[X] My Assistant

[karolp]

I also think that MGS was a fine spacecraft and wish it was around for another Martian year or two. But I was wondering: in what way will our presence at Mars be different without MGS? Are there some capabilities which are not overlapping with MRO and Odyssey?

[djellison]

Well - if you take MARCI, HiRISE, CRISM and MCS on MRO, you have basically covered or exceeded all of MGS's abilities with MOC2 NA, MOC2 WA and TES. MOLA was working passively having had a failure of the circuitry that 'pinged' the laser. We've also lost the MAG, but I don't know what, if any capacity to get similar data SHARAD and MARSIS have.

What we have really lost is repeatability and overlap. One of the key things that the most recent extension was being talked about as usefull for was revisiting site previously imaged by MOC to identify changes. Technically possible with HiRISE, but there is something to be said for doing repeat obs with the same instrument at the same local time. Also - one could do a 'scout' observation with MOC before turning on HiRISE to grab an image. Also - it would have been usefull to have MOC WA global coverage to overlap with the MARCI coverage as a 'transition' phase, and also to offer two daily sets of observations a couple of hours apart to identify motion etc.

Doug