Red Colony – Colonizing and Terraforming Mars

We are an international symposium, spanning students and professionals, scientists and laymen alike, all with a desire to colonize and terraform Mars. Our visitors have the opportunity to submit ideas in these evolving fields, knowing they are literally writing the books on Mars. Their articles are discussed by the scientific community until the most comprehensive, efficient and realistic Plan is developed and enacted. Read the

Mr. Gellert also stated that data has been collected during the day and the night, and both have good data. The importance of this statement, beyond having a working spectrometer, is that the APXS sensor is sensitive enough to pick up thermal noise in the sensor between the day and night. The MER detectors

Ken Edgett, the MAHLI Primary Investigator, was next to speak and showed

During the Q&A session, Joy Crisp, MSL Deputy Project Scientist, fielded a question about the

The

- posted by Jim@ 23:51 EST

The conference was kicked off with Jennifer Trosper, MSL Mission Mananger, re-assuring us that we are in the final Sol of characterization. Today, Sol 37 puts the team one day behind schedule, but, according to Trosper, in her experience on Pathfinder, which she noted lost 1 in 3 sols to unexpected events, and MER, which lost 1 in 10, that the MSL team is doing well. Thus far, Curiosity has shown that her arm can reach all of the calibration targets and "teach points," which are points that would be needed to be reached to fulfill the science mission, such as moving over the

Ms. Trosper also noted that over the next couple of days the MastCam will be pointed to the sun to watch the transits of Phobos and Deimos, and event that only happens twice a Martian Year. MastCam will take video of the transit, but will only transmit back a few frames to Earth. The rest will be stored until a later date because of constraints on bandwidth and the importance of engineering data at the moment.

Additionally, it was added that the RTGs are producing 115W of energy and the rover is kept between 7C and 37C, right where they should be. Also, the rover has driven 109m according to the odometer, but only 82m the way the crow flies. Glenelg is approximately 400m away and Curiosity can move 30m/sol to 40m/sol depending on the terrain and science-team needs.

Over the next two months, the team will attempt to move back to Earth-time. Currently the team is using Mars-time in order to maximize the time they have before needing to send commands to the rover from the time they get the downlink. Currently it takes approximately 8 hours to figure out what the team wants to do and another 8 hours to turn that into a sequence of commands. By Sol 90, it is hoped that the team will be fast enough to allow them to function on Earth-time.

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Red Colony - Colonizing and Terraforming Mars