22
votes
Accepted
Current maximum bandwidth between Mars and Earth?
There are 8 active Mars missions at the time of writing (11/14/17)
Mars Odyssey
Design Downlink Requirement: 3.6 kb/s minium
On-Orbit Downlink Performance: up to 110,600 b/s for 34-m DSN passes
...
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11
votes
Why did MRO have to "both pitch upward and roll hard to the left" to point exactly at Perseverance during the entry, descent and landing phase?
A year plus later and with the enormous benefit of reconstructed data (SPICE kernels), the exact maneuvers of the spacecraft can be visualized.
The PDS Label for the MRO data product gives the ...
- 10.1k
9
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
It is actually surprisingly difficult to determine the color of something so small on Mars. In order to best understand that, we need to understand a bit more about HiRISE, and more about human vision....
- 122k
9
votes
Accepted
Why did MRO have to "both pitch upward and roll hard to the left" to point exactly at Perseverance during the entry, descent and landing phase?
Why exactly did MRO have to "both pitch upward and roll hard to the left" to point exactly at Perseverance during the entry, descent and landing phase?
Perseverance was not directly ...
- 75.5k
7
votes
Accepted
Why aren't there HiRISE observation footprints near the Martian poles?
HiRise routinely observes at high latitudes. In fact I can quickly find these examples:
At $86.8^\circ$: https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_035295_2670
At $82.2^\circ$: https://www.uahirise.org/...
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5
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
Part 1, "is it actually blue?"
This is a HiRISE image. On the page linked to by your source page, there is a heading 'About color products (PDF)'.
This is the one you're looking for:
...
- 128k
5
votes
Accepted
What is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's orbital period?
I went to JPL Horizions and extracted the osculating elements for MRO about Mars at 1 day intervals over the last ten years or so. Osculating elements are not exactly Keplerian elements, but they are ...
- 149k
4
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
Picking up on PearsonArtPhoto great answer, I was intrigued by the assertion that what we saw in the image was mostly blue with almost no red channel.
So I wrote the following snippet of code, to ...
- 2,113
4
votes
Accepted
Any news about the Mars-3 landing site since early 2013?
The 2013 images and analysis are the most recent and the conclusion still stands - the features identified are likely to be the Mars-3 lander. NASA agrees with the conclusion as outlined in the above ...
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4
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
Excerpt from Information for Scientific Users of HiRISE Color Products by Alfred McEwen and Eric Eliason, October 10, 2007:
What do the colors in HiRISE images mean?
The PDS products are stretched ...
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3
votes
Accepted
How long did the plasma blackouts of Perseverance's signals to MRO and direct-to-Earth last during its seven minutes of terror?
There are some misunderstandings here (similar to this question) that make the question(s) a little malformed.
Roughly what frequency was used in the link(s) between Perseverance and MRO?
From ...
- 10.1k
3
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
Is the “Mars blue dune” actually blue?
No, “The dunes are actually grey, but appear relatively blue after such a stretch because most of Mars is red.” (see below).
The false color generation is used ...
- 149k
3
votes
What is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's orbital period?
That burn used the "intermediate thrusters", 6 units producing 22 N force each, for a total of around 10000 newton-seconds of impulse.
I was able to coax Wolfram Alpha into admitting that, against a ...
- 170k
3
votes
Accepted
Why are the gaps in MRO global images of mars so irregular and sometimes filled in?
This is essentially down to the difficulties of capturing and returning data from Mars orbit rather than Earth.
These images from MRO are taken by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI), a very wide-angled ...
- 9,974
2
votes
Did the rovers' cruise balance masses have a noticeable impact on Mars?
Photos from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show the impact sites from Curiosity's 2 main ballast weights about 80 km from the rover, plus the impact sites of the 6 smaller weights jettisoned just before ...
- 251
2
votes
Is the "Mars blue dune" actually blue? And what makes it so?
The referenced site states:
Just to the south of the group of barchan dunes is one large dune with a more complex structure. This particular dune, appearing like turquoise blue in enhanced color, ...
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2
votes
Can HiRISE photograph Starman?
Great question!
Using JPL's Horizons in Observer mode one can see their predictions for apparent magnitude as seen from Earth, including locations on Earth that contain the word "Mars" but ...
- 149k
2
votes
Curiosity / MRO UHF connection and weak signal modulation
Another interesting paper is The Electra Proximity Link Payload for Mars Relay Telecommunications and Navigation (C.D. Edwards, et al., 2003), which is reference #21 in the DESCANSO paper @...
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2
votes
Curiosity / MRO UHF connection and weak signal modulation
The MSL DESCANSO article states that it is MRO that monitors the SNR and controls the data rate (section 2.2.2):
In this mode of operations, it is the MRO radio that controls the return data rate, ...
- 10.1k
1
vote
Images of Mars Phoenix Lander showing what's happened after more cycles of winter ice build-up?
The image above is an enlarged part of a HiRiSE image captured in Januari 2012, and the only other one that I could find.
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