Doug,

Thank you for the information. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) data will be interesting to examine. For a moment I thought the website had the atmospheric model reconstructed from the MER IMU data. The MER atmospheric model is something that I've wanted to include in my spacecraft design code (for some reason they've been slow about releasing it). Unfortunately the model wasn't there. I asked around and supposably it'll be another month or two before it is released. For me, the real brass ring in terms of IMU data would be from the Viking landers (I fear that data has been lost). Unlike Pathfinder and MER, Viking's aeroshells flew a non-spinning, lifting trajectory. The dynamics of a spinning aeroshell is harder to unravel due to the effects of precession and nutation coupled with oscillation about the vehicle's trim angle-of-attack.

If you look around the New Mexico State Univesity website, you'll find the Galileo Probe flight data. That data set has both the IMU data and the Jupiter atmospheric model. Jupiter has some really interesting gas physics that was glimpsed at briefly by the Galileo Probe. There's talk about sending more probes to Jupiter that'll descend to 100 bar altitudes. I'm hoping it'll actually happen.

Here's an interesting "gee wiz" that I learned today: The temperature of Jupiter's atmosphere at around 100 bars is roughly the same as the temperature of the Venusian atmosphere at comparable pressure. However the temperature of the Venusian atmosphere is driven by the Green House Effect while in the case of Jupiter it's simply isentropic compression.

Thanks again,

Gary