Seems pretty clear to me. "this is the angle in degrees clockwise from a line drawn from the center to the right edge of the image to the direction of the sun at the time the image was acquired."



North is approximately up. The sun is coming from slightly above right. Of course, the sun is very high (incidence angle is ~25 degrees) so it's hard to see where the sun is coming from just by looking at the image.

Obviously not. I suggest you send a query to the PDS to inquire about the schedule.

Despite its shortcomings (the entry state isn't measure by onboard instrumentation so it' s perhaps unreasonable to expect it be included in this archive, tied up with a neat little bow), other researchers seem to have made use of this dataset; see http://www.agu.org/meetings/sm05/sm05-sess.../sm05_P24A.html

Oh, I don't know. It depends on what you're trying to do, and how you're doing it (level of automation, etc.) The JPL way has always seemed a bit labor-intensive to me.

That said, they don't enough money for two MSLs, so that's not going to happen regardless of anything else.

Anything's possible, I suppose, and the image of the model is too low-res to see much detail -- I think I can see the RTG radiator fins on the bottom, and I can't tell what's on the top. For all I know, the modelmaker was in a rush or didn't do a very good job.

If you want to be annoyed about something, be annoyed by the stupid airbrushing-out of the RTG on the renderings.

Umm, no, that's the heat exchanger for the fluid loop that carries RTG waste heat into the rover.
See http://marstech.jpl.nasa.gov/publications/...-2005-01-28.pdf

Outstanding job, Doug. Thanks very much.

The illumination of the MOC image is pretty unfavorable for seeing the topography, so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. The MOC inevitably will have worse signal-to-noise ratio, so HiRISE will always win in that regard. Also, note that R10-1370 is summed 2 so it has a nominal resolution of about 3 m/pxl.

Maybe. I spent 15 minutes trying to match these up and failed, but the lighting conditions are pretty different. It's not much overlap because the MOC image is slanted the other way.

I have to give the HiRISE team credit, this image is very nice. Now, by analogy, Viking orbiter images were clearly superior to those of Mariner 9, but it was the latter that revolutionized our view of Mars. We'll see if the same is true for MRO compared to MGS

Couldn't have asked for better. MARCI is working well too. Now cue the usual tirade about MSSS release policies I think we're just letting McEwen have his day in the sun.

I think that's the only one. M03-05898 is too far to the north.

I've got a good CTX image of this area though Unfortunately, I think the release won't occur until next week.

There are two THEMIS VIS frames of this area, V05982004 and V16266005, both 18 m/pxl.

It's MRO time. One-way light time is 13m02s but the data playback will take several hours, so I wouldn't expect any data until 2 AM PST at the earliest, and probably not until even later.

Have they ever taken a large color mosaic of all of Saturn and the rings?

Unlike MER, there isn't going to be a central repository for all MRO images, because each instrument team is doing its own thing so far as I know. You'll go to the HiRISE site for their images, you'll go to the MSSS site for MARCI and CTX, etc. I still don't know the details of anyone's release policy.

For these initial test images, I'd just keep an eye on the MRO website at JPL. I don't know what the release timetable for these images is either.

Sadly, not as easy as it might sound. That'll be done for the main body of the rover, but stuff mounted on the extremities (wheels, mast, arm, etc.) is pretty much on its own. And electrical power for heaters, while available, is not all that plentiful. Surviving the temperature cycles is still a big challenge.

It doesn't need to -- HiRISE is always doing "time-delay integration", which has the same effect but is done internally in the instrument. For this to work, though, it requires that the spacecraft attitude is very stable, and there are some concerns about that.

Of course they weren't lying through their teeth, Bruce, the world is not so black and white as you seem to think. But they were, I suspect, being overly optimistic about what the technology development groups were telling them. The same thing happened in the last EO project: the AO claimed that there was all this wonderful "X2000" radhard technology available, and as the proposal process went on, all of it proved to be vaporware. After that experience, I'd need more than a JPL scientist's claim that it was really ready for flight. As just one example, what non-volatile memory technology are they claiming is megarad-hard? Current flash memory cannot survive more than a few tens of Krads, and MRAM is neither dense enough or flight-proven that I know of.

