Rovers on Mars

saw the little Weber charcoal grill being laid out and the two solar pizza pans. Now they ready to make ribs and pizza. Dayum, they forget the brews?

Pretty dang awesome. Just spent some time reading about it.

You see these pix of a sunny day on Mars and think: "That looks nice." But you would not only need air tanks, you'd need some serious thermal underwear. About -80, on a warm, sunny day.

But I love the pictures.

looks like the carburators on my AH Sprite

I watched the live stream from NASA, very fun. And a bit nerve wracking. Now comes the long wait for test results.

how did they insert those two suitcase sized satellites along with the insight?
I understand that their function is to gather all the telemetry and parse it out into easily decipherable streams of data that can be beamed to earth at all times rather than having to wait for optimal position to transmit?

I guess this will be a forever feature for upcoming deeper space missions. Whats the transmission time for signals from Mars? Something like 22 min to 25 min?

Im anxious to see some of the drilling logs .They are expected to go about 5 meters(I think). I hope they find anorthosite, thatll be somewhat more understandable to planetary geologists rather than all those evaporites and reduzates on the surface that reflct chemical rosion , oxidation, and solution chemistry

Apparently they ruled out 21 other landing sites before selecting the "Elisium planitia". The selection process included being served up some plain old surface where the heat flow could be measured, seismicity wasnt loaded with local structure that would attenuate signals and the tectonic returns could be measured to evaluate their sources. Only a little of the deeper probe will be devoted to geochemistry and that will (I understand) be focused on silicates.

Apparently the last three sites to be let on the "final contestant" list had som engineering realities to contend with, sunlight array, and low winds.
So, as they said at JPL, "If Elisium Palnitia" would be a salad, it would be lettuce and kale, no dressing. But thats wxctly the kind of site we need to do deep investigations by seismic reflection and thermal gradient detection"


Most often, long term science data can be amazingly boring>(Im sure the newspaper science reporters will pimp it up for the average kid and parent)

(Im sure the newspaper science reporters will pimp it up for the average kid and parent)
As would Gunga

The radio delay between Mars and Earth varies from around 24 minutes to 4 minutes depending on the orbital positions.

never realized the orbital minimum was that close. .Now I gotta look up a perigee chart to see what the historical perigee has been.

It's not just its perigee from the sun, it's the relationship of the two planets (Earth and Mars) in their orbital positions.

I hadn't really considered that before, but I can see why it's like that.

All of the planets have elliptical orbits, although the orbit of Venus is as close to circular as makes no difference. Earth and Mars both have highly elliptical orbits, with the orbit of Mars being even more elliptical than that of Earth. A Martian year is 687 days (sidereal), and a Martian day is 24 hours and almost 40 minutes--so a Martian year is roughly twenty-two terrestrial months.

Both Earth and Mars has pronounced axial tilts, at twenty-two and a half degrees for the Earth, and 25 degrees for Mars. So both planets are seasonal. When the two planets are nearest the star, they move the fastest, and at aphelion (farthest from the star) they move more slowly. For both planets, perihelion occurs in northern hemisphere winter, southern hemisphere summer. Since each planet is close to the star, that means those seasons are shortest, while the opposite seasons are significantly longer.

The four light minute gap between the planets is relatively rare--it only occurs when both planets more or less lined-up during perihelion--when closest to the star. At aphelion, fartherest from the star, when the planets are moving slowly, the gap is six to eight minutes.

The two planets are not moving in a dance, and rarely are their seasons coincidentally coordinated. Most of the time, the two planets are separated by a light speed gap of between eight and twenty-two minutes.

This image shows both planets at perihelion--an extremely rare event. That's when the distance would be four light minutes. They would not be close for very long, because both planets would be moving faster along their respective orbital paths. The difference in orbital period, with that of Mars being almost twice as long as that of Earth, means this does't happen often, and when it does, it's a long damn time before it happens again.

Shiny rock - they bypassed this rock and have turned back to find and examine it, if I was not too hasty reading about it.

cross bedding at Whale Rock