"Gore is gonna have a fit when he sees what I brung 'im" (with apologies to Capt. Quint)
Green Valley Bump!
I'm looking forward to seeing these high resolution surface images of this region. Hope the landing goes real smooth and provides some very different images. As a matter of fact, I'm confident the images alone are going to open up a whole lot of new interest.
I am always amazed at the level of math involved to calculate trajectories of machines hurtling towards distant planets. Simply amazed.
AM: Drilling on Earth is a notoriously dirty process, where you contaminate the subsurface with surface materials and other things.Sorry, I still think there's going to be significant cross-contamination between the layers, rendering the results of any studies the lander does of the various soil layers less definitive than we'd like to see from an organization like NASA!CM: That’s not an issue for planetary protection, because they’re only concerned about contaminating Mars with stuff from Earth. But in terms of mixing the materials -- that will happen if we drill. We’ll form a pile of material around the drill hole, and that will be mixed with material from various depths. But we’ll still be able to get samples from known depth even while we’re making a mess around the drill. We’ll drill, then bring the drill up and clean it, and then send it back down and drill for a little bit, and then bring it up again. The stuff that’s on the drill at that point will be from that known depth, and we can study it.
I sure hope the nav and control teams have agreed on a common set of units this time.
Fine Turning (lol) I remember when fine tuning was what you did to get your television to get the channel reception as good as possible. This was because the contacts in the channel changer would get oxidized over time, and wouldn't line up perfectly. So, you needed that knob to turn to get it into the best position. The editors of the article don't remember the metaphor of fine tuning.