Even more questions for Emily (or anyone who can answer them here).

Is there a systematic observation plan for atmospheric halos scheduled as part of normal surface operations?

Will other mission raw data (MET, TEGA, TECP, etc) be available in rapid manner as the SSI data is?

(A statement rather than a question) Thank you for your dedication and willingness to open the further exploration of Mars to all who are interested!


-- Pertinax

I think they had this planned for MPL? I remember a article in Sky & Telescope magazine, i'll see if I can find it.

I've found the magazine.. December issue 1999.

The scoop:





and the RAC:




http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=814&cID=8

Thank you Sunspot. I though I remembered that as well. Did the plan carry over to Phoenix though? I thought that it had but over the past month have not been able to find any mention one way or the other.

-- Pertinax

It would be sort of cool to see the RAC with the 'lights' on imaged by the RA,B,C SSI filters

Doug

I am happy...
On the 8th year of the 21st century I have made my first gif...

Oh dear god, we've created a monster! A MONSTER I tell you! Run! Runnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!

I don't have a scanner, so I had to photograph the article with my digital camera.

....and the rest of the article.

Q: Can Phoenix wake in the spring without its batteries? Are they the most likely part to be damaged over winter? Could the wakeup "phone home" procedure end up saturating the telecoms orbiters (heh) if Phoenix tried to do it repeatedly?

Q: Do we have any photos at or near the Phoenix latitude taken in the early spring and mid summer for comparing changes?

Q: What amount of expansion/contraction is expected of the polygons? Will we be able to see noticeable changes?

Q: How late in the winter will MRO be able to view Phoenix? Will it take photos past EOM to watch the surface evolution? (and hopefully get some "engineering photos" of Phoenix's shadow across the surface!)

Q: What kind of effect is predicted on the ground ice accumulation due to the albedo change caused by Phoenix's landing?

Q: Is there a decoder for the windsock speed online somewhere?

Q: Phoenix got below the Mars Scout budget cap by using existing equipment. What is the phoenix's team feelings about building a new lander from scratch within the Scout budget?

Here's a great idea for a flash kid's game: Dig with the scoop and drop it into the instruments! My son could play for hours doing that. Hmmm, crazy thought for the "XM"...Write JPL in the sand.

Thanks Emily!

PS Some questions from friends:
Q: How long before Phoenix team members get "Order of the Phoenix" badges?

Q: Do they expect the digging to shift the lander at all?

Plus the usual "when is the mic going to come on?"

Ehhem...it didn't. The initial 'scout' budget was $325m. That went up by about $100m before launch. You have to include the $100m spent on the old '01 lander as well. Total cost about $520m.

Doug

Here's a question for you Emily (or any Phoenix people lurking in the undergrowth...)

At the risk of sounding slightly ungrateful when the team have done such a magnificent job getting the pictures published online so quickly, are there any plans to sort the raw images page into daily blocks, like the MER ones are? I just ask because it's a bit ungainly at the moment, with everything on the one page; I fear that after a week or so of pictures it will become just too big to use without having to go and make a meal or do some shopping while the page is loading...

I too would love to see some "sky shots", it's a real itch I want to scratch, you know? I remember seeing that Sky & Telescope article at the time it was published and thinking how cool it would be to see something like that for real, and now we have cameras and hardware to do such a beautiful scene justice I think it would be a real shame not to at least try. I'm sure they're going to tho.

(BTW: just found this interesting report from JPL on landing night... camera-work's a bit "Cloverfield" but I thought it gives a nice impression of being there...)

As some of you may have noticed (thanks Algorimancer) the Phoenix raw image update on my site was corrupted earlier. For some reason things got garbled when I tried to FTP from work. It should all be fixed now.

James

Thanks for your reply.

"So, it's impossible. How long will it take?"
- Leslie Neilson's (yes, that Leslie Neilson) proto-Kirk character in Forbidden Planet

But, if I ran the zoo I would listen to my engineers. So my question would be -- back of the envelope estimate, how much cost & complexity would it add to a lander such as this to provide for a small, sealed 'sllde' (i.e. chamber) in(to) which ice could be melted, to then be imaged at say 200x?

Ideally several different magnifications of course, but let's start simple, especially as in this thought experiment it sounds like we need a lens assembly put in place for this single purpose.

I'm hoping that at least by the time we get to Europa such a capability will be included.



True enough. My excuse for bringing this up now is that I'm trying to manage my expectations, and to put the science that we can expect into context -- at least for myself.

Also, my martian friends, who were anxious that they might be exposed (and y'know "there goes the neighborhood") by Phoenix, are breathing much easier now.

Just completed watching the latest news conferance, they mentioned the lander "sleeping" yet with continuous sunlight, why would it sleep? (Or is it for the benefit of the team to sleep!)

Starting to name rocks and features around the lander. The theme: fairy tales and folklore, so we have (another? Doesn't Gusev have one already?) "Sleepy Hollow", "Headless" (as in "horseman" I'm guessing" and "Ichabod", plus "Humpty Dumpty", "Wall" and "Alice"...

Labelled pic here

Peter Smith said they expect to be naming 100 to 200 features, so there's a lot of potential to have your kid's (or your own!) favourite fairy tale character ID's on Mars soon...

