Doing away with the camera altogether would make all those calculations even simpler, but that doesn't make it a good idea, does it?

I think we had the zoom calibration under control. I wouldn't count the zoom out quite yet.

There was a very blurry NIMS image of the partially deployed Galileo HGA.

MARDI on MPL took an image of the inside of the heatshield in cruise, but it was too blurry to recognize anything much.

In theory I think the MOC WA on MGS could have imaged the end of the solar array, but this was never tried so far as I know (it would have required the SA to be intentionally moved through the FOV.)

We could do HD cameras for a tenth the mass and power, if not less. The formal rules are not yet posted (see http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/com...tion/guidelines ), but the implication is that the realtime video need not be transmitted to Earth in real time, so the telecom system can be pretty modest and not a system driver.

Sure, but anyone who's ever tried it (ever heard of idealab's "BlastOff!"? http://www.diamandis.com/blastoff.html ) has spent a lot of money and gotten nowhere. It's a pretty goofy commercial venture.

Exactly what kind of formal collaboration has Squyres supported? AFAIK the MSL data availability will be just as good as it is with MER. But I'm not on the science team and I don't speak for the science team or anybody but myself on this forum.

I'll be more than happy to answer what questions I can about data formats, camera models, etc. but I don't think a formal collaboration is in the cards, at least for the science cameras, whether it's a good idea or not.

Sorry, but I think we have enough trouble with the mission planning opinions that are already available

While I think that might be unduly pessimistic (at least for the right team) I share your skepticism that a total mission cost of $20M (which presumably includes the Rockot launch, cruise stage, etc, as well as the landed hardware) is very (one is tempted to say "laughably") thin.

This web site hasn't been updated since 2004 that I can see, and it says nothing about how they were delivering anything to Mars. I'd assume, then, that this project is dead. I'd certainly not heard anything about it before.

AFAIK, the Pancam covers got pulled off at mast deployment and are now dangling from the head not doing anything. It's the MI that has a movable cover. The only way to limit dust on the Pancams is to point them down when not in use.

Flash memory requires no power at all to retain its contents.

That abstract is seven years old, so you may want to follow where the research went after that. It's not like you were the first to notice these features.

These are not the features usually called gullies; the conventional view is that they are dry dust avalanches and do not involve a liquid. See, for example, Rob Sullivan's abstract http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2000/pdf/1911.pdf

I answered that: it would work but there are no plans to operate MARDI post-landing.

There's a picture of the microphone at http://www.msss.com/phoenix/mardi/index.html so I don't think it was a big secret.

MARDI can take perfectly good images of the surface from the height of the landing legs (and I think this might even be an area that the SSI and RAC can't see) and the microphone would work post-landing, but there are no plans to operate MARDI then. Recall that the PHX mission has a limited duration and the other instruments use up most if not all of its lifetime.

As I have said many, many times before in this forum, any spacecraft can fail no matter how expensive it was. Neither MS98 failure had that much to do with money, and both designs were fundamentally sound IMHO.

Lagrange solved the restricted three-body problem analytically in 1772.

The first numerical solutions predate the invention of the computer and go back to Vannevar Bush and the differential analyzer during WWII. I imagine that von Neumann's group did some work on this in the early fifties; the earliest reference I found was from 1958. It's a pretty obvious thing to do when you have a computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lect...c_xscript.shtml
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0040-165X...%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

There seems to be some confusion about the color. MARDI/PHX ( http://www.msss.com/mars/surveyor/ms98/lan...t/abstract.html ) is panchromatic (black-and-white), though the images could be colorized via the usual methods. It's the MSL MARDI (completely different instrument, just the same name) that's color.

Question: if imaging from a moving, powered platform, would you rather take a single image or a series of images?

Disclaimer: just my opinions, public information only.

Rather than give you the inside story, which I obviously don't have the authority to do, let me ask a question. The press release says this:



So the question: what probability of failure should be considered an "unacceptable risk"? The bug that caused the failure of MPL had a probability in the tens of percent, as I recall from the review board reports, so it was obviously unacceptable. But given that a PHX landing failure would result in no science data being returned, it might not take that large a probability to be judged unacceptable. I didn't have to make that call, and I don't know what the failure probability assessment was, but the press release implies it wasn't zero. Of course, in aerospace failure probabilities of zero don't come along very often.

Disclaimer: just my own opinions, no privileged information.

Of course it's part of the process. This is usually called the "Washington Monument Strategy", supposedly because when the National Park Service is threatened with cutbacks, they say they will have to curtail access to that first.

I can't speak for Rob or anybody at JPL, but I have never, ever heard any name for the vehicle other than MSL. JPL has never been big on "pretty names" for spacecraft: witness Mariner 9, Viking 2, etc. It's only been fairly recently that names started being used (Galileo and Magellan were the first I recall, obviously when you only have one spacecraft per mission type you can't use a number) and even then, those programs were often referred to as Jupiter Orbiter/Probe and Venus Radar Mapper, respectively. I will always think of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander as the Mars Surveyor 1998 Orbiter and Lander; the names (pretty lame in that case) usually come very late in the process. There are plenty of people who still call Spirit and Opportunity MER-A and MER-B (or MER-2 and MER-1

Sometimes the assembly techs have pet names for spacecraft, but they're not always printable :-)

A large fraction of MIL-STD-461 testing is associated with conducted emissions and susceptibility (what you're calling line power) and typical avionics will operate through all kinds of horrible noise on input power lines, by design. Typically one uses box-level DC-DC converters with extensive EMI filtering. ISS uses 120Vdc main power distribution (at least the American side does.)

That sounds like BS to me. Avionics, in the US at least, are extensively tested for electromagnetic interference problems. For digital electronics, shielding is not very difficult. And if there are sensitive sensors like magnetometers involved, they should have thought of these sorts of problems long before now.

To an extent, but the LEDs are not intended to be calibrated light sources and there is likely to be some color shift as a function of current and temperature. White LEDs typically have a narrow peak in the blue where the LED actually emits, and then a broader peak centered in the yellow where the phosphor emits; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED

http://www.msss.com/msl/mahli/MAHLI_description.html

"MAHLI has a suite of white light LEDs and a suite of ultraviolet LEDs to provide illumination of the targets it is imaging. The white light LEDs permit the instrument to operate at night and allows the science team to avoid problems of shadowing during daytime imaging. The ultraviolet LEDs provide an opportunity to look for minerals that fluoresce."

Phoenix cal target: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1149.pdf

MSL cal target is still being designed.