Sorry to be a curmudgeon, but the reaction to this image, which is rather bland and poorly exposed, surprises me a bit. No accounting for taste, I guess.

You could assume from the published reports that the instruments not mentioned were performing normally. Or did you think that CRISM had failed since they hadn't released anything either?

http://www.msss.com/msss_images/2007/02/12/index.html -- The top middle image is a CTX image from 23 November 2006.

I believe that they number the CCDs from 1 to 14, with a prefix that indicates which filter it has. So there are two IR sensors, called IR10 and IR11. See http://hirise.seti.org/epo/hirise_lesson1.htm and http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/HiRISE/papers...ISE_InstDev.pdf

I surmise that each CCD has two output channels that are separately processed. It's pretty typical for linear CCDs to have such arrangements: the MOC NA, for example, had two channels for its single CCD (one for even pixels, one for odd). These are not redundant; if you lost one you'd have to interpolate every other pixel.

From what I've read now on this forum from UofA, the media accounts are fearmongering to some degree.

http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/Applicat...issance_Orbiter might give some insight into the processing required for HiRISE images.

Disclaimer: this information is all from public sources.

I have no idea what the actual situation with HiRISE is, but it would be nice to get an official and unambiguous statement. The media reports do make it sound pretty bad.

From the Nature story: "A previous high resolution NASA camera was lost with the demise of MGS. The best camera currently in orbit around the red planet is on Mars Express, which arrived in December 2003."

Given that the SRC system on MEx hasn't performed to spec, I think that CTX on MRO at 6 meters/pixel wins the prize for next best camera, at least in terms of resolution.

The leftmost person is Andy Ingersoll of Caltech, and standing just to his right is Ed Danielson of JPL, who went on to be the prokect manager for the Mars Observer Camera.

From what little I've heard, the problem is almost certainly analog in nature, if not in the CCD output amplifiers then somewhere in the signal chain before digitization.

WFC is the Wide Field Camera subsystem of ACS; WFPC2 is the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (pronounced "wif-pic".) WFC3 is the new instrument to be installed on the next servicing mission.

SBC is the ACS Solar Blind Channel.

WFC UDF is the Ultra-Deep Field taken with WFC.

The SPK files on naif.jpl.nasa.gov in /pub/naif/ROSETTA/kernels/spk/ORMR* seem to be fairly up-to-date (late December 2006) and with some effort you can use an SPK file in Celestia, at least in v1.5.

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/Phobos_comp.pdf

Seems a little odd that these names (which are all from GULLIVER'S TRAVELS) are on Phobos when Swift is on Deimos. But the Illiad would have been more appropriate on one of the Saturnian satellites (The Odyssey is being used on Tethys.)

The MPL/PHX radar is a multibeam Fourier doppler radar that can measure velocity. The MER radar didn't need to do that, and couldn't. So there are legitimate engineering reasons to develop new designs that I don't think you are appreciating.

There's plenty of standardization for box-level avionics: the LN-200 IMU and the Small Deep Space Transponder come to mind.

http://marstech.jpl.nasa.gov/publications/...C-1188-2005.pdf has some background on the MPL radar, and a proposed radar design for MSL.

The VL1 and MCO cases are not what I would call software faults. In the Viking case, ground controllers commanded things with raw memory writes instead of a higher level command protocol, and they inadvertently wrote into the wrong locations. You could argue that they should have had better software, but the software they did have was working as it was supposed to -- it was operator error. The MCO loss was more a process problem, stimulated by a simple calculation error. Nor is the MPL failure a pure software error -- it was a miscommunication between hardware and software design. Of your examples, only the Spirit flash anomaly was what I would call a pure software error, and it was recoverable via other software.

I can't discuss the MGS failure because unlike some other people on this forum, I was too straightforward in my choice of user name and can't speak anonymously

If you're never going to use the vehicle again, absolutely.

The arguments for VTVL all revolve around reusability and rapid turnaround. See, for example, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/412/1

I'm agnostic on the topic; like most engineering, there is no clear best solution. It's very dependent on the mission profile and on the logistical/economic assumptions.

About 40 cm, based on http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/snow_paper.html -- it would take 3x that much to cover the lander over.

Which reminds me: does anyone have access to this globe? http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materi...s/hmc05.html#g7

It was drawn using Mariner 6/7 images and (I suspect) a good deal of imagination. I'd love to get a good set of photos of the entire surface.

You might be interested to read my summary of how the MM69 camera system worked: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/i...m7_imaging.html

The data was delivered to PDS on schedule and has been on the PDS website for quite some time. Did you try looking there? Note the volumes for S11-S16 at the bottom of the page.

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/Admin/resources...html#mgsMOCDSDP

The MOC Gallery update has been delayed, but so, it seems, has the USGS web access. You should note that the Gallery has always been a pro bono effort. I don't know what the status of the USGS pages is.

By that I meant the free version of STK. I don't think many people reading this will be able to afford the needed add-on modules to read SPICE files; last I looked they were well over $10K.

BTW, the current version of Celestia can read SPICE SPK files. The support's not all there yet, but it's improving rapidly.

Thank you, Doug, but please be advised that we haven't given up on MGS. Still many things left to be tried.

The best public account of the history of the MOC can be found at http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/mal...rt1_000623.html

And people tend to forget that the instrument on MGS is MOC2, the Mars Observer flight spare. A partial account of the assembly and testing of MOC2 is at
http://www.msss.com/mars/global_surveyor/camera/MOC_2.html

Could we move the discussion unrelated to MGS to some other location?

They're using the Optical Navigation Camera ("star camera" usually refers to the wide field of view Galileo Avionica attitude control star cameras.) ONC has some advantages relative to CTX for this: it's mounted on the -Z side of the spacecraft so the spacecraft doesn't have to slew as much to point at MGS; it's a framing system it may be easier to compute geometry; and it can expose a frame for many seconds (which can either help or hurt.) On the other hand, it has a narrower field of view than CTX, its extra sensitivity doesn't help much since MGS is pretty bright (perhaps seeing the star background will help, but I don't think it's mandatory), and I'm not sure how rapidly it can take back-to-back frames. CTX can easily image for several minutes and cover a patch of sky ~6 degrees wide and maybe 20-30 degrees wide.

Sorry, not buying this. We had little difficulty imaging Odyssey with MGS, and MRO should be better in every respect than MGS (HiRISE has a wider FOV than MOC, MRO pointing control is much more accurate/stable, etc, etc.) Maybe it'll take a couple of tries, but it shouldn't be that big a deal. LMSS does most of the work anyway; they just tell you when to start imaging, no?

How would you propose to fly antennas many tens of meters in diameter, much less duplicate, in flight-qualified form, the sensitive receivers and megawatt transmitters used by DSN stations? After all, these orbital comm relays would in general be little closer to Mars than Earth, and would then have to send the data to Earth.

Well, I'm afraid I have nothing definitive to tell you. Note that there are lots of players and we may not know, or need to know, what other teams are doing. Plans may be changing from day to day, and the media often misquotes sources anyway. Even I might not know for sure what my own instrument will be doing and when. I'd believe that images were taken when you see the images.

Maybe they're planning on using some other instrument on MRO with a wider field of view first. Gee, which one could it be?

What's so difficult about it? Lookheed-Martin designs the slew and they tell you when to start imaging. At least, that's how the Odyssey image by MGS was done. Doesn't sound too hard to me.