[X] My Assistant

[remcook]

did it got mentioned that the site was launched last week or so?


http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I've been told flatly by Peter Smith: can't be done.

[tedstryk]

Again I will say, lets be honest. We are image junkies, and image junkies prefer rovers to stationary landers. Worse, with MSL likely slipping to 2011, once Spirit and Opportunity die, we will have an addiction we are no longer able to feed, so a 2007 Mars rover would be nice. So would a longer-lived vehicle. But with the opportunity to get the science we will be getting out of this mission at a relatively low cost, given the already-spent money, I think that this mission will be a great one. And, as has been said by myself and others, there will be imaging consolations (the microscope, the new kind of terrain - and I wonder if we will see deposition of frost a la Viking 2 before Phoenix dies).

[paxdan]

Again I will say, lets be honest.  We are image junkies, and image junkies prefer rovers to stationary landers.

yeah true, but then the imagery is all we are given to play with... i wonder how many of us would become mini-tes, mossbauer, APXS, thermal, insolation, every measurement made on mars junkies with access to the full data stream from the MERs. someone commented recently about how imagery is regarded as the poor relative of the remote sensing 'real science' being done, and sure, people strive for decades sometimes to get 'their' instrument in orbit/on the surface, careers are made on the results, but why on earth (or mars) isn't the rest of the data available? (even in a degraded form like the raw imagery).

so what if only a handful of people have the inclination, knowledge or skill to process it, surely this information should be available to the amatuer community in order that it can be shared by those who can to those who want to know.

Doug, if i had my one question to ask steve it would be parsed from the above. Given the interest in the missions, why isn't more raw data made available?



edited to include link to thread i referred to

This post has been edited by paxdan: Aug 26 2005, 10:54 PM

[helvick]

...but why on earth (or mars) isn't the rest of the data available? (even in a degraded form like the raw imagery).

so what if only a handful of people have the inclination, knowledge or skill to process it, surely this information should be available to the amatuer community in order that it can be shared by those who can to those who want to know.

As one of the few amateurs with enough interest in the engineering of the machines themselves to work on figuring out how well they are working I'd add to that a request for the engineering data too.

For the record I've just spent the last two weeks building a reasonable insolation model based on badly scanned pdf's served up by the Nasa Technical reports server - all of the data I have is in poor quality scans from appendices in typed reports from the 90's. I'd have a field day with some real raw engineering data from the MER's but it 's very sparse.

To be fair NASA\JPL are light years ahead of everyone else and for that I am really grateful but it is worth pointing out that there is an outreach benefit there that is being lost.