MSL development & assembly, Until it's shipped to the Cape |
MSL development & assembly, Until it's shipped to the Cape |
Mar 29 2010, 08:11 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2922 Joined: 14-February 06 From: Very close to the Pyrénées Mountains (France) Member No.: 682 |
In case you missed it there's 9 minutes on MSL (actual hardware visible) + 5 minutes with Dr Elachi on "This week in Space" there: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/
14 minutes out of 23 regarding Unmanned, not bad. -------------------- |
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Jul 28 2010, 06:26 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 293 Joined: 29-August 06 From: Columbia, MD Member No.: 1083 |
Just attended a talk by Sylvestre Maurice, deputy PI for ChemCam. Some interesting facts:
- ChemCam is planning to zap 7-20 targets per day for the entire 2 Earth-year mission (!!!!) - ChemCam sees alkali metals extremely well and the transitional metals and other metals reasonably well -- It has a harder time (but doable) with H, C, O, N, P, S, Si ...those elements need .5-10% by weight fractions of the zapped rock to be identified. He said they need 3-5% for C, in particular, depending on range. -- They can't get any of the noble gases (but who cares?) or F and unfortunately, they can't get Cl at all. APXS will have to look for Cl - They're operational range is 1.5-7m -- It would take double the power to extend it to 9m, which was their initial goal - They added a cooler to their body unit, because the heat from the RTGs would have been too much for it to handle. They were in an awkward spot for awhile where the mast-mounted laser wasn't going to work well when it was too cold, while the body unit was going to be too hot! He feels confident the electric cooler resolves this. |
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