MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[djellison]

I heard about this 24 hours ago, and couldn't believe it - this is EXACTLY what has been missing from ESA. MASSIVE kudos to the ESOC MEX flight ops team for doing it

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/VMC/index.html

The last time I wrote a post and hit 'submit' at UMSF with a smile this big on my face, was when Oppy successfully got out of Purgatory.

[ormstont]

Thanks to Stu for passing on the message, I'm registered now and can pass on my thanks to you all once more for the wonderful work you've been doing with our VMC images. I hope that through this forum I can keep in touch with you all as the VMC project continues, with this instrument we're just the tool, you'll be making the discoveries! Especially the users here on Unmanned Spaceflight forum have given one of the warmest welcomes to this new initiative so it's great to be in touch with you directly.

As Stu passed on, I'd really urge you to send in your results to vmc@esa.int - Daniel runs our website at ESOC and we'd love to publish your VMC results along with the routine updates as we get them from the spacecraft. With him looking after the website I look after the camera (as much as I can - my 'day job' is power and comms on the spacecraft) so if you've got any suggestions on what we should do with it that might help us too (although we are heavily limited by operational constraints - with the wonderful results we get from our science instruments the science mission must come first!).

I'm open to questions on the e-mail or here on the forum - if we keep the images coming you can help keep VMC fresh with new processing techniques, image analysis and ideas for the future. VMC is meant to be everyone's camera, I hope that despite our somewhat basic images we can still get some wonderful results.