A few thoughts from the press conference:

1) Emily got in more than 2 questions *tsk tsk* Seriously, at least you got some of the others to say something.
2) NASA TV does look better on a High def TV.
3) The rock circulation idea is pretty interesting. Some of the views of the nearby trough walls gives the appearance that the soil is a conglomerate, with a coarse-grained sand matrix with hand-to-football sized rocks. Basically, the texture below the surface resembles the appearance on the surface, a mix of sand and smallish rocks. I wonder how this will affect digging. The rocks here are pretty diverse with two basic rock "types": angular rocks with relatively smooth, flat top surfaces and lumpy, vesicular rocks. I would presume the second type represent basaltic rocks, but the brighter albedo is a bit odd.
4) Can't wait to see that pan in color.

Too bad they didn't take the weight of the MARDI (Not really needed with MRO) and replace it with a third camera on the mast with a terrific telephoto lens to see up close more distance objects of interest.

All hours of sunshine are not the same. At local midnight, the sun is only 3 degrees above the horizon - the solar array output wont be zero, but it wont be very much at all. At local noon, it's 45 degrees above the horizon - lots of power.

Doug

I'm hoping that the trough near vector 300 gets the name "Blue Canyon".

This seems to be one of those ubiquitous names you find on just about every hiking map. It would be nice to have one on Mars as well to increase confusion.

[Other ubiquitous names include: Deer Lake, Mount Snow, Bald Mountain, Deep Creek, Green River, Green Valley (oops! already got that one!), Rocky Ridge, Blue Lake.]

From today's press release mosaic, a crop showing the hardware in the distance. Used HiRISE image to confirm identification of heat shield and bounce mark, assuming bright spot is backshell.

Go Phoenix! Waiting on the full-color panorama to be released...

Good shot (inverted up) to show scoop and deck.Click to view attachment

Well you've all already seen a version of this at yesterdays press conference. But this is my first Phoenix mosaic so I thought I'd show it off anyway.



Click image

James

Don't forget that shadows on Mars are very dark, as is low-angle light. Without a think hazy atmosphere to scatter light, the amount of light that gets to the solar panels when the sun is near the horizon is practially zero.

Phoenix - in TallovisioN - WAY more horizon relief than I was expecting.

This isn't really the easiest way to turn the board's posts into a reference of useful commentary on the mission. Next week when someone's wondering what was said or done re: a particular image, who's going to remember which sol it was?

Open to suggestions on how to manage it especially better. There are 100,000,000 ways you could organise it. Splitting the enormous traffic spike of the first few sols into sep. threads was one. Note that this thread is 'Sol 3 and onwards'.

Discussions are essentially chaotic - attempts to cultivate them in an organised fashion at anything other than a very very low level will always be a waste of time imho.

Well, I'm a kind of horizon man too. Whoaaouuu

That is very, very cool.

For those of you who only use inches as units for measuring the diagonal diameter of television screens, Mark provided me with a version of the rock-dimensions graphic with units in centimeters:
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001479/

--Emily

Ahhhh... The metric system. I heard about that one!

Thanks Emily but, you know the worse is to figure out °F in °C! No chance the weather reports will be in °C I guess...

Regarding the backshield and parachute, is there any chance that the parachute move a bit and come to view in the future?

C/5 = (F-32)/9

and I've carried that in my head for over 40 years !

And for those of you who don't use metric that often, I hastily threw this together. (Please don't flame me if I'm off by 10% or so).

That's instructive, but left me with a horrible concept - mission funding via product placement in images!

I was just going for familiarity.

Is there a site that has past Phoenix mission briefings?

Since the temperature cycles a bit above and below -40, °F or °C doesn't matter

http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...21&Itemid=1

oh I know, and that makes eminent sense; just a strange thought, though, that it brought on - obtaining funding through the sponsoring of features

I like that one a lot -second you on expecting way less.

Nico

Here's a Dutch commercial for an insurance company

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXNMAiJeD0c

Very nice. Made me feel like I was "there" for the first time :

Is there a way to know when each day's pictures will be made available?
Is there a site with scheduling information for when the expected 'afternoon' downlink will take place? (This way
we can set an alarm to check instead of doing bandwidth wasting polling of the phoenix image gallery website).
Will the downlinks occur approx 39 minutes later each day because the sol is longer than a day?

Maybe I hadn't been following the mission closely enough, but I thought there was going to be an instrument on Phoenix that would take pictures of the ground below during the descent. Did this instrument not make it onto Phoenix? I guess we don't really need it due to the MRO images. Is such an instrument still planed for MSL?

Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) was on Phoenix, but it was unfortunately decided not to turn it on during landing. There was a slight risk of interference with the landing operation itself. You can read more here. Another MARDI will fly on MSL (although for a brief time it was announced that it would be cut for lack of funds).

You'd expect this to be roughly true since they'd try to return the data at the end of each sol, but keep in mind that also depends on when the orbiter doing the relay (currently Odyssey, but also including MRO once they figure out the radio issue) has a good pass. Odysseys orbital period is about two hours, and not every pass is favorable. Then the orbiter has to return the data via DSN which has it's on scheduling issues.

So my outsiders guess is it will be ~40 minutes later every day on average, but +/- a couple of hours on any given day. A publicly accessible schedule would be awesome

New images arriving.

Is this solid ice exposed by the retro rockets under the lander?

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=836&cID=25

http://fawkes3.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=0&cID=8

New images! Including optical microscope.