Investigating The Heatshield Options

[djellison]

Lots of MI images of the heatshield today

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...B8P2939M2M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...B8P2939M2M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...B8P2939M2M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...B8P2939M2M1.JPG

[djellison]

http://mer.rlproject.com/ohsc.jpg

[centsworth_II]

I bet there are lots of "mystery fibers" on the ground in this area!

[mike]

Those are pretty sweet.. the engineers must be loving them.

[djellison]

[hendric]

Being a fellow engineer, I imagine the heatshield team must feel a small hint of sadness seeing something they worked on for so long in so many pieces...So I thought a haiku might cheer them up...

Broken and shattered
Upon the field
Job well done

[djellison]

Possible evidence for wind at Meridiani?



Thats all the filters, just run one after the other.

I'd like them to get a little closer to this piece - simply so we could get a self portrait looking at the foil - parts of which look quite flat

Doug

[remcook]

what's the white stuff flowing across the image? if it's dust it looks a bit light doesn't it?

[OWW]

The white stuff are reflections in the camera. Doug means the shield 'moving in the wind' I think. What is it made of anyway? Can aluminium move in such a small breeze?

[djellison]

I dont mean the foil, or the glare from the camera I mean the big piece sticking up from the heatshield - looks a bit like an old cable or something

Doug

[CosmicRocker]

Wow! That thing clearly appears to be moving, and wind is the only likely explanation. There is just one thing that confuses me. If the part is in different positions in the red, green, and blue filters, shouldn't your colored image above show some color separation or blurriness on that same part?

I'm curious. Did you do an animated gif for the whole image, and if so, did you see any other signs of movement?

[Pando]

I think they are currently looking for signs of movement due to wind; basically looking for stuff being blown around. I don't know if anyone has actually found any conclusive evidence of it but Doug's gif is certainly quite interesting.

If Geoffrey Landis is reading this forum perhaps he could run this past the atmospheric science folks?

[djellison]

Wow! That thing clearly appears to be moving, and wind is the only likely explanation. There is just one thing that confuses me. If the part is in different positions in the red, green, and blue filters, shouldn't your colored image above show some color separation or blurriness on that same part?

I'm curious. Did you do an animated gif for the whole image, and if so, did you see any other signs of movement?

I did think that myself - but the movement isnt really enough to see seperation in the colour. I did check the whole image, and there wasnt anything else moving that I could see.

Doug

[slinted]

I think they are currently looking for signs of movement due to wind; basically looking for stuff being blown around. I don't know if anyone has actually found any conclusive evidence of it but Doug's gif is certainly quite interesting.

I was wondering why there were so many duplicate sequences on the recent sols, like the one Doug used for his gif. Looking at Opp sol 335 ( http://www.lyle.org/mars/bysol/1-335.html ), they took a L4567R1 series, then did another right after. In looking at the times in particular, that piece is wiggling back and forth between just about every frame which
are seperated by as little as 40 seconds and as much as 1 minute 20 seconds.

I'm not sure if its all shadow changes or not, but it seems like there is a difference in the general shape of the heatshield section between the 2 R1 frames, seperated by 2 minutes 20 seconds : http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/collections/oppsol335R.gif

[akuo]

Sure looks like wind to me.

This got me thinking, Oppy doesn't have a weather package, but couldn't they have tied a small flag or a piece of string or something on the calibration target post? At least this way they could have looked indirectly for wind.

Another technical improvement came to my mind earlier. Since the rover gets much better solar coverage when tilted towards the sun, then why not make the whole rover tiltable? This should be possible to implement in the rocker-bogey wheel system. It sort of seems to me that JPL didn't think of the orientation of the Rover in its plans, since they had the HGA motors freezing in the shadow of the mast on one of Spirit's fist sols - only after this even they started turning the rover to the most favorable position after each drive. This manouvering could be extended to tilting the rover also, if the mechanics existed.

Of course this would mean more careful manouvering around targets on the ground, but it would still improve the solar power situation most of the time. Maybe it could be considered in future missions, even Phoenix (by making the legs party movable in vertical direction). I think JPL will also put some thought in making the MSL solar powered after all :-).