Thanks

Pages 16 and 17 of this 2018 paper give a good description of the plan:

With tip-prevention by careful reconnaissance to plan avoidance of such features in the flight plan seems effective enough given the other risks, in the NASA article it also states "If Ingenuity survives the cold Martian nights during its preflight checkout, the team will proceed with testing" a choice of words that didn't exactly fill me with confidence, but from the paper linked by Explorer1 shows in page 15-16 section 'H' seems the batteries should have more than adequate capacity to provide the 21Wh needed to keep above -15C at night, but does anyone know if the CO2 insulation was ever replaced by aerogel?

TCM-1 was supposed to be today, but I heard it was delayed according to Reddit due to the accuracy of the launch. I haven't heard anything official from JPL or NASA though.

TCM-1 was completed today:



https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/1294450300095471616

Perseverance is now fewer than 100 days away from landing on Mars.

In addition to an EDL microphone recording of the heating system, one of the hazcams took some images during the cruise of some insulation and a cable:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7789

I am wondering about the lighting though: is that sunlight coming through the aeroshell, or something internal?

I thought these cruise shots were illuminated by an LED, but I could be wrong.

P

This may be of interest re: sound propagation in the Mars atmosphere
http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/granada2017...granada2017.pdf

There's no LED illumination out the back of the rover. That illumination is coming through gaps in the backshell

Obviously this isn't true, but I would have thought that gaps would allow super heated gasses to enter the backshell during entry.

It's perhaps surprising, but there is a vent hole in the backshell - you have to let the air escape during launch to avoid a pressure differential that could cause structural failure. The same hole (the ~30cm dark circle you can see on backshell images, but there is some sort of wire mesh/filter, so the effective area is only 600cm2 or so) allows the aeroshell to repressurize during entry/descent, but this is slower. Attention is paid to avoid sensitive items being exposed to that repressurization flow, but it is relatively slow (effectively it just sips at the wake, it isnt exposed to the dynamic pressure on the heat shield).

I managed to put together some info on this sort of venting in a recent paper (email me if you can't access)
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/1.A34861

New interactive Jezero geologic map at https://planetarymapping.wr.usgs.gov/interactive/sim3464

Following on from that is a new paper in Space Science Reviews:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00739-x

If you have access to it. It's a description of this map and the geology of the site.

There is a supplementary file here (a c. 18 MB TIF file):

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art..._MOESM2_ESM.tif

which I think is open access (correct me if I'm wrong), and this gives the names of the nearly 200 quadrangles used for mapping the site. I really wanted to have this for Curiosity, but it was never released, as far as I know.

Phil

New EDL video: https://images.nasa.gov/details-JPL-2020122...%20w%20SFX.html

My obligatory link to a comic on my office door: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/32/a0/e03...c0a1fbc5f1f.jpg (Overlook the technical errors in the first two panels, it's still funny.)