I'm so mad! Our network at work is offlimits to RealPlayer...I cannot listen in, I'll have to wait to see if it comes out in Windows Media format.

News Release for ongoing briefing

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mgs/mgs-20061121.html

Well - it's a bit odd that they have not found anything in the images...but they were not specific as to how much of the area in which they expect MGS would be in ( a one minute window in its orbit, roughly ) they have covered via CTX or the ONC. If they've imaged most of it, it would worrying that they have seen nothing. If they've only imaged a bit, it's not so worrying yet.

Doug

MGS has been the first Delta II launch I saw live on CNN. I still have it on tape somewhere.

If it's really gone, it's very sad, but contrary to the Viking days we have new spacecraft already at Mars and in the making.

Good bye MGS. It's the end of the beginning of the second exploration of Mars.

Analyst

Last question was about how many images have been taken in the search - 750 Star camera images, 1 CTX image, 1 HiRISE image taken.

Doug

Phone number for archived press conference: 866-513-1230. Unfortunately I didn't catch the international call-in number.

[Edit: the tape will be available for 1 week]

I thought it was a good press conference, with decent questions and responsive answers from well-informed panelists.


TTT

Veronica Mcgregor ( Manager of the Media Relations Office at JPL ) has been kind enough to email me and let me know that the conference will be available for a week at....

TOLL FREE FROM WITHIN THE U.S.: 866-513-1230
INTERNATIONAL TOLL: 203-369-1973

Doug

I was pleased to hear that they are continuing to pursue their options with an upbeat attitue. I'm an insufferable optimist and in light of some of the "magic" that these folks have performed in the recent past, I am still not writing off MGS yet.

I don't wish to sound the pessimist, but it just seems to me unlikely that MGS is going to show up again. If they missed photographing it my understanding was that likely means there have been some thruster firings since loosing contact. Possibly the spacecraft was trying to orient itself or recover in some way.

My gut says that the vehicle is very possibly out of fuel and out of power.

It was a tremendous run. As people have pointed out, it totally changed how we saw Mars. I told many friends at the time that Pathfinder was great public relations, and a good engineering exercise, but MGS was where the real breakthroughs were going to come from.

If the only thing that mission accomplished had been a global topographic map from the laser altimiter, it would have been worth it. As it was, we got so much more.

Godspeed, MGS.

How much of the surface of Mars was photographed by MOC? More broadly, what kind of numbers can we use to sum up MGS's achievements?

If I understood correctly, Tom Thorpe, the project manager, said that MGS has a year's worth of thruster fuel on board. So unless the guidance systems have gone berserk, I don't think that fuel is a critical issue.

TTT

Operating normally, it's got fuel through to beyond 2010. Operating in various safe modes, 1 to 2 years.


As for figures..... well... until the second Shuttle SAR mission, MOLA had produced a better elevation map of Mars than we had of Earth.... it took more than 600,000,000 altitiude readings of Mars before the laser failed and it operated as a passive radiometer.

TES has taken dust loading, temperature and mineralogical readings for 5 martian years - collecting more than 206 million spectra.

MOC...well...wide angle and narrow angle added up - probably 250,000 images, the entire planet, every day, in red and blue, for weather monitoring with the wide angle - and then probably more than a million sq km of Mars covered at better than 4m/pixel resolution.

Can't find anything more specific for the Magnetometer and Electron Reflectometer.

Doug

Yes I concur with Tom and djellison, attitude fuel should not be one issue. But energy are a major one, MGS cant operate on one solar panel only, assuming that the one with the problem now are misaligned.
If both are, well it seems quite unlikely but as pointed out on this forum already, Ulysses had a nasty energy situation and in addition its fuel frozen solid and it was still possible to retrieve it. So its still an open question, though the odds for one retrieval have gone up now.

That was SOHO

Doug

Well...

what can I say if MGS is finished!? I have such affection for that gal/machine.

I remember the long wait to get back to Mars after Viking and the awful consternation when Mars Observer bit the cosmic dust in 1993. That year I had been laid off from my job with two children to support.

Then, the wonderful launches of MGS and Pathfinder in 1996. And the horror of losing the Russian Mars 96 probes. That year I started working for one of the NASA field centers as a programmer for business apps.
Not the fun stuff but paid the bills and kept my kids fed.

I agree, that Pathfinder was just that, a pathfinder for MER (and wonderful in it's own sense to be ON THE GROUND AGAIN). But MGS was the gravy....... and anyone who wanders the MOC gallery cannot but be impressed artistically and scientifically with that incredible contribution to enlarging Mars for us all. MGS has truly introduced a NEW Mars.... and I will ALWAYS hold her in great esteem.

Thank you MGS and sleep well if sleep you must.

Craig

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews....-SPACE-MARS.xml

Here's a groaner from the above Reuters article:

One chance remained on Tuesday to recover the probe, which has been programmed to transmit a signal to NASA's robotic geology station, Opportunity, located near Mars' equator.

Now, I suppose one could call Spirit a "station" at Low Ridge Haven before she moved, but Opportunity has hardly been stationary

I know, I know, mainstream media.....yadda yadda yadda....

Not to mention "Mars Global Surveyor's cameras were the first to record topographic features suggesting flowing water on Mars,"

Mariner 9? Vikings 1 and 2? Mars 5?

I wonder what kind of a run MRO is going to have? With its greater bandwidth and resolution, think of how much data it could return in 10 years.

It's sure to be alot. MRO returned more data in it's first picture at Mars then Galileo during it's entire mission. It's sure to be an exciting time!

As for MGS, well, it's sad to see it go, but not all hope is lost (Just most of it), and it's certainly served it's purpose well. I've personally been looking at the HiRISE pictures, it's alot of work to carefully look for something out of the ordinary... There's still a glimmer of hope that there is something near the noise level that is MGS. FYI, the pictures weren't of the entire 2 minute uncertainty window that MGS currently has, only a few seconds of it, based off of two canadates from the nav. camera. Still, they are among the largest HiRISE images taken... Cheer up though, there might still be some exciting news from HiRISE in the short term future. The release of pictures was delayed in part due to the press conference today, and with the holiday in the US, but it will be coming shortly. MRO in many ways is an upgraded MGS, it will allow for photographing the entire weather patterns at Mars, and for high-resolution pictures anywhere, just like MGS, only it's spacial and spectral resolution will be better. That's not to say that MGS couldn't have done something more, only that it served it's purpose to the day that it was replaced, and not a day longer. Sad it is there couldn't be a bit more overlap, to compare the data sets a bit more, but it's something that will take MRO quite some time, to build up the great reputation that MGS left for us.

Drat! Always told myself I shouldnt post late at night.

If anything is an unfair comparison, that is it. Galileo with its crippled HGA and many times weaker signal since it was so much further away at Jupiter can't be compared to MRO. Comparisons with previous or current Mars missions do have sense on the other hand.


I find that posting early in the morning is much worse. And here I am...

You are correct that that's an unfair assessment, to compare with Galileo. For Mars spacecraft, well, I think MRO will have about the same data as MGS released about this time next year or so, our data rate's about 10x faster or so...

Well, I like poking fun of the media as much as the next guy, but in defense of this article:

1. the word "station" is probably referring to MER's radio communication role. In HAM radio, my truck can be considered a mobile station. (So don't blame the writer, and instead blame english as a really sloppy, inconsistent, and horribly mutated language?)

2. I think the writer meant that MGS was the first instrument to detect signs of *actively* flowing water, instead of evidence of flowing water in the past.

3. Finally, an american news report on a NASA mission that didn't require comparisons between "Football Fields" and "School Buses".

4. The mission cost is not in the first sentence, and cost referred to as "modest".

This alone is a miracle....

Could we move the discussion unrelated to MGS to some other location?

Moved the MRO discussion to a new thread for the Nov. 22 new image release.

Ooooog,


don't get me started on the Galileo high gain antenna . . . .

haaaaaaaaaaa !
I do not post here often but your answer is what I treaser most about about this site.volcanopele thanks.Hey ! I use to post questions in google space about where the mars observer might be in future decades,would turning the space craft to heat its fuel line have saved her ?...............

Opportunity did not detect any signal from MGS on Wednesday.

I wasn't hopefull of that one - that would have required a power positive vehicle with multiple failures on the X-Band sdie which given the symptoms before the loss would seem unlikely.

Doug

I was hopeful. A signal was received on November 5, after the eclipse which means that the failed panel isn't that badly positioned. The spacecraft should be power positive... Opoortunity should be able to pick a weak signal in that case.
hmmm, that's strange.

I'm sorry for the double post ( I could just edit the previous message ), but more bad news is coming...

The star tracker of MRO has detected some light points that are not in the star catalog. Prelimitary results show that this could be pieces from Mars Global Surveyor, but they may also be gamma rays that impacted the quality of the images.

from http://www.livescience.com/blogs/2006/11/2...-mums-the-word/

Doug

Maybe the panel broke off somehow... weird

Would the cracked panel yoke have given way?

