Not "Out Of Africa'' But "Into Africa!''
Back home, doing stuff, for a couple of days, riding and preparing for the impending opening. Andy laying in the garden come horse paddock with their collection of horses snuffling round him! It`s a hard life, but some one has to do it! It won`t be Derek, he is far to busy running around everywhere! Nothing new there then! Our next adventure was to be camping in "Ol Pej" with Tiddyas our guide. Tid decided that it wasn`t a good idea to stay and that we should TRY and get out of reserve. This was no mean feat, as when it rains here the soil when wetis like driving on ice! Wizzy had a hell of a drive getting us out - but get us out she did - so Derek you see I have to come back to camp in Ol Pej! The rain was a fairly constant feature of our holiday although Wizzy assured me she had not come to Africa to get rained on! We couldn`t complain though, it was lovely and warm and sunny inbetween and the bush was green and lush and all the animals looked really well.
Land Rover has done quite well for itself since its separation from Ford more than a decade ago. Under the watchful eye (and deep development pockets) of India鈥檚 Tata Group, the UK鈥檚 luxury SUV brand has thrived with new models, updated interiors and no loss of cachet along the way. The Range Rover model is still a desirable vehicle and status symbol for many thanks to its iconic styling and real go-anywhere capability. We just had a week with one of the more interesting variants of the luxury SUV: the 2018 Land Rover Range Rover HSE Td6. What鈥檚 all that word soup mean? Well, the overall brand is Land Rover, but under that there鈥檚 a model line range called Range Rover. It didn鈥檛 have a fancy, ultra-powerful engine, nor did it have much in the way of bells and whistles other than what you鈥檇 normally expect to find in a well-equipped luxury vehicle.
To maintain the Yukon's cavernous interior, the engineers utilized the undercarriage space for the NiMH batteries. Part of that space was realized (and the beast's weight gain minimized) by replacing the full-size spare tire with a can of sealant- not exactly what you'd expect in a 4脳4. Not that you'd ever take those low-rolling-resistance donuts off-road. On the positive side, the Yukon Hybrid 4X4's towing capacity is a respectable 6000 lbs. Which may account for GM's decision to equip the Yukon Hybrid with a 332hp, 6.0-liter Vortec engine. In any case, the monster motor becomes a hybrid with the addition of a 300V battery, two 60KW motors in the transmission and some creative software. I've never driven a full hybrid this seamless in operation. You never notice when the drivetrain changes modes, from electric to gas and back. The electric boost comes on smoothly; the power delivery remains silken as the engine spools-up.
There was one point that the voltage available at one particular connection was 17 volts. This is essentially impossible for a nominal twelve volt lead-acid battery using six two-volt cells to provide. Here's the key shot of this particular experiment. My meter well and truly faulted, I ran to the parts store to get a new one. Then I compared the two against the AAA. Actually, it read 22.5 V, and I had missed the fact all along that the decimal point was in the wrong place. That 15 V reading that made me think I had such a great battery? It was actually reading 150 V, but my mind had inserted a decimal point in the "right place". Later, after moving the meter inside and warming it up, the point went back to the right place, which makes me suspect the 9 volt battery in the multi-meter. This led me back immediately to fault the battery, which I switched out for the good new one I had in the shop. I also replaced the cables for good measure.
The same applies to the oxygen supply to breath for any future astronauts. How does the 2020 rover鈥檚 scientific instrument suite (MOXIE is an engineering demonstration) compare to that of the Curiosity rovers? The 2020 rover will have far superior remote sensing instruments (Mastcam-Z, SuperCam, and RIMFAX) and contact instruments (PIXL and SHERLOC) than Curiosity. This will allow this new rover to much more quickly find important samples to study and potentially cache. This is especially true for finding any rich deposits of organic material. To locate two to three dozen samples within the mission鈥檚 lifetime on Mars, the 2020 rover will need to operate much more efficiently than the Curiosity rover has. The scientific team that defined the requirements that NASA used to select this instrument suite specifically asked for a suite of instruments simpler than Curiosity鈥檚 to speed operations. Because almost a decade has passed since Curiosity鈥檚 instruments were selected, the march of technology allows the new rover鈥檚 instruments to be considerably more capable than Curiosity鈥檚.
