well.

Antenna arrays for the DSN have been considered for quite a while and I believe are now in active development.
For example, http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/ska/workshop/Weinreb.pdf

This certainly makes more sense that naive ideas of orbital facilities.

The problem is that the GIF format is inherently limited to 8 bits.

For the maps of Mars I was working on in 2000-2002, I used the GMT tools and GMT-format files that could be obtained from the MOLA website (since they used GMT for a lot of their products.) But GMT is really hard to use and I think predates the widespread use of PNG.

Later versions of Photoshop can load 16-bit images in raw format, which would involve using NASAview to determine the image dimensions and the header size, and then telling Photoshop to load those dimensions and skip the header. It might then be possible to save as a 16-bit PNG. But I've never tried this.

Your best best is to use some kind of raw file import capability.

I'd have characterized these as dry slope streaks, no water involved. But that terminus seems weird. Only thing I could think of is some topography below the limit of resolution (some kind of a ridge or dike maybe.)

Wow. Cool image! I wonder what's going on with the very linear terminus to the flow in the upper left corner?

Even though I designed a large part of CTX, I haven't looked at 1% of the data from it. From these images, it's doing everything I hoped it would. Thanks for finding them!

Merry Christmas everybody!

MSL landing site candidates are map-projected. I can't think of any others.

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/msl/ctx/

I'd argue that a considerably smaller swath than HiRISE's at the same resolution would have produced much the same science. It's hard to quantify the benefits of a wider FOV, especially with the 6-meter context provided by CTX.

That said, to be fair CTX is for all intents and purposes mostly an incremental improvement on MOC. The images are 10x wider and of comparable resolution to most MOC images, the buffer is much larger, and the SNR is a few times better, so we cover a lot more ground at better quality on average than MOC did, but I don't think this difference is perceptible to most people.

I think the jury is still out on what the major scientific results of MRO will be.

It's a neat image, but like most of the MRO data, to the layman at least it's just an incremental improvement over MOC stuff like
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/E01_E0...2002/meridiani/
which I suspect is why it's hard to come up with an MRO image that really seems revolutionary.

All missions have PDS data release requirements, and that's about it. While outreach is a factor in mission selection, it's a very tiny factor. And I suspect a better outreach plan than just dumping minimally-processed data with no explanation or commentary on the internet would be required to make it be a bigger factor.

Not a lot of response to my CTX challenge yet. Maybe you guys are waiting to surprise me for Christmas.

Here's a nice CTX image of White Rock: P03_002033_1720_XI_08S334W_070101 downsampled by 4.

That's the way they come out of the camera; it's an artifact of the relatively wide angle CTX telescope. There's data on the volumes with all the correction coefficients.

Here's a pretty CTX image I found just by looking at the PDS volumes. It's one of those cracks to the west of Elysium Mons. This is just a small subsection downsampled 2x. For the full impact of CTX, you really need to make mosaics.

I'll also point out that the CTX PDS volumes are pretty good; there's a cumindex.tab that has text lines describing each image on every volume, and there's a pre-processed JPEG browse image for each image on the volume.

I'll make you all an offer: there are plenty of people on this forum who can process the raw CTX images just as well as we can. Find some images you consider worth sharing from the current released PDS data, process and format them as you like, and I'll link to them from my own page on the MSSS web site and credit you accordingly.

Do it soon and maybe we can get a CTX image on Emily's best of the year list, which would make me very happy.

This must explain why a MER image is on the front cover of TIME every week.

Frankly I'm not sure this loss of interest is any different than what we saw with MGS. The images would have to be pretty spectacular to elicit a "wow" response day after month after year. I think you guys have just gotten to the point that the instrument teams arrived at a long time ago.

THEMIS still releases an image every week. Does anyone here look at them? I'd wonder about the cost-benefit ratio of making a lot of effort to do regular releases, if even enthusiasts express dissatisfaction with such outreach efforts. Better to dump the data to the PDS and let you find the pretty ones.

Cassini has an encounter every month or two with not much happening in between. MRO takes more data than a Cassini encounter every day. And frankly, the Cassini images are far easier to pick good ones from, don't you think?

I think it's fair to expect that one or two images from MRO will make it onto most lists of the top space images of 2007. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect a lot more outreach than that. (Though I am disappointed that most likely none of those images will have been taken by an MSSS instrument this year.)

Not a rover which is kept warm by a big lump of plutonium, though. External hardware is being designed to last for a minimum of one martian year of thermal cycles.

The hibernation may rule out southern sites because no one will want to hibernate that much, but it's not because of solder joint lifetime.

Between the Galileo experience and the total failure of the JPL SEASAT mission due to slip ring arcing, it's unlikely that slip rings will find much favor in future applications.

It would have been simpler to split Galileo into two spacecraft, a spinning particles and fields mission and a three-axis imaging mission, and indeed this was discussed after Challenger.

Juno of course is a spinner, but imaging is not the main focus of that mission. Imaging has to be done in spite of the spinning.

Hmm. I think you're right; I stand corrected.

Pointing precision of a scan platform is still really poor relative to spacecraft precision. If we're talking about rates, that's even more true.

You're ignoring frictional losses in the bearings. This is why momentum wheels still require propellent usage to unload them occasionally.

How many more flyby spacecraft do we expect to see? For an orbiter in a roughly-circular orbit, the instruments are all more or less nadir-pointed all the time anyway. Pointing the spacecraft is done with momentum wheels and costs little additional fuel.

Scan platforms have always had poor pointing accuracy relative to spacecraft, they're heavy and mechanically complex, and they complicate the cable design between the instruments and the spacecraft a lot. Most needed pointing/scanning can be done more effectively within an instrument.

With varying degrees of difficulty, but I'd say that a spotting scope makes a better astronomical telescope than vice versa. Though you are unlikely to get much more than 45x mag even with a high-end spotting scope. For just casual observing, I'd say a <$200 spotting scope would be fine, though it obviously depends on what you want to look at and what your budget and degree of pickiness is. There's a lot to be said for a cheap refractor and a good pair of binoculars.

I've got a $100 60mm Meade plastic refractor, and the optical quality is adequate, but it would make a poor field spotting scope (hard to transport, image inverted, not very robust).

Goto scopes are kind of a gimmick, IMHO, especially small ones with not enough light-gathering power to see most of what they can point at. I'd avoid the smaller Meades; I had an ETX-90 and it was OK for casual use, but not 4x better than a cheap refractor. A friend has the Celestron NexStar 5 and that's about as small as I'd go for a semi-serious telescope, but I'd hate to carry it around in a camping situation.

This is a significant part of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis of Ward and Brownlee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis