Just back from The U of A where we got a tour of the HIRise
facility. The person giving us the tour is a mission specialists and
is in charge of spacecraft health (Volatages and temps). The main
floor has several static displays and some very cool very large pics
from the MRO. Notably on display was the optics end of the MRO with
sun sheild. The shield it turns out gave them quite a concern when MRO
was settling in while in Martian shadow. The optics sheild has a
sensor on the the farthest end (actually located all over the
structure) which registered -130C. Turns out that the truss work
supporting much of the internal optics is made of the same material so
it gave them some pause for a bit. The spacecraft is out of touch
until Nov. and work still continues. "Mission Control" was very neat,
very long table large digital time displayed on wall at one end marking
upcoming mission miletstones. Offices sorround this area. To my
surprise our guide and mission specialists told us finding previously
lost craft is in fact a priority, thought that was very cool, bound to
be some fantiastic imagery there. I mentioned the older soviet landers
and she did not know what the mission status was on imaging those.
Anybody!!!!! have any reliable specific data on where the soviet
landers impacted?????????? If you do could you send it along it would
be appreciated. Also interesting is how they are made aware of issues
occuring aboard the spacecraft. JPL apparently has written software
that has high and low limits o (for example temperature). When limits
are reached text messages are sent to team members cell phones (and
work stations I would assume) to notify them somethings up. Who would
of thought, "ET phone..........." anyway! Also interesting was
seeing a U of A student writing software to take artifacts out of some
Cassini imagery. My tour was short, only about an hour, but most
memorable. I mentioned to her that like the Lunar Orbiter imagery some
of this imagery more than likely will be in the hands of the first
humans to walk Mars, and she said it probably would. Unfortunately for
my schedule they are having an open house Oct 21, bummer. Great time,
and if anybody has that Soviet Lander info, could you send it
along.............Doc