It was more like 9 years ago that the licensing was announced, there was a production update in 2002 (see http://www.sandia.gov/media/rhp.htm and http://sandtcolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/spring200...oll_4-30-02.pdf ) and I haven't heard anything more about it since.

I don't think the situation is as bleak as made out in this (wildly off-topic, BTW) thread. Rad-tolerant FPGAs are evolving nicely and embedded soft processors in FPGAs do as much as most of our apps need. We're using this approach in our MSL and LRO instruments and it's been working out well.

Minor change, but your table says 3 UV bands and 4 vis/IR bands for LROC WAC. I'd have said 2 UV bands and 5 vis/IR bands, because we consider the blue band to be a visible band. At least, that's how I implemented it in the firmware, so if somebody wants it different they need to tell me.

Out of curiosity, is there any increase of failure probability that you would have judged acceptable? E.g., what about a 1 in a million chance, or 1 in a billion?

People who say that the risk of doing something is 0 are probably just not thinking hard enough.

What still images are you looking at? The ones at http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071113_kaguya_e.html look blurry and contaminated by video noise to my professional (but probably biased) eye...

Welcome to my world.

ChemCam and MARDI have been reinstated as MSL instruments:
http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=25991

As Einstein said, "as simple as possible but no simpler." The history of MSR design is full of ideas that are simpler than possible.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/robomars/pdf/6052.pdf and the AIR&SPACE article referenced earlier in the thread. Basically this was the MiniMAV concept, which was found to have some overly optimistic assumptions.

Regardless of the acceleration, the pendulum will always react to the vector sum of the gravity vector and the acceleration vector, so if you want to fly antiparallel to the gravity vector, this should work fine.

Thanks, Don, that's what I'm remembering. Used to own a copy of that.

Not from me. The highest-res camera still operating at Mars I have anything to do with would produce an image of Earth about 3 pixels across. I've already taken the best one I'm likely to take.

I have a vague recollection of seeing some artists' conceptions of Earth as seen from Mars in some book when I was a kid, say 1965-1970. It might have been one of the Time-Life "Science Library" series books. Anybody recall?

Read page 28 and following in http://hirise.seti.org/MSL_Landing_Sites/W...s_Steltzner.pdf
The RTG heat only warms the interior; the instruments and actuators on the outside have to be warmed as needed by heaters.

The link is in post 39 of this thread.

I would dispute the accuracy of the cost figures in that table based on what I know, but you'd have to take that up with MEPAG.

Many of these questions could be far more cost-effectively answered with in situ measurements than by sample return, and some of the others could be answered by a much simpler SCIM-type mission. And some we more or less know already from the SNCs.

Frankly, because of the fundamental energetic difficulties and the valid-or-not "Andromeda Strain" concerns, I'm a little surprised that people are still seriously talking about Mars sample return as a likely mission for the foreseeable future.

At best this is a vast oversimplification of how and why costs evolved. I think you can expect some public discussion of this in the near future.

The MSSS instruments on MGS, MPL. MCO, Odyssey, and MRO all came in at or under budget.

I know this is our own press release, but those numbers sound high to me. I think as part of all three instruments being selected, the total cost was significantly lower.

This Falcon stuff is all totally off-topic for MSL. Could we move it to some appropriate place, please?

Not a HHGTTG fan, eh?

That would be Magrathea: http://www.magrathea-engine.org/v2/index.php?lang=en

Just hypothetically, if you're going to impose hard cost caps on project elements (and I have nothing against the notion of hard caps), it's a good idea to tell the teams about this in advance, don't you think? Otherwise they might reasonably assume that the usual mechanism of project-carried margins for cost growth applied.

Unfortunately media reports are rarely if ever consistent about costs. Is that costs up to launch, or total cost of mission? Is that with or without the launch, ESA contributions, DOE costs for the RTG, etc? Sometimes they report one thing, sometimes something else. You can't base an opinion about how a mission's costs have evolved unless you have hard numbers, and I don't know of a public source for those for MSL.

Again, I don't think there is enough publicly-available information on what the actual budget issues were for Cowing or anyone here to have an valid opinion. The press release just doesn't give enough detail and Cowing shows no signs of knowing anything more. Unfortunately, I can't comment further.

What's your source on that? All the news articles say is that there is a $75M overrun. It doesn't say where it is, and since $75M is more than the entire developmental budget for the payload (see the 2007 budget), do you think it's likely to be all ChemCam's overrun?

Disclaimer: this message is entirely based on data from public sources.