The Marsis deployment is scheduled for March iirc

Doug

Unlikely in a low gravity, thick atmosphere, windy environment.

Look at the high gravity, thin atmosphere, low wind environment of Meridiani and Gusev - and the parachutes lie neatly to one side of their backshells

Doug

Spirit FR wheel problem ( which has now gone away ) was being watched from about 2 weeks prior to the Sol 154 arrival at the hills

Doug

The MEX high res issue is due to calibration problems - or so Bruce tells me. I'm not sure I buy that - and I'm not sure he does either.

Doug

Well - yes - MGS and MEX have high res cameras - 1.5 - 2m/pixel.

MRO has a resolution of 0.3m/pixel - i.e. for every pixel that Global Surveyor can image - MRO will have 25 pixels.

You can do a lot more science with that.

There's a great presentation you should watch on the whole mission that explains a lot of the instruments and how they compliment one another and the other orbiting assets, and landers - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/oct04.cfm

Doug

Strange isnt it - the view's we'd really like of mars ( a few km high drifting across the terrain) are the ones we done have at all - yet are the first we'll get at titan

Just a thought - wouldnt Titan make an amazing place to send a blimp/balloon vehicle

Doug

Pando posted an image of the expected route - which goes slightly left of a straight line - via vostok, to the round feature at the start of the etched terrain, then SE to Victoria

Doug

Of course - that area is S / SE facing, and so will have to wait till summer before being visited. To venture there now would, I imagine, kill Spirit very quickly indeed - a matter of a few sols.

Doug

LOL - one even has motion blur How long before the cooks show this as evidence of martian gremlins wandering around

I'm amazed that they've driven so close to this piece - as there is a large ( several feet across ) 'flap' of insulation that has peeled away from this area and looks to be folded around to the left. It could quite easily fold itself back again

Keep an eye out for the self portrait - i.e. reflections of Opportunity in the foil

Doug

Sounds like a lot of work Are the relative albedos of Mars and Phobos about right there?

Doug

Oh - theres a lot of coding gone into making sure that nothing goes wrong. They've gone about as robust as they can with the spacecraft to get the Huygens data back. You're right -it's VITAL.

Doug

Looking at http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/MER/sea...RELEASE_ID=0001 - terrain wedge and terrain mesh are listed as N/A

Poo

I may get in touch with Dr JB and see what the word is on these things

Doug

That two-shot technique is analagous to taking multiple exposures on earth to simulate HDRI imagery I guess.

Doug

I've done some more hunting and found some VRML data sets for the Pathfinder site - and I put it together and came out with...

http://mer.rlproject.com/mpf_3d.wmv (4 meg WMV)

Now - obviously - with a single P.O.V. one can get visibility 'shadows' behind things - when your cameras have wheels - you can go to a different P.O.V. and fill in the visibility 'shadows'. If I had another MPF data set from, say, 10m away - I could use it's terrain maps to 'fill in' a lot of the blanks.

Now - what I would DESPERATELY like to do is this with MER data - as, for instance, one could re-build the heatshield impact site quite verbosely - as we've had Navcam stereo pairs from several locations.

Doug

That HGA + Cover reminds me of the Debris Opportunity is visiting. I always look forward to spacecraft arriving at KSC - it means vast numbers of v.high res images on the KSC media website.

As a side-thought - anyone know why they wrap the HGA's of mars spacecraft ? MO2k1, MGS, MEX - all have a mylar-like covering over the top of the HGA.

Doug

FWIW - I believe it's being aired on Discovery here in the UK on the 8th and 28th of Feb at 11:00, 15:00 and 21:00. I THINK. If not - then it's a repeat of the previous PBS program

Doug

Wasnt Justin was it ?

Doug

Any ideas on this guys? I'm always looking for something new and interesting to do with the imagery but as you all know I'm more an artist and certainly not a programmer but I'm wondering if there's anything out there to generate terrain maps from stereo pairs?

http://schwehr.org/photoRealVR/example.html is the sort of thing I'm talking about - and a lot of googling has found nothing.

Doug

I think it was actually not THAT cheap for the second rover. Something like $500M for the first and $300 for the second. Some would have you believe the second cost about 10c

Doug.

I'm finding it harder to find interesting colour mosaics to put together for Opportunity Nothing quite as interesting as the Spirit ones anyway.

Doug

I was thinking about trying to reproduce this area in 3ds max - i.e. take bearings and ranges of navcam and pancam to reproduce a map that shows where everything is - then use that to build a 3d model of the debris on top of it.

Anyone got any thoughts on that?

Doug

I didnt say succesfull lander - I just said lander

The last non-roving vehicle on mars wsa Beagle 2. It may be a small crater and some schrapnel - but it IS there

FWIW - I trust JPL to deliver with Sky Crane.

Doug

Well- the actuators are almost there already to tilt the vehicle back and forward - so all that would be required is a means to command that specifically.

However - the next rover on mars will be RTG powered anyway

Doug

The possibility of restriced sols was something I mentioned in the freenode #space irc channel earlier .

Doug

Nothing @ the exploratorium for a few days. Is it a case of restricted sols w.r.t the guy who runs the public outreach script

Tempting to jump to bad conclusions - but experience shows that the exploratorium is nothing if not erratic, unpredictable and unrelated to actual goings on

Doug