Two $400M rovers - that's doable on the Mars Exploration budget

Two $800-1000M rovers. That's hardly doable on the ISS budget

Doug

Fudged from green, blue and UV

A wise man once said..

.

Well - I say wise. It was me.

And yes - as ilbasso suggested they might - they do look slightly different. Perhaps the blueberries 'spring' back up toward the surface after a while, having been squished in by the wheels?

Doug

Fudged together from something almost red-green-blueish

Doug

Stitched the available imagery - 155kb
http://mer.rlproject.com/dione_dec15th.jpg

Power-wise - it's more sensible to go straight off the rising slope of the crater - as it's sort of SW facing. So they've bee-lined straight for the flat ground ( sensible )

I assume they will now swing left and head for the heatshield - althought a stop at some of the exposed rocks wouldnt suprise me

Doug

Looks like about a 11-12 metre drive thats put them almost straight on top of the turning point from the traverse the rover took before going in - getting back from Pan Point B

Doug

Well - if the hand lends is 2.4 more than the MER MI - and all three are using the same CCD Design - it's 2.4 megapixels - so perhaps not square pixels - but something in the order of 2000 x 1200 pixels - or 1500 square?

Remember - MER launched at a time when 3, 4, 5 megapixel cameras were normal commercial products - and has only 1 MSL will launch when 6, 8, 12, meg pixels is normal - so launching with 2-3 is to be expected.

Doug

Oh - yes - I have every intention of doing that. Although - if I do find a publisher who says "I want to go with this for next Christmas" - then I'll simply do one earth year's worth ( A year on mars....) - and then a follow up when they die.

But yes - Its the one thing that will hold this up - is the damn things not falling over

Just had a VERY encouraging email from Jim Bell, who says he likes a few sample images I sent him and is glad to see someone taking the time and effort to use the proper PDS Archives.

I'm resolved now that if I dont get my own book together - I WILL get my images published somehow. I owe the MER team that as thankyou and recognition of their efforts!

Doug

MER onlyy - it's the first mission with t e ability to take images at a high enough resolution to do justice in print and stand on their own next to film camera images from Apollo etc.

Also - if I introduce other missions then i have 3,4,5 stories to tell.

Ultimately - this is a call that the publisher would make, however - but I dont see it diverging from mer + mgs-moc

Doig

Any and all comments -
http://mer.rlproject.com/index.php?showtop...view=getnewpost

Understandably - I wont be posting any other of my pans at BIG res till I know whats going on

Fear not - the odd jpl jpg mosaic will still appear


Doug

Right - I'm actually going to go ahead and try and get this thing made. I'm starting to make proper panoramas - a collection of probably a dozen for each rover - which will be submitted to the publishers as a portfolio and proof of concept.

However - for the best chance of being published - I need to know what people want - so.....ermm..whadda you want

I'm not going to do any 3d images. red-blue glasses just are NOT coffee table material - and as these rovers dont have Green+Blue in the right eye - it's not easy to make colour anaglyphs

But - I am going to do several mosaics - and a few individual images - but 99% pancam. Do you think I should use Navcam as well? What about Hazcam? What sort of text descriptor would you like for each image - perhaps a diary type format - or collate all the text at the back as a sol-by-sol account.

Do you want MOC images showing routes and image location and direction? etc.etc.etc.

Any and all ideas much appreciated - as they give me more idea of what will be acceptable when I come to present to a Publisher. I will initially be approaching Random House - whos inprint Jonathan Cape published 'Full Moon' here in the UK. If I have no luck there - I'll go to National Geogrpahic - who published a similar book called 'Orbit'.

I'll keep you all posted

Doug

MRO has a huge capacity for downlink - not as much as MTO - but 4Mbit/sec DTE at least - and of course, the Electra UHF payload is designed for a relay between 4kb and 2Mbit/sec - the expected total relay is about 150MBits/day for MRO.

However MTO is expected to be able to relay 1.5GBit/sol

Doug

http://www.msss.com/press_releases/mslselection/index.html

Some astonishing proposals there - full colour motion descent imagery

Not sure what use 10fps video is - as even MSL will still crawl along at a slow pace making it very boring viewing Notice the HDTV resolution of it though - James Cameron has got involved - should be interesting!

Doug

If you ask nicely

Got to get a portfolio together before going to see Random House first though

Doug

What I didnt say is that this is the first image of the portfolio I'm starting with which I'm going to approach the publishers for a coffee table book

Doug

This image could NOT have happened without the help of Bjorn Jonsson - he's put in some stunning work to help make img2png everything I could ask for!

This is for Bjorn - and Tim Parker - he may only have sent me one email, but a word of praise from him is the best drug in the world when you're dabbling with pictures from mars!

This is a mosaic that I dont think Nasa ever released - it's from near Adirondak - just before heading off to middle ground etc - taken, unlike the usual empty-nest image we see of Spirit - in L4,5,6 to show much more accurate colour. I wont pretend this is 'true' colour. In this field I'm an artist, not a scientist, so I dont pretend to know how to do this scientifically - but I know what looks 'nice' and what looks 'right' - and this is the result of a thousand hours of mucking about with jpgs, imgs, pngs and more. Hours I wouldnt have spent without the praise and encouragement that I've had from those of you kind enough to visit this place.

PS - Sorry if you're on 56k - it's a biggy

Doug

WEll - it's stuck heater isnt really a big problem - especially when they have SO much power - they're going to end up with more power than they started by this time in 4 months I'd guess - it couldnt be better!

Spirit - a little more worrying - 400whr's is a TINY ammount - less than half of Oppy

It'll be interesting to see Oppy's MI images of the solar array (I presume they'll be doing that next week - so as to compare exactly to spirit images w.r.t. exposure to martian atmosphere) - to see how/why they're so clean - and what, if anything, can be done to help spirit in this regard.

Doug

Mars and Saturn are more than 90 degrees apart - so whilst it might make some impact - I imagine that actuallly it's very little. Remember, the DSN has multiple antennae at multiple locations. They dont have to talk to just one spacecraft at a time

Doug

It may be that the rattling it's getting with the driving they're doing on this slope is re-distributing grease in the gearing and helping a little?

Doug

A publicity stunt that would take probably 3 or 4 days of remote obs, and a week or two of UHF comms to send back

The tracks are very difficult to see anyway in Endurance - so they'd be wasting their time pretty much.

I'd rather they forego that and start making some progress. We do, after all, have two full colour panoramas of the crater from the rim already.

We're done with Endurance - time to leave it behind.

Doug

But if you've got colour data from pancam - why bother overlaying it onto navcam

Pancam's FOV is 16.6 degrees, Navcam's is 45 degrees - so you need roughtly 3 x 3 images - but they wont overlay very well because of the distortion involved.

Doug

They did that a LOT early on - infact, for both rovers the mission success pan from the lander base was done with L2 at full res and L5 and L6 2x2 binned

Doug

Well - when comms conditions are not great - shifting >200Mbits of data just for pretty pictures isnt too good an idea

I'm sure a full pancam panorama will follow when we get to the heatshield - and if there's anything to be seen on the horizon ( which they're probably wont ) - it'll be seen from there as clearly as it would have been from a couple of metres higher on the rim of Endurance. We can see from the pancam pics taken yesterday that looking toward the Heatshield - there's nothing you can see in the distance really.

Doug

I look at all of that - and it makes a lot of sense - BUT - I'm just an artist

I'm sure there must be a way using photoshop to have a template file using layers to replicate this - there must be. I think I might email Tim Parker

Doug