Sol 90+, Extended mission |
Sol 90+, Extended mission |
Aug 25 2008, 11:46 AM
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Senior Member Group: Admin Posts: 3108 Joined: 21-December 05 From: Canberra, Australia Member No.: 615 |
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Aug 27 2008, 06:31 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1592 Joined: 14-October 05 From: Vermont Member No.: 530 |
Long shadows may actually help them in the quest to get an icy sample. They were speculating that sunlight made the adhesion to the scoop worse.
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Aug 27 2008, 07:36 PM
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#3
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 47 Joined: 27-June 08 From: Ashford, Kent, United Kingdom. Member No.: 4244 |
AFAIK, the sunlight DID make the regolith clumpiness worse. The idea is that the ice softend in the sun & caused it to stick together. Aslo the scoop is dark, absorbing solar energy, warming it up slightly, thus making the ice rich regolith contained within to clump, as the ice rehardened.
The idea f perhaps scooping some samples in the half light of the polar midnight twilight (as the sun will be setting 'properly' from this Saturday onwards) sounds much better. Delivering ice rich samples to TEGA should be easier as it should be more of a fine granular mix, rather than the stodgy stuff that has proven so difficult to load. The minus side of course, with proper night time arriving, well deep twilight (even on Sol 124 the final sol of the current extension, the Sun will only dip to just over four degrees below the horizon at midnight), power will become a big issue. Will each active period every Sol have to be reduced in duration to allow more time for recharging batteries? Andrew Brown. -------------------- "I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before". Linda Morabito on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.
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