You haven't worked with a lot of geologists, have you?

Very interesting and well-done. One question: the "channel" in the mid-field of the image on your blog page seems suspiciously aligned with the edges of the image coverage. Is there really reason to think this is anything but an artifact of your processing? I wouldn't want people doing photogeology on the basis of seeing this feature if there isn't real evidence for it.

Operations during conjunction are contingent on smooth operations before conjunction, of course, so I wouldn't count on it yet. There is somewhat better instrument fault protection on MRO than on MGS, but the issue that keeps us from leaving MOC on during conjunction is primarily the risk of getting too cold in an off-nominal condition that doesn't cause a safe mode entry, and MARCI doesn't have that particular issue.

I don't know what the data acquisition and return strategy will look like over conjunction. MRO has a lot of capacity to store data onboard (160 Gbits compared to MGS's 3 Gbits.)

I wonder what sort of ITAR restrictions exist for this sort of thing. I looked at the cubesatkit website but I couldn't tell if they would sell to non-US entities.

Lunar missions weren't off-limits as far as I can tell from the AO. At least, we proposed one.

Ralph is TDI, but as far as I know, LORRI is just a framing camera, not a pushbroom. (And BTW, pushbroom and TDI mean different things.) This looks like a small amount of H register readout noise to me, but the noise level seems very low.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4212/ch9.html has some background on this. It doesn't look to me like anything in the area was considered. Remember that prior to the MGS TES hematite observations, there was nothing that special about Meridiani.

You mean the way the MERs have inspired all this public interest and support for manned missions? A fixed lander in the wrong spot in Meridiani would have been a total snoozefest; even in the right spot, not all that revolutionary in my opinion. Of course, I don't think the MERs have been that revolutionary either.

Actually, if you look at overhead rectifications, you find that the sites aren't all that hopelessly rocky; by area there is less than 2-3% rocks that would have been a Viking hazard.

No. There are two pads at Complex 17. MER-A went from one and MER-B from the other. The end of MER-A's launch window and the start of MER-B's were only about a week apart.

Because the launch windows were non-overlapping (mostly because of workload on the spacecraft and Delta teams) and for the 2003 geometry the C3 (a measure of injection energy needed to get to Mars) was rising rapidly at the end of the window (see
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...5/1/02-1854.pdf ) MER-B needed a larger rocket.

The Vikings were launched on identical Titan-IIIE/Centaurs as far as I know. I suspect the Titan had enough excess capability to make up for any C3 differences across the window. It might be that in the days of routine dual spacecraft missions they had larger launch teams, also.

He doesn't sound happy about the situation (see http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/whatsaplanet/requiem.html ) but I'm still unclear why he supported the eight-planets proposal at all.

Oh, OK, thanks. (BTW, the National Science Foundation is nsf.gov.)

According to
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...4/1/06-0902.pdf the transponder (an SDST, see http://nmp-techval-reports.jpl.nasa.gov/DS...ated_Report.pdf ) is redundant but there is only one Ka-band TWTA rather than two for X-band. A Ka-band TWTA failure would take out Ka-band downlink, but a failure downstream from there could be worked around by switching to the other transponder, unless there is some other single-point failure point in the system I am unaware of.

While I can neither confirm nor deny anything about this problem, couldn't they swap sides to the other transponder? As far as I know, while the Ka-band is not mission-critical it doesn't have any single-point failures.

p.s. What's "NSF.com" supposed to mean? The domain belongs to NSF International, which is "the world leader in standards development, product certification, education, and risk-management for public health and safety."

FWIW, the majority of people at JPL seem to pronounce it "sahl" (kinda rhymes with "doll" I guess, or maybe it's closer to "saul".) I used to try to pronounce it "soul" but most people don't seem to say it that way.

OK, I've checked the situation and it's a bit more confused than I wish it was. As has been discussed before, the definition for the cumindx.tab entry for SUN_AZIMUTH depends on a left-right "flip flag" in one of the other fields and is defined relative to the image that appears on the PDS archive volume. I had been under the impression that the "processed but not map-projected" version of the image in the MOC Gallery was identical to the PDS image, but it turns out that they are being rotated in some manner (at least for the more recent releases), but the SUN_AZIMUTH parameter is not being adjusted appropriately. I'm going to check to see if the people in charge of the gallery can clarify this situation. In the meantime the official PDS release is correct, which is the important thing.

That said, I checked image S08-00321 and the sun direction is as it says in the "image of the day" release, so I don't see how those dark streaks could be the shadows of geysers.

Brown has always said that "Xena" was just a nickname and was never going to be proposed as the official name.
See http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/

It's not the convention for planets. Hence the current situation.

I think it's possible that Brown caused this problem himself to some degree. If he'd suggested a name for 2003 UB313 that was compatible with the naming of previous KBOs, it seems likely to me that the IAU would have just accepted it. Presumably he wanted to know if he'd discovered a planet, though, and I can't say I blame him.

Also, are you suggesting that we quit giving names to asteroids?

Hey, we're not infallible. The "image of the day" release lighting direction could be wrong (I don't think it is, but it might be.) But the official PDS release on our Web site is pretty carefully computed and checked, so somebody should feel free to look at the images in question there and confirm that the lighting is as stated in the "image of the day" release.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that if there was anything remarkable in these images somebody at MSSS would have seen it, but I'm happy to keep an open mind about it.

[edited: I think the claim is that we got it wrong by 180 degrees, not 90 degrees ]

Both of these images are illuminated from the upper left. All the "geyser interpretations" I've read only make sense if the images are illuminated from the lower right. Either the MSSS web release pages are wrong about the illumination direction, or the "geyser" interpretation is wrong. I checked with the author of the releases in question and he said he was pretty sure the illumination direction is as stated.

But, since both of these images appeared in the last Web release, you should feel free to check the illumination direction (the parameter may be confusing, but I know it's right because my software computed it ) and see if the Web releases are wrong.

There seems to be some confusion between an objective, quantitative definition, and a "scientifically-motivated" one. The seeming need for the latter is driving people to these tortured definitions involving atmospheres, hydrostatic equilibrium, barycenters, domination of neighborhoods, etc. Maybe I've been consorting with engineers for too long, but what would be so "unscientific" about simply setting a size limit so that Pluto stays a planet and anything larger would be one, and anything smaller wouldn't?

I'm reminded of the effort to define the meter as a fraction of the Earth's circumference before it was actually possible to measure the Earth to the needed level of accuracy. Much effort was spent but in the end the meter doesn't really match the Earth (and they knew this when the definition was made) -- see THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS by Ken Alder, very interesting read.

I'm also wondering who goes to these IAU meetings. Wouldn't the real scientists stay home and do productive work?

Not sure what people are expecting. I doubt that the rovers will be resolved as unambiguous objects. I think the images will be improved somewhat over CPROTOs. Having more coverage will be an improvement, of course. As I have said before, the real improvement is in SNR, but it's harder to judge what improved SNR will look like. There wasn't much overlap between MOC images and the HiRISE test images, so we'll have to wait some more to see.

For what purpose? We know where the rover is, and it's hard to improve on s11-471 for route planning.

Unless they pitch the spacecraft backwards for motion compensation ala MGS CPROTOs, the limit is set by the minimum LROC line time, about 0.3 milliseconds. Even if it could run faster, I doubt if the SNR would be very good.

The question of what a planet is has one important ramification: it affects what the name of 2003 UB313 can be. I think we're all tired of saying 2003 UB313, so it'd be nice if the IAU could resolve the question to that level.

Do you have any children? Have you been anywhere near an elemetary school since you were a student in one?

Three years ago, my son's entire first grade class made mobiles of the solar system with the sun and the nine planets, and they had pictures of the planets up on the wall in the classroom. I doubt if that's very unusual. Maybe they didn't memorize the names, but I'd bet that most of them did.