[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Reading thru lots of little PDF's I've found, i get a figure that mentions up to 12 Gbits for a single full HiRISE image.....BUT - look at this...



To me, it would seem that they might get as few as one full HiRISE image per day

BUT - at the best data rates of say, up to 6Mbits/sec - 12 Gbits is only 34 minutes of downlink.

Can anyone sync those two facoids? It seems that the suggested performance, and the expected return, don't match by an order of magnitude.

Doug

[djellison]

Perhaps they'll combine the two, downsample and subsample

i.e. take the full thing, but send the full width at 1/4res, and the central 4k pixels at full res.

I've seen fairly confident mention of 5mbps, and one of the reports I mention elsewhere in this subforum talks about 6mbps. Obviously, I appreciate this will only be at certain ranges, and only with larger DSN assets, and only some of the time. I guess once you factor all that in, and the requirements of the other instruments and so on and so forth - a couple of images a day makes sense.

It does seem a bit mad, however, that only something like 70,000 sqkm or so will be imaged at that res - for a planet with as much land as Earth, it's an area just the size of Lithuania.

I guess a lot of it will be monochrome, probably 2x downsampled ( good for SNR ), and thus approx 50-60cm/pixel. It's going to be good stuff, but what's MOC up to now, 200k images +? It'll take a long time for MRO to match that

Doug