[X] My Assistant

[Ryan]

Just found out today at a MER all-hands meeting that both MER and Odyssey will each be suffering an immediate $4 million budget cut to help defray the cost of MSL. Read more here: http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com/200...rs-budget-cuts/

[elakdawalla]

Here's a question I don't know the answer to: Say Spirit can no longer rove, but has enough power to continue some observations, in particular observations of weather phenomena like sky opacity and stuff like that. How valuable is it for the understanding of Mars' weather to have one continuous set of measurements from one point on the ground indefinitely? Spirit's not a real "weather station" -- it can't measure wind speed or direction or other properties of the air, at least not directly; but it can continue to gather records relevant to weather. Is having that one limited set of records from that one point worth spending a few to 10 million dollars over the course of a year? Or is the type of data that Spirit can gather so limited that gathering another year or two's worth wouldn't provide much further incremental benefit to Mars climatologists?

Mike, since you're the representative of the orbital community in this discussion, can you comment on what continuing science campaigns are being performed by Odyssey? I don't know much more to say about specifically why Odyssey needs to continue other than "More data good. No more data bad." And I'm sure there are much more intelligent things that can be said than that.

--Emily

[mcaplinger]

Mike, since you're the representative of the orbital community in this discussion, can you comment on what continuing science campaigns are being performed by Odyssey?

I'm the representative of the orbital community? Then why am I working so hard on MSL?

Seriously, as others have said it's pretty hard to put a dollar figure on data bits. Certainly more GRS integration time leads to better SNR and higher spatial resolution in elemental abundance maps, and more THEMIS images is more coverage of more places in more bands. And THEMIS can monitor atmospheric temperature and dust globally. But there's some overlap with the MRO payload in that regard, so I would think the GRS dataset was the unique contribution of Odyssey.