Have you looked at the images of Opportunity already taken by HiRISE? They are useless, IMHO, for assessing anything about the dust loading.

If you read the description of the instrument at http://hmi.stanford.edu/Description/hmi-ov...i-overview.html you'll find that it's basically a camera that takes images in 12 very narrow bandpasses centered at 617.3 nm, produced by a tunable filter with a bunch of moving parts. There's also an image stabilizer inside the instrument. Pretty complicated, and presumably with a lot of possible ways to go wrong.

I'm not sure how close to raw the images we see are, probably not very close.

Could somebody post an actual image with the artifact annotated? I still don't know what you're talking about.

[edit: sorry, I missed Richard's post. If that's what we're talking about, I'm not sure what the fuss is over. It's not like you could mistake that for a nature feature and it's so faint I can barely see it.]

I'm honestly not seeing this artifact, can someone post an actual image that shows it?

The tone of some of these messages is flirting with rule 2.6 IMHO.

It's a sol-average pressure so you can't tell if the triple point was exceeded at some point diurnally, not that it would be so amazing if it was.

As you pointed out, there's no real motivation to publish engineering approaches that don't pan out; at best this usually remains a part of the design lore within a given organization, and at worst it's forgotten by the next generation even within the same organization.

In hindsight to my inexpert eye, the Mini-MAV was an example of something that sounded workable as a high concept and turned out to be less attractive on closer examination; there has also been a lot of risk aversion for things like grain cracking that could be easily avoided with a little thermal control and limiting time on the surface.

As for the payload mass, the science community does themselves no favors by constantly racheting up the minimal requirement for worthwhile sample return. At one point a small grab sample from a single known point was considered a useful minimum; now it seems we have to have a separate rover to carefully pick samples and curate them. Maybe that's a legitimate evolution of scientific thinking, but it's obviously not helping reduce costs. As usual, these missions are always approached as being the single chance to do something, so they become all things to all people instead of having a focused, minimalist goal.

Wilcox was the main proponent of the all-solid mini-MAV based on his father's work on NOTSNIK. https://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-one-p...-718812/?page=1

and per
https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Br.../personFull.cfm


But of course in engineering the devil is in the details, and either the mini-MAV was not as workable as originally thought, or the concept just wasn't followed through to the end.

If we had tried to do it, we'd have figured out how. It's these endless paper studies that go nowhere.

Well, that's an interesting case, but AFAIK what happened was that the competition created a cohort of people with an interest in the problem, who happened to be available when significant resources became available from industry. Correlation, certainly, but causation would be hard to prove. As Heinlein said, "When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before."

I stand by my claim that competitions in general have not proven that useful in aerospace but have been quite oversold by people who stand to benefit directly from them (*cough*X-Prize Foundation*cough*). But it would be an interesting thing to study in detail ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

I wasn't mocking Musk, only pointing out that it's difficult or impossible to have a balanced discussion on https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/ on any Musk-related topic. How Musk's Mars ambitions play out is obviously yet to be known.

I've spent thousands of hours doing outreach and I'm all about inspiring the next generation, but I don't want to leave MSR for the next generation. We've had the tech for 20 years or more, if only we would choose to do it. While I have some significant concerns about whether the viewgraphs Van linked to represent the best approach, I suspect it would be workable with sufficient commitment.

I'm sorry, but IMHO this misses the point. The problem is not a lack of "creative juice" -- you are buying into the myth that somehow this would be easy with the right out-of-the-box thinking. The reality is that it's a hard technical problem that requires enough money to solve and the will to follow through.

Give me an example of an X-prize that led to something useful. The Ansari X-prize led to a few flights of a vehicle that now hangs in the NASM but has proven a real challenge to commercialize, and the GLXP led to a whole lot of promises and no flights at the time the prize was cancelled.

I'd suggest that you take this discussion over to NSF, but there you will simply be told that Elon will return all the samples you want in a few years.

Find one that isn't vaporware. This is a problem that sounds easy to a casual observer and ends up being not very easy at all. Unfortunately, MAV design has been plagued by casual observers and technologists selling their own particular solution to the exclusion of good system tradeoffs for a long time.

Not methane, but I presume you're aware of MOXIE? https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/instruments/moxie/

IMHO, ISRU is one of those supposedly enabling technologies that have served to distract MSR from simpler, more workable architectures for decades.

You can find any shape you want in various concept art for MAVs over the decades. I recall at least one short fat one with spherical exposed tanks from the 90s.

Well, it's somewhere between 0 and 1. One could figure out based on season and a range of dust loading what the tau needed to get into "solar groovy" (1.1A of production) would be -- then it's a matter of hitting the narrow window when the rover would be responsive to commanding in that mode.

What I don't understand about solar groovy is what the battery SoC has to do with it -- is the 1.1A after whatever the battery charging is using? What happens if the battery just refuses to charge?

I share your skepticism, but as the saying goes, "it's a lousy war but it's the only one we've got."

I've watched MSR flail around my whole professional career in aerospace. I've always felt that there were lots of viable ways to do it, and we just needed to have the will to pick one and follow it through, staying within a clearly defined and achievable set of budget constraints. But there is certainly a minimum viable budget.

People seem to be expecting some magic solution that will all of the sudden make MSR more affordable. I doubt that such a solution exists.

I have a Mars meteorite on my desk that Mike Malin gave me on the 25th anniversary of my working for him. I've felt for a while that barring some out-of-the-box event like Elon Musk's Mars plans actually coming to fruition, that's as close as I'll get to a Mars sample.

EDIT: BTW, I think you sell solids short. I've been active in amateur rocketry with small solids and hybrids for several years now, and I'm pretty impressed with what can be done with solids (less optimistic about hybrids, which is why I find this latest interest in them a bit perplexing.) As for electronics mass, there's a lot that's possible, but it would require a different mindset about reliability. The pendulum was swinging in that direction, but after the Mars98 failures (from which the wrong lessons were learned, IMHO) it swung most of the way back again.

Despite trying as hard as I could to figure out exactly what the recovery process might look like from public information, I haven't been able to figure this out from the papers or what various project people are quoted as saying.

EDIT: I did run across this -- http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-top...mer-update.html -- which has more detail about the need for "sweep and beep" than I had previously run across.

1) It depends, but nearly all of the lossy images have been taken with the same compression requantization parameter for the past several PJs, with an occasional single image with a little higher value.

2) For a variety of reasons, the 273K value basically means that the software couldn't easily figure out the FPA temperature. None of our processing so far tries to do anything with the FPA temperature, so we haven't tried to fix this problem very aggressively.

Sending a message to jncdata@msss.com is the prescribed way of asking questions about the PDS products.

The original design could drill into basalt successfully, but obviously it can no longer be operated thst way.

I'm not sure if "optimized" is the right word -- given all the things it has to do, the design is a series of compromises.

As I indicated, though, that appears to have been only the worst-observed prior to the recent dust storm.

See "Energy management operations for the Insight solar-powered mission at Mars" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7943965/

Article is paywalled but the figures suggest that all of this analysis was done before the current dust storm, and the maximum tau value shown in the figures was about 5 IIRC.

No idea. Probably Giang Q. Lam, Scott Billets, Timothy Norick, and Richard Warwick. "Solar Array Design For The Mars InSight Lander Mission", 14th International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum, (AIAA 2016-4520), https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2016-4520 has some information, but it's behind a paywall.

I'm not sure if a worst-case global dust storm was a credible contingency for InSight planning; I suspect not.

No, and it's set by the hardware to a very large value which maximizes antiblooming at the cost of reduced full well. Which doesn't help in this case because the CCD vertical registers are not connected to the substrate.

Even if everything was perfect (geometric registration, digitization, etc.) a pair of images of TDI N/2 would only improve the SNR by sqrt(2) relative to a single image of TDI N.

We did some tests with lower TDI several orbits ago and will likely repeat them with the new CCD readout region, but we don't have a good model for how much this will help, and it's obviously a tradeoff between blooming and SNR.

I think these features are called "barges" by the Jupiter community, but I'm not sure what distinguishes a barge from a spot if anything.

We've concluded that the issues with the methane images are not stray light per se but are being caused by blooming of charge from the visible bands migrating up into the CH4 region more than we had expected from ground testing.

We tried a couple of things: just turning the TDI off and letting the image blur alongspin (which works but obviously the images are very blurry) and moving the CH4 readout region as far as possible from the visible bands (which showed some modest improvement but isn't a panacea.) The latter will affect the geometric information in a way not currently captured in the instrument metadata. You can expect some similar tests in future perijoves.