Hum... perhaps some small impact on the damaged panel? Or is my imagination too wild?
Anyway... a spacecraft doesn't just disappear!

Ominous reminders of the CoNTour accident.

Doug

My first thought was what Sunspot was thinking... if the star tracker did see chunks of MGS, maybe that solar panel broke off. Not sure how realistic that is though...

It would be odd for an array to have become detached wouldn't it...even if a solar array gimble went rogue and thrashed around flat out for days ( which I can't imagine being possible ) it wouldn't rattle anything loose would it?

If there's MGS 'bits' drifting around, perhaps a more likely situation was a low power situation and some sort of rapid outgassing ( I hate to use the word explosion ) through fuel freezing or something like that? A burst prop line chucking a few mylar blankets around would be a little more plausable I would have thought.

Doug

But IF MGS had been in the field of view of the star tracker cameras, are the MGS team sure it would have been visible for certain? If its not visible in the images, why is it so far from it's predicted position? Or, if it is still fairly close to its original orbit why wasn't it seen in the images? - All very strange

It's a shame the rovers are on reduced winter power, perhaps they could have attempted to image MGS as it flew over - if that were technically possible of course.

MGS orbits at early-afternoon as far as the ground goes. Odyssey is a couple of hours later and thus sometimes visible at dusk, but it's just not possible for MGS.

Doug

If Leonard David is referring to what was said in the press conference last week, I'd've called it something even less strong than speculation. Here's what I wrote down that Jim Erickson said: "We believe we would be looking for either the intact spacecraft, but we did not discount that there might be other pieces out there, so we were willing to consider multiple hits. We adopted strategies of looking along the MGS track, and let the possible locations of MGS drift through the fields of view of our instruments...." I interpreted that to mean that while they had no reason to believe there were multiple pieces, they made sure that their observations would cover that possibility.

--Emily

MGS had solar panel gimbal problems during the early part of the mission, which required the beta supplement orbits. Perhaps that mechanism finally snapped (or at least ceased to function).

If I remember correctly the reason for the beta supplement orbits has been with the HGA, not the solar array. The solar array caused slower/longer aerobreaking.

Analyst

That's the cracked yoke I was wondering about. Here's an excerpt from the 1997 JPL press release:

"The investigation of the unexpected motion of the unlatched panel led us to identify a secondary source of damage in the yoke, a piece of structure that connects the solar panel to the spacecraft," Cunningham said. "This secondary source of damage was a result of the failure of the damper arm that jammed in the panel's hinge joint shortly after launch when the solar panels were initially deployed."

Mechanical stress analysis tests suggest that the yoke -- a triangular, aluminum honeycomb material sandwiched between two sheets of graphite epoxy -- probably fractured on one surface. The analysis further suggests that the fractured surface, with increased pressure on the panel during aerobraking, began to pull away from the aluminum honeycomb beneath it.

MGS made it through the rest of aerobraking just fine. If the yoke did finally break off, what kind of stresses would have made that happen during normal operations?

Europe joins hunt for missing Mars probe
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn10...mars-probe.html

The radio beam from MGS's antennas is about 60° wide, giving only about a 1 in 6 chance of it reaching Opportunity, since MGS's orientation is unknown.

Spirit, will try to detect the beacon, too. But Spirit will not have enough power to spare for this task until a few weeks from now, Thorpe says.

"We've asked the Mars Express people to take an image of MGS with their High Resolution Stereo Camera," Thorpe says, adding that the Mars Express HRSC team had agreed to make the attempt. The earliest opportunity is on 7 December 2006, when the two spacecraft should come within 400 kilometres of each other.

MRO is too busy to continue hunting for MGS. But if MEX can locate MGS, a case could be made for a second imaging attempt with MRO.

NASA is beaming commands to MGS from Earth every day in the hope of reviving it.

The two points of light in MRO images were in two very different orbits, so it's pretty unlikely that both could have come from the spacecraft.

I thought I'd point out that Thorpe gave me an update yesterday...

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000778/

Also, he told me earlier that the problem panel is indeed the same one that caused the lengthy aerobraking period. However, he said it was a different part of the panel that was reporting problems this time.

--Emily

Ten posts dealing with tomorrow's scheduled press conference were moved to a new thread in the same (MGS) forum.

Mars Global Surveyor: Still Silent, Yet Hope Remains
Leonard David
LiveScience.com Blog
December 12, 2006