At about 1830 yesterday (UT) a command was uplinked to MRO to use its Optical Navigation Camera (an engineering experiment flown to try out a technique for increased accuracy of approach to Mars) to try and image MGS and tie down it's location, so that a HiRISE sequence can be written to try and image the configuration of the spacecraft w.r.t. array positions, HGA pointing etc etc. I don't know when the results are expected to be downlinked, but if I see any other uplink sequences whos name is obviously related, I'll let you know.

Hopefully - this will help tie down what sort of state the spacecraft is in, and then in turn try and identify the best times to communicate with it based on the pointing of the low gain antennae.

At 15cm/pixel, a HiRISE image of MGS, if it comes out OK, will be a spectacular image, and even if MGS is never recovered, this image would mark an appropriate batton change from MGS to MRO.

Doug