800Whrs+ Staying Up Late ideas |
800Whrs+ Staying Up Late ideas |
Jun 6 2009, 07:04 AM
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#1
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
With Spirit producing an annoyingly large amount of power given her current predicament, the time may well have come to re-open the Gusev astronomy society. Anyone have any dusk / nightime observation ideas?
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Jul 7 2009, 02:44 PM
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#2
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Martian Photographer Group: Members Posts: 353 Joined: 3-March 05 Member No.: 183 |
Airglow and discharges have been discussed a few times. One problem with these is that it is generally incumbent on the proponents to do some calculations showing that the cameras could see them. If you take the observation and see nothing, you'd like to at least have an interesting upper limit, as opposed to saying there could have been a full-blown aurora but we're just not that sensitive. That said, we've obviously done speculative and multi-purpose observation, and some airglow & discharge hunting has snuck in. Let's just say I'm not yet aware of any papers underway...
I like time sequences (aka "movies"), as you might guess. Some have been up to 90 minutes long, but if you strung them together at 25 fps you'd get about 1 sec. That's a fundamental issue. Much below 1 bpp, we'd have a movie of compression artifact variation. At full frame, that's 25 Mb for 1 sec of animation. We have lot's of energy available, but downlink has not gone up proportionately. We'd love to use the energy for AM downlinks, but have frequently been unable to. So, 20-70 Mb for a soll is typical. For things like dust devil movies, we need several bpp. so, we've cut the movie down to 1024x256; use low priority for most frames, so they can be deleted if there is nothing (or use the WATCH feature); and limit times we do it to when flash is emptying or at least there's not something big going on later that sol. (Although if anyone can make the sol 1931 anti-sunset twilight movie--p2663--that accidentally looked at home plate--interesting, I might start to buy the argument that any movie would be interesting.) One part of the data volume argument is that there is no multi-frame compression (eg, MPEG) on the rovers. MSL will have video cameras with video compression. |
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