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Sep 26 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Less than seven hours til #DARTsmash! Live countdown and links to official streams are on the mission website here: dart.jhuapl.edu
And I’ve got you covered with links to background information on the mission to answer all your questions about #DARTMission #DARTsmash on my Patreon: patreon.com/posts/72349462…
Just six hours to #DARTMission #DARTsmash now. The live feed from DART's DRACO camera will pick up at 2:30pm California time, a little more than 4 hours from now. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
This is a very niche but excellent meme
Another good pre-impact write up by @meghanbartels: space.com/dart-asteroid-…

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More from @elakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Sep 27
Here's the replay of the DRACO camera view of the #DARTMission impact onto Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos earlier today. Now time for me to play with some images...
Well I probably can't beat this #DARTMission
Oooooohhhhh! Wow!
Read 16 tweets
Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Sep 27
OK y'all #DARTmission post-impact press briefing is live now here:
nasa.gov/nasalive
"Once we got a look at Dimorphos, we were very confident we were going to hit." (If Dimorphos had been a contact binary like comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko or New Horizons' target Arrokoth, a nearly direct hit on its centroid could've turned into a miss. Fortunately, it was round.)
I tried to call in to the press briefing to ask a question about image release plans, but, technical difficulties. There was one question on the briefing about LICIAcube plans... 1/n
Read 11 tweets
Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Sep 26
Thar they are! Right now Dimorphos and Didymos are both this bright dot of light. They’ll separate into two dots in a little while. #DARTMission

I’ll add photos on to this thread periodically as approach continues. Image
At the moment, this is the only source for the approach images. If they have not appeared on a website by the time of the post-impact press briefing scheduled for (I think) 5pm Pacific time, I will ask! #DARTmission
So one hour prior to impact, or roughly 35 minutes after this tweet, the #DARTmission photos should start separating the two components of the Dimorphos system.
Read 42 tweets
Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Mar 2, 2021
I just got off WebEx with Justin Maki, who leads of the Perseverance engineering camera team. I've learned a lot and gotten a lot of confused questions sorted out. I'll try to bang out a blog entry with lots of techy detail about raw images tomorrow.
The TL;DR: of the interview was: a lot of the things that are weird and confusing in the raw image metadata from sols 1-4 have to do with the rover being on the cruise flight software at the time.
For example, the cruise flight software did not "know" how to automatically create image thumbnails. So they had to instruct the rover computer with separate commands to make thumbnails for each image, which is why sequence IDs don't match up between thumbnail and full-res.
Read 5 tweets
Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Feb 28, 2021
OK, *cracking knuckles* time for me to wrap my head around the Perseverance raw image data set. Thanks to @Miscul for helping me out with a dump of the metadata. Here's a list of other resources:
Photos sent from space are pretty enough but they're not science without metadata. I loooooooooove metadata. I'm gonna dig in and see what I can learn & understand about how I'm going to be able to follow this mission through its images. Image
Update: I've successfully gotten a grip on what most Perseverance metadata describes. Coolest thing is extremely detailed geometric information on rover position & orientation and camera pointing & image distortion. Coders could use all that to make some great visualization apps.
Read 12 tweets
Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Feb 27, 2021
Hi! I'm Emily Lakdawalla and I love to talk and teach about space exploration & science communication. I'm now self-employed, available to speak, write, & consult. My website: lakdawalla.com/emily. My blog and Patreon: patreon.com/elakdawalla Image
My first book was "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How The Mars Rover Performs Its Job" published by Springer-Praxis. I'm working on a sequel about Curiosity's science results. springer.com/gp/book/978331… Image
I like to make stuff. I sell space-themed art at etsy.com/shop/elakdawal…. I have a sideblog about other craft projects at aziraphalescloset.tumblr.com. I designed a multi-size mask pattern: lakdawalla.com/emilysmask ImageImage
Read 4 tweets

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