Now you're beginning to fold it up - a whole bunch of strange little bracket, bolt, lumps, pyros and bumps will make sense

Being really picky here...

You've left the hold-down bolts in the cleats of the wheels (small chrome components) - it's just a hole once the rover is off the lander.

Some of the cables going down the front strut toward the front wheels sneak under the metal along the top, and then cuts thru the end of the strut as it turns down to go to the wheel itself.

Oh - I didn't think it was a criticism, I just want to pick up on Scooters point suggesting the MER animation was done by a couple of teams.

Actually - it was one guy. Dan Maas, of Maas Digital. He was finishing his undergrad studies at Cornell at the same time he made it. And it's now nearly ten years old. Technology, and software, have come a long, long way since then. It was made the same year the 2Ghz Pentium 4 came out - CPU's are now an order of magnitude faster, and RAM an order of magnitude cheaper. Technically - that was a very very long time ago.

Having since been involved in a similar project ( the MSL animation ) I now have a level of appreciation for just how astonishing Dan's work was at the time.

It's only 45deg South, and HiRISE images mid-afternoon. I'd consider frost to be very very unlikely.

But there is a confluence point for the riser to the parachute, than contained those smaller solids - so there should be something quite obvious, right next to it.

The heatshield could be findable - that's quite large - larger than MER.


Thanks for the movie link - for all kinds of retro reasons - it's amazing!

What was Mars 3's landing system like - and thus what other hardware would we expect to find locally? Heatshield size, was there a backshell. Did the chute stay attached to the lander etc etc.

There's also a tiny tiny little patch with a lovely double rainbow ( I'm too much of a ring muggle to say where. About 15% of the way from left to right )

Or, in other words - we're guessing and it's just an artistic judgement call.

Having seen similar hardware in person - I concur with pospa - the non wrinkled surface shouldn't be pink. It should be a muted, 'matt' gold color.

Yup. They didn't QUITE get it right - they were about 140 meters east of what I was asking for....as they didn't quite get the backshell and parachute in color as well.

I have the same request submitted for Meridiani, Color over Eagle Crater.

The thanks should really go to the members for the content, the Planetary Society for their support, and the admin team of Glen, Dan and especially Emily for keeping us all on the rails.

I'm just along for the ride

Just imagine what the next 8 years could hold.

D

That