Coffee Table Book, Thread Options

[Marz]

With " general public " interest being low for the MER missions, the release time of the book would be crucial for its sale!
A good moment would be just a few weeks before Christmas ( 2006 or 2007 ? ) so it could be a great gift for that period of the year 

I'd imagine "general public" interest in MER will, perhaps ironically, spike again when one of the rovers fails, and a huge spike will occur when Phoenix lands... so maybe time is on your side?

What I'd like to see in a coffe-table MER book (in addition to stunning photos):
1. A description of the discoveries and what they mean
2. How the landing sites met the expectations of the scientists who argued for their selection.
3. How MER is impacting NASA's future mission goals in Follow the Water .

Not much focus on the rovers at all, except for the onboard experiments, or when something dramatic happened, like Purgatory. I'd prefer any technical details about the MER themselves to just be embedded factoids, rather than dedicating a chapter to the engineering design and capabilities behind them. The focus should be on what they encounted, not the nuts and bolts that made it possible (which I imagine is covered in detail already in Roving Mars).

[DFinfrock]

I have to agree with both ideas/proposals ... but why wait untill the MER die ?

Take one look at the new images from Home Plate. Then you'll see why Doug *has* to wait until the MERS die. You can't leave part of the story untold.

David

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

O.K. David but don't underestimate the work involved in preparing such a book !
Working on it now and adding interesting things at the end-of-life of the MERs will be easier then to start after the end-of-mission of both 'golf carts'

[djellison]

Working on it now a....

Who said I'm not

Doug

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Great to hear this !


By The Way, a fellow ' unmanned spaceflight ' buff I know is preparing a book on unmanned spaceflight and I'm trying to convince him to post on this forum

[paxdan]

*cough* this image please *cough*

[djellison]

I don't intend to colourise monochrome images for it - I'm trying to document as well as possible the images they took. It's just a smidge of artistic interpretation too much for me - I love that image, don't get me wrong, I'll be using it in my talk to the BAA on Sat. AM as the only Spirit image in an Opportunity talk just to mention Spirit's current state of health, but that's not the image the rover actually took . But that mosaic in B'n'W is certainly on my list of contenders - it'll be Christmas time before I get the raw data for it though. Who knows - there may be even better mosaics of that area at low-sun angles before we leave the 'sunbed' of winter.

The other issue is that a colour page costs more to print than a black and white page - and when it comes to spending on the colour, I'd rather it were colour taken at the time than suggestive artistic colour. Possibly an unpopular choice but if and when I get this book done, I think it'll be the better for it.

My next 'wish for' is MRO HiRISE imagery to act as basemaps for fold out route maps front and back.

Doug

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Well, there's a separate topic on the TOP-20 photos of the Mars Exploration Rovers ... that could certainly help

[monitorlizard]

One thing I always wanted to see in a Mars book was a modern map of the planet
with an acetate overlay of Lowell's Mars canals to see what (admittedly weak) correlations
there were. The World Book Encyclopedia yearbooks used to have fold-in acetate overlays
for various articles, but they never did the Mars thing.

[David]

One thing I always wanted to see in a Mars book was a modern map of the planet
with an acetate overlay of Lowell's Mars canals to see what (admittedly weak) correlations
there were.

Lowell's canals were pretty much of his own imagining; he projected canals onto any body he observed, even those with no surface features at all. But some of the canals drawn by earlier observers do have albedo feature correlates, though more by way of corresponding to nexuses where canals meet rather than the canals themselves - most canals were illusory attempts to connect barely visible dots into visually meaningful patterns. But in some cases (e.g. Syrtis Major) there have been very considerable movements of the darker surface material, and some of the albedo features observed by observers of the late 19th/early 20th century may not exist any more, at least in the location, size, and shape that they were observed.

[ustrax]

Doug...Any guess on the date of the so waited publication?...

[djellison]

Any guess when the rovers will stop working?

I can't start thinking about one till the other happens.

Doug

[ustrax]

Oh I see...By then paper will be an archeological relique...

Can't wait for the smell of those pages...

[tedstryk]

I hope you are right...I still think it would be cool if one or both MERs outlive Phoenix.

[centsworth_II]

I hope you are right...I still think it would be cool if one or both MERs outlive Phoenix.

I can't wait to see FOUR operational rovers on Mars after Exo Mars and MSL get there.