There's lots of Viking lander stereo; see, for example, the anaglyph at http://www.msss.com/http/ps/vl.html

However, as the page notes, "Viking Lander stereo is notoriously difficult to fuse because of the long camera baseline".

It started out as an Italian Space Agency initiative, and when ASI couldn't find the money for it, specific engineering groups within NASA took over advocating it (laser comm, sample return canister tracking, etc.) In my opinion, at the current stage in Mars exploration, it was a solution in search of a problem to a significant degree.

Don't get me wrong, it'd be great to have that kind of comm infrastructure, but not at the cost of not having the money to fly science missions to use the infrastructure, which is what seemed all too likely to happen.

It's obviously very hard to quantify the value of a given number of bits, or the impact of their loss. Based on what we can tell of the mission profile so far, the traverses will be leisurely enough, and the rover stopped in one place long enough to perform analyses, that we will have plenty of time to acquire the full-resolution, minimum compression, all color 360 degree mosaic from every location. Beyond that, what are you going to take? Video seqeuences of the sun coming up, monitoring the sky, phase angle studies, and the like -- interesting, but second-order science IMHO. And we'll still be able to do those, just perhaps at a lower frame rate or with more compression.

You might be interested to read what I believe is the current data release policy for the Mars Exploration Program:

http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mep/mepdmp.pdf

It specifies a six-month data validation period, encourages but does not require more timely release, but does require that "each Principal Investigator will also release a significant subset of data earlier as a form of public outreach and education. These releases will typically be available within a week of data receipt."

Actually implementing this is the responsibility of the individual instrument team.
I don't know the specifics of any of the MRO teams' plans, and it's too early to say for MSL.

We have no intention of losing the descent movie. It'll just take somewhat longer to send back. Assuming that the total downlink time was even being limited by orbiter downlink rate -- it could just as easily been limited by rover uplink rate or rover power constraints. (Just because it has an RTG doesn't mean it can't be power-limited in some situations.)

It's not obvious what 5 fps movies would be worth taking on the ground and what their data volume will be -- this is still a subject of ongoing analysis within the Mastcam team -- but again, we have a lot of buffer space so it's just a question of somewhat extending the downlink time.

For what it's worth, I remain of the opinion that MTO was not an appropriate way to spend the large amount of money it would have cost at this stage of martian exploration.

And with all due respect to the COMPLEX membership, I doubt they have deep insight into the details of ongoing mission development.

An Atlas V stays inside the Vertical Integration Facility (essentially a big building) until about 12 hours before launch, when it's rolled out to the pad.

They're pretty used to this sort of weather at KSC.

Assuming it's similar to the Mars Pathfinder HGA, it's a microstrip array. I couldn't find much about this either, but DS-1 used the MPF spare antenna (see http://smallsat.org/proceedings/12/ssc98/4/ssciv1.pdf ). "A 32-GHz Microstrip Array Antenna for Microspacecraft Application" describes a similar antenna but for Ka rather than X-band -- see http://tmo.jpl.nasa.gov/tmo/progress_report/42-116/116p.pdf

I think such antennas can be phase-steered to an extent, at the cost of including delay elements in the path, but these weren't.

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/Atlas/MER/documents/insthost.cat says

"The solar panel provides 30 strings of triple junction cells (gallium indium phosphorus, gallium arsenide, and germanium) covering 1.3 square meters, which produced about 800 to 900 W hours per sol at the beginning of the MER mission. Each rover had two reference solar cells, one that measures short circuit current and another that measures open circuit voltage. Due to the change in season from late southern summer to early southern autumn, and the degradation in performance due to dust deposition, the energy produced by this array dropped to about 600 W h per sol, 90 sols after landing."

http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2004/TM-2004-213367.pdf doesn't answer your specific questions but might be useful to look at anyway.

I'm not at liberty to disclose anything that's not publically available. The stuff at http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/future/msl.html is accurate so far I know: there's one MSL, the baseline EDL system is Skycrane, the baseline is RTG power, and the launch is in December 2009.

Though there have been many rumors to the contrary, the current plan is to fly MSL in 2009. (I'm the systems engineer for the cameras for MSL, so I think I have some insight.) So this whole discussion is based on a flawed assumption.

Since you're so brilliant, next time *you* can design the sequence.

The Earth *was* imaged by CTX, just not at the right exposure.

Given that the only way that the CTX exposure time can be reduced is to increase the line rate (that is, to reduce the exposure time by 4x you have to take data at 4x higher rate -- it's a linescan camera, not a framing camera) there is a direct relationship between the data volume and the angular coverage of the image. Because of buffer space limitations, the unknown relative timing of Earth-Moon in advance, and limits on the timing of back-to-back images, there was no way to manage the range of possible geometries and properly expose Earth and Moon without building the sequence post-launch (if then). And we were trying to minimize sequencing effort in inner cruise in case *real problems* came up.

And let's face it, even if it had been perfectly exposed it still wouldn't have been that great an image or gotten much attention.

The max transmission rate at minimum Earth-Mars range is about 3.5 Mbits/s to the DSN 70m antennas. At maximum range the rate is about 600 Kbits/s. The daily data volume in mapping is between 40 and 90 Gbits (depending on range, length and number of comm passes and which DSN antennas are used.)

See the MRO Launch Press Kit for more details.

I don't know all the details of the DI story, but I don't think you guys are being completely fair here.
You might recall that in the "old days" cameras had all-metal structures and masses of over 50 kg. For example, the Cassini ISS mass is about 58 kg, fully 4x heavier than the MOC on MGS with its graphite-epoxy optical structure. But for that mass savings, you have to work with a much trickier material. To say that all of the problems are known at this point is not really accurate.

You can usually assume that with optics, even mistakes that seem dumb with 20:20 hindsight are fairly subtle and hard to avoid once you appreciate all the details.

As for focus adjustment; it may be nice to have, but it's heavy and complex and if it fails, you can easily be worse off than before. We studied this trade very carefully for MRO CTX and ended up with no focus adjustment, and we intend to do the same for our LRO instruments. The MOC has focus control heaters, by necessity, but they have only a fairly limited adjustment range. See Ravine, M. A., et al., Graphite-epoxy optical systems: lessons learned on the way to Mars, Proceedings of the SPIE, 5179, 311-322, 2003.

This simulation is technically flawed for several reasons. First, obviously the Clementine dataset is much higher-resolution than the CTX image, and the process used to artificially degrade it (probably just Photoshop blurring) doesn't really reflect what the CTX optics really do. Second, the illumination conditions are very different, and in the CTX case lead to worse maria contrast than did the Clementine dataset.

A more realistic simulation could be done by taking the HiRISE image and degrading it down. I was working on that yesterday morning, but somebody else rushed the press release out before I finished.

So CTX is working fine. If I had it to do over again, I'd have imaged the Earth with a shorter line time on at least one of the slews, which would have made for a somewhat more interesting composite image. But the command sequence was defined several months ago, before we knew the launch date, and there was no way to predict the Earth's location in advance.

- Mike Caplinger, CTX Systems Engineer, MSSS