It's arguably your fault if you state it as absolute truth without going to any effort to verify it, though.

Don't believe all the JPL hype. The RAD750 is only hard to ">100 Krad" and if they'd meant 1 Mrad, they'd have said that. And it's not all that obvious how you can build an Mrad-hard imager, though we'll do it if you toss a few million our way

Just because, e.g., Galileo was expensive (and I don't know what the total runout cost was but $4B wouldn't surprise me) doesn't mean that a properly-designed reduced-scope mission would have to be. I'm not talking about orders of magnitude less cost, but 2-3x doesn't seem impossible, if there was in fact much real motivation to save money.

That's the party line, but I'd be prepared to argue that Cassini could lose half of its instrument complement without losing half its science. If instruments alone were a huge cost fraction of a mission (they're usually less than 25%, maybe more like 10%), that might be important.

Very useful, but a couple of observations: first, maximum THEMIS VIS resolution is 18m, not 12m (probably close enough). More importantly, I would say that this overestimates the true image quality at all resolutions. The highest resolution images in Google Maps are from scanned air photos, which probably have roughly 3x the sharpness of satellite images at equivalent sampling.

I usually advise that people run a blur filter of about 1.5-2 pixel radius for these sorts of simulations. Of course, it depends on the point you're trying to make.

I wonder if one problem is that both Galileo and Cassini have been very expensive missions. I think the OP community might have been better served by a larger number of somewhat smaller missions. Unfortunately the FBC pendulum has swung far away from smaller missions, and it is hard to build constituencies for them -- big missions tend to force coalitions between groups that otherwise would be competing for the same resources.

http://www.msss.com/http/ps/intro.html may answer some of your questions.

To summarize: it's generally thought that the less-cratered areas of Mars were resurfaced by lava towards the end of the period of heavy bombardment when most craters were formed. One need not invoke an ocean to account for this "global dichotomy" -- see http://www.msss.com/http/ps/di.html and http://www.msss.com/http/ps/age2.html

The "rivers" are generally considered to be, well, rivers, formed in a period when Mars was wetter, although such features can be formed by more subtle but still water-related action, such as sapping -- see http://www.msss.com/http/ps/channels/channels.html

MARSIS uses wavelengths between 50 and 230 meters; SHARAD around 15 meters. I doubt either could detect an object as small as a spacecraft.

Part of the MRO MOI viewgraph package was a COLA (Collision Avoidance) analysis for Phobos, Deimos, and the currently operating orbiters. We don't really know where the dead ones are, so there is no sensible analysis that can be performed. As Bruce said, the probabilities are low, but for bodies with known ephemerides, the analysis is pretty easy, so it might as well be done.

The thread at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2367 goes into a tedious level of detail as to why Celestia orbital elements probably won't be correct for orbiters in low sun-sync orbits. The same is true for Starry Night. There's some hope that Celestia SampledOrbits can be defined that will be right over the time they cover, but there's still work left to do on that.

From Emily's LPSC blog: "Bob Pappalardo would not sit down until he got Cleave to acknowledge that Europa is the consensus highest priority of the planetary science community."

Cleave was obviously poorly prepared for this session, but I don't see that this acknowledgement is either meaningful or particularly accurate. If Europa were the "highest priority" of the PS community as a whole, then one might wonder why we were spending all this money on Mars. I could easily imagine that Europa is the highest priority of the outer planets community, but frankly I was surprised when Europa Orbiter appeared in the '07 budget (presumably the result of some serious lobbying on someone's part.) It was pretty obvious to me then that there would be no money for it, especially in the aftermath of JPL running the old EO project into the ground with cost overruns and engineering upscopes. (And JIMO is best forgotten.)

Don't get me wrong, I would love to be involved with a Europa mission (we did what I think was a good proposal design for EO) but I don't see either the money or the political support being there in the near term. I know it's frustrating, but one has to be realistic, and it might help to avoid the aura of entitlement that I perceive is building in some parts of the community (not referring to you, Bob). Of course, I am just a lowly engineer.