Well, likely true, but this can depend on how the mission plays out. If they just cancelled it outright it wouldn't cost "anything" (except substantial runout costs, I suspect.) And they could put it into some form of deep hibernation and it might not cost as much as delayed missions under active development would cost for the same period, though this is rarely done (DSCOVR is sort of an example.) Of course, if they end up flying it, it will cost far more than it would have when Russia was involved.

Bottom line for MEx; despite statements to the contrary, active missions are rarely cancelled if they are still at all productive. The larger worry for MEx is that the spacecraft is low on fuel, but this seems to have been mitigated to a larger degree than was thought previously (I'm assuming that's just not excessive optimism on someone's part.)

Proposals for networks go back to at least MESUR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESUR

But as I understand it, Insight-quality seismometers are hard to accommodate on small fixed-base landers. Met instruments are much less challenging.

No problem, if you have about $600M per vehicle exclusive of launch and operations cost. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-mars-insight

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/...-gravity-assist

I was sort of expecting science instrument images to be highlighted over T2CAM images, but I'm not complaining.

"Near-Earth Asteroid Deflection Strategies", by Dan Mazanek of NASA LRC, https://sservi.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/...on_Mazanek1.pdf is a good summary of various approaches. Direct propulsion is not the most effective according to this; short of nuclear weapons, kinetic impactors were judged the most effective.

Oh, that must be why we just explode the fuel in a rocket instead of spending all that effort to build a complex rocket engine.

Seriously, you have to get the rocket exhaust to all go in the same direction at as high a velocity as possible for maximum efficiency.

Lucy downlinking now at 353 kb/sec to DSS14.

I think this image is from sol 319 so the raw image is available already -- https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mars2...2_1100LMJ02.IMG if I'm not mistaken.

It looks somewhat better if you get rid of the hot pixels and process appropriately, but Phobos is only 45-ish pixels across so there are limits to how good it can be (I blew this up 2x and just crudely painted out the hot pixels, so don't stretch too hard.)

The tube is inside the drill, but the whole process is fairly involved. See Figure 6 of "Mars 2020 Rover Adaptive Caching Assembly: Caching Martian Samples for
Potential Earth Return", Silverman and Lin, https://esmats.eu/amspapers/pastpapers/pdfs...0/silverman.pdf

You may not appreciate the subtleties of how funding flows from NASA to JPL projects. For example, NASA centers and FFRDCs have something called a Director's Discretionary Fund that can be used for various purposes. TBH I don't know how Ingenuity was funded in the first place, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely from the Mars 2020 budget line item.

At any rate, I have heard nothing official and can only offer my opinion, informed by 30+ years of working on JPL-funded projects.

Speculation as we have no operational role in this mission --

DSN Now shows 20 kbit/s down, most likely on the LGA/MGA due to spacecraft orientation. I doubt if we will see anything until after the flyby is complete and they can send the data back at a higher rate.

It took about 2 months before the 14 Feb 2022 star images were released ( https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/c...lucy-spacecraft ) but hopefully some flyby images will show up more quickly.

Now that helicopters are an integral part of the MSR architecture, I doubt if there will be any issues with funding Ingenuity until it dies.

Interesting, considering that MEPAG presentations as recent as May 2022 had basically written MEx off as a viable relay ("Fuel load extremely low and uncertain"). https://www.lpi.usra.edu/mepag/meetings/mep...anson_Meyer.pdf

I don't think some dust being kicked up is unlikely, I guess, what I find less likely is that the bright areas are anything more than the bright low-phase edge of Didymos. At least based on the movie at the top of https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-dart-imag...target-asteroid

But I agree the outbound images look stranger than the inbound, so maybe you're right.

Not sure when we can expect to see the full LICIACube dataset.

I didn't see the briefing, but this seems very unlikely. The exposure time of the images seems all over the place, I'm still not sure what the strategy being employed was.

FWIW, Junocam is not a pushbroom. There certainly shouldn't be any significant chromatic aberration, but there are plenty of ways for different color framelets to get misregistered, and that's probably more likely the farther you go from the optic axis.

So I agree with John.

Those are real. See https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Eu...bal_mosaic_500m

One of them might be Eightercua Fossa?

It's going to be really hard to find anything like because the existing Voyager/Galileo coverage is mostly at much different sun angles. I'm sure people will be looking hard in the weeks to come, though.

No, we didn't think that would be workable within all of the other constraints.

Looks right to me.

Europa images on missionjuno.

One wonders if the large overexposure of the LICIACube images was intentional or accidental.

If you believe "REACTION OF DIMORPHOS' STRUCTURE TO THE DART IMPACT" https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2021/pdf/2041.pdf then only 2.5e-3 of the kinetic energy isn't dissipated inelastically. That's still more than the gravitational binding energy, but I suspect the real system is a lot more complicated than any of these models. The whole concept of gravitational binding energy is somewhat abstract and ignores how the energy would be transported through the body, other sources of cohesion, etc.

TBH, I'm still not quite sure how this mission came to be or if it really tells us anything practical about how to deflect asteroids, but it was cool

Regardless of what the images look like, that seems very unlikely, at least if you believe "Spacecraft Geometry Effects on Kinetic Impactor Missions", Owen et al, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac8932/pdf

However, they did a ton of work and then at the end



I haven't read the paper in enough detail to know if their modeling is truly appropriate or just detailed but in an unrealistic way. But the spacecraft only had a mass of about 500 kg and Dimorphos is of order 10**7 more massive and DART wasn't going that fast.

On the other hand, I was thinking of this:

Han Solo: That's what I'm trying to tell you, kid; it ain't there... It's been totally blown away.

Since the Europa flyby is a gravity assist for period reduction, there is probably more interest in radiometric tracking than there would be for a normal PJ. Though I can't say that this is atypical, I haven't looked before.