MARCI will do observations of the Moon at some point - and HiRISE will do I THINK Moon + Star focus tests.  Not sure of CTX, it may do the same.

Only one post-aerobraking deployment was mentioned, and that was SHARAD

Doug

Does anyone know if MRO is to take any test shots of the Earth and Moon?

Mars attack!      Sol568
An entire DD moving front... I counted 7, maybe more... need avatar update!

Hum,
The word on the street says that there is already an asteroid called (10386) Romulus....

List of Asteroids (180Kb)

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/merweb/merweb.pl

Using that - you can see that Spirit is FINE - and has been imaging a LOT

I want to know more about Spacecrafts' OS!
How to work a OS in a spacecraft?
What OS work in Mars Rovers?

"[JPL] needed the tools to be able to develop their mission software on a system from someone with a proven track record," explained Steven Blackman, director of business development for aerospace and defense for the software company Wind River. The Alameda, California-based company developed the VxWorks real-time operating system used in aboard the MER rovers, as well as other NASA and European Space Agency missions.

A sad question/consideration. The impactor uses a high-precision star tracker, which imply some kind of optical instrument... why they didn't planned to use it (or add a dedicated small camera) to take a "movie" of nucleus approach?
Even using a low resolution and limiting bit rate (let's say, one picture/min) last images should easily reach sub-meter resolution of pre-impact area, a result impossible even with perfectly focused HRI...

The impactor begins science imaging 22 hours before impact with a pair of full-frame
images -- one exposed for the nucleus, and one exposed for the coma, the dimmer
cloud that surrounds the nucleus. Similar image pairs will then be obtained every two
hours until 12 hours before impact. At that time, the impactor will spend two minutes
taking the same pictures and other data that it will collect during the final two minutes
before impact. This demonstration is designed to verify that it will execute this critical
data-taking correctly during the final and most critical segment of its mission.
Beginning 10 hours before impact, images will be taken every two hours until 8 hours
before impact; every hour from 7 to 4 hours before impact; and every 30 minutes from
3 to 1 hour before impact. At that time, the pace of imaging will increase until it reaches
a maximum of one picture every 0.7 second at about 12 seconds before impact.
Engineers say that odds are at least 50-50 that dust hitting the impactor will end transmission
of its images during the final 10 seconds before impact. The final potential
image that could be transmitted in its entirety is one scheduled at about 2 seconds
before impact, with a scale of about 20 centimeters (approximately 8 inches) per pixel.

I think Oppy is hovering somewhere in the low-to-mid 400Whr range in the past few sols...

And in the "it's always something" department... we are now facing a new threat to both vehicles. It is dust storm season on Mars. Dust storm season happens once per martian year, during the southern summer when the input of solar energy into the martian atmosphere is highest. And southern summer is now upon us. The atmospheric dust levels at both of our landing sites are high and climbing, and in fact the dust level at the Opportunity site is the highest we've ever encountered. It's not a serious threat yet, but it's a worry, and we're watching the dust levels in the atmosphere very closely.

The thing to realize about dust storms is that the threat is not high winds, nor is the primary threat dust buildup on the solar arrays. Instead, the primary threat is simply the attenuation of sunlight by dust that is suspended very high in the atmosphere, and the resultant loss of power from our solar arrays. RIght now we've got power to spare on both vehicles, and there is no imminent danger. But martian dust storms are notoriously hard to predict. In some years things are pretty quiet, and in other years what starts out as a small regional storm can blow up quickly into a monster that covers the whole planet, with solar attenuation that could be very bad for our vehicles. We have no way of knowing what's going to happen this year.

a) Available panel power, any time during a clear-day (tau = 0.5) 6 hour period (20° N, untilted) exceeds ~11 W ( ~14.9 W at mid-day). This power could be attenuated by approximately a factor of two during severe dust storms (optical depth ~4, the worst that Viking experienced).

You develop pretty strong feelings for these vehicles once you've spent enough time with them, and when one of them gets into trouble you really sweat it until the trouble is over.

Looks like a packaging error on my part. Rather than repackage it I'm posting version 1.1.1, which is better anyway. I'll make sure the Mac version works...

In the attached images, the blue position is the original "stuck" position, and the overlaid positions are after drives on sols 463-468.

Using that BnW 20x20metre image they released of Oppy in its current 'situation' - and the colour self portrait from 100 sols ago or so... I made a preview of what Oppy might look like today to HiRise..

Whoops. It's fixed now.

I follwed the link recommended by jamescanvin and noted one patch that have caught my attention before, so I try asking here since you seem to be knowledgable people here, so here goes:

What might that that dark spot in the inner basin be, volcanic ash?

I follwed the link recommended by jamescanvin and noted one patch that have caught my attention before, so I try asking here since you seem to be knowledgable people here, so here goes:

What might that that dark spot in the inner basin be, volcanic ash?

High resolution pictures of MRO have appeared on the KSC media archive. Click on this link and select page 3 (or find the page with pictures from May 2nd). No HGA installed yet, but I was interested to see three small thrusters on the underside of the spacecraft. See the image on this page especially. Is this triple redundancy for orbit insertion? I know Cassini had a fully redundant engine, but three seems a bit excessive.