Just wondering if the rovers are going to have to duke it out over time on the DSN now that Cassini is starting its encounters. Anybody know how this works? Is there call waiting? Do they do paper - rock - scissors?

Also, anybody know how much data can the orbiters cache to send later? Or are we looking at a data diet as well as an energy diet for our little robots...

They upgraded the network in anticipation of the winter rush. Haven't heard anything about coping with the rovers plus Cassini.

I'm sure there's a well-established procedure and set of standards for determining which spacecraft have priority in which situation, but I don't know just what those would be. Certainly Cassini's maneuvers to get into orbit will take precedence over anything else.

The rovers have 256 megabytes of flash memory each. I don't know how this compares with the quantity of data gathered in any particular interval, though it is interesting that Spirit had problems early on because of the number of files that had accumulated in this memory - it didn't appear that they were desperately concerned about keeping it cleaned out.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Thanks ToSeek!

I hope no data gets lost with all these probes running about the solar system now. Seems like you can upgrade all the instruments faster than the bandwidth back to earth. Of course now we only expect Hi Res imagery - I can't wait until the close ups start coming in! Of the Colombia Hills, I mean.

I am sure I will be hooked on Saturn as well once more photos come online.

I hope they dont have to take a back seat in favour of Cassini too, especially in light of the fact that we get to see ALL of the pictures the rovers transmit. With Cassini on the other hand we will get a dissappointing 260 a year lol.

I dont think there ever has been or ever will be a mission qute like MER again, you get a real sense of being involved with whats going on.

The data storage on Cassini is 4 giga bits, about 512 MB.

The data transfer rate is about 140 K bits per second.

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It has actually been negotiated already, more or less. Cassini was given a certain set of downlinks, and they are essentially fixed. Obviously, neither craft can take up all of one station all the time: Earth's rotation gets in the way (sorry Yul). So, it is possible to have each station track a different mission (actually, a couple different missions each, since there is more than one dish at each station). The MER team has certainly already gotten their time allocated for at least the next month or two.

However, if anyone wants to really help out space science for many years to come, build another 70m DSN station or three. DSN time is becoming harder and harder to get with each new spacecraft that comes online.

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
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Don't forget these guys call home, too. Talk about your extended missions! Amazing what a little RTG can do for staying power.

ESA is working on it. I would hope that the ESA stations and the DSN would be interoperable.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Excellent link. Thanks!