I don't have the stats at my fingertips as to what "usual" means, but the DSN schedule does tend to vary a lot. There's nothing wrong that I've heard of. [edit: I would expect the rest of the images tomorrow, 11/16.]

Frankly, I find the concern about thermal cycling of the MAV solid motors, and the suggestion to add an RTG to the lander to heat the MAV to reduce thermal cycling, to be a massive step backward from the seeming progress of letting the contract to buy the SRMs discussed upthread.

This is the kind of "adding epicycles" that signals that a program is in trouble IMHO.

Typically the effects of offsets would be so small for orbiters that this information doesn't appear anywhere. If it does appear, it's in the "struct" SPK files (for Juno see https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/JUNO/ker...uct_v04.bsp.lbl but it's only given for magnetometer-related objects.)

While waiting for these (I have no idea when they will be released) one could amuse oneself figuring out what they might look like relative to the SamCam images (SamCam is 20x20 degrees and basically pointed at the TAGSAM head); Navcam1 has an FOV of 21x16 degrees and is rotated 6 degrees about Y and -70 degrees about Z. I've never seen a good visualization of this and it's pretty confusing. All of this stuff is in https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/data_comet.html [EDIT: these images were taken with what is being called Navcam 2 or NFTCam; we called it Navcam1 when we were building it, but I guess they swapped the numbers?]

"The nominal exposure time for a noontime image on Mars is approximately .25 seconds."
https://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/ds-view/pds/viewIn...NT_HOST_ID=MER1 but the MSL cameras are the same.

Mastcam exposures would be much shorter, yes.

Agreed, I don't think thruster firing is going to tell you anything.

But the other small forces on the spacecraft (e.g., radiation pressure) might be well enough characterized. Time will tell.

The story is of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations

One thing that surprised me was Dante talking about "dust loading" (I think he said) on Navcam and SamCam. I wonder how dirty the nadir panel of the spacecraft is now?

Yes, 60 grams. https://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-new...-asteroid-bennu

Data flowing to the DSN at 900 kbps. Press conference at 2 PM PDT today (10/21) on NASA TV.

Sampling complete! Now to get the images back and verify sample mass.

Livestream seems to have collapsed due to load. http://cristianopi.altervista.org/as/sonde...a_temporea.html is a view from the SPICE predict files but without any spacecraft events [EDIT which seems to have errors of some sort, so ignore, livestream is back.]

As a frequent user and perhaps even more frequent producer of PDS data, I have many things to say on this topic, but expecting everyone to send their comments in from-scratch document form via NSPIRES is a pretty steep barrier to entry.

There are plenty of on-line survey systems that could be used to collect at least a subset of useful user feedback far more easily.

BTW, the "hose" is a Kapton-wrapped cable bundle.

The article is IMHO an oversimplification (it says "as if" there was a void, not that there's really a void), but the paper does say that the core is underdense.

Occasionally Juno gets to within 650,000 km or so of Callisto so it would appear about 10 pixels across, but that's it. I'm not sure if the geometry works out such that Callisto appears in the Junocam FOV.

Wayback machine's last crawl was from August 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200813002623/...g/maps.php?js=1

FWIW I asked our group at MSSS and they forwarded the problem on, so I presume the problem is at JPL or whoever they contract with to manage this. But the web site interface seems to have changed since the last time I looked at it, so I'm not sure this is still inconsistent between the science and engineering cameras.

Appendix C in https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/juno/...R_RDR_DPSIS.HTM

The RDR is decompanded, yes.

There's a gray-coded series of marks on the science tether that's read by an optical sensor inside the support structure, and there's also a regularly-spaced series of marks on the tether (See figure 2 in https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2019/pdf/1344.pdf ) but I'm not sure any of this can be seen in the available imagery.

Regardless of phasing, there are typically two passes per day per orbiter (see https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/44382 ) and MAVEN and perhaps TGO will also be available, but there's usually some uncertainty about the performance of early relay ops.

From the April 2020 MRO status for MEPAG https://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/meeting/2020-04/...202020_post.pdf

As for data return from the EDL cameras, that will probably be discussed in the pre-landing press kit and press conference.

It was supposed to be a Ganymede image, but since it didn't contain Ganymede they changed the title to reduce confusion.

To detect something in absorption, you have to 1) know where the absorption is, and then 2) you have to have a light source that would normally have a lot of energy at that wavelength (either reflected sunlight or thermal emission, depending on wavelength) and 3) it can't be absorbed or scattered by the other stuff between the instrument and the target, and 4) the instrument has to have enough SNR and spectral/spatial resolution to detect the absorption.

1 depends on the behavior of the substance under venusian conditions (if that's known; phosphine is horrifically toxic so people may not have enthusiastically studied it in the lab, I sure wouldn't); 2 and 3 depend on the complex properties of the atmosphere above (and for emission, below) the clouds; 4 is usually something the instrument designers know.

As I said upthread, I'm sure this will be gone over carefully for every dataset there is, and we'll see what happens.

I'm not following the point you're trying to make at all. The paper attempts to show why non-biogenic origins are not possible under Venusian conditions. You can take issue with how complete this attempt was, but they certainly made it.

There's a huge CO2 absorption right there, so that doesn't seem viable. See Figure 5 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00228

But I'm no expert. I'm sure all of the orbital datasets will be getting a close look in the months ahead and people will be considering what types of remote sensing would be best suited (if any.)

It's very unclear to me what "committed" means, and I see a lot of naive talk about how easy it would be to pull something like this off. But if you like that sort of discussion, I suggest https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/ as a better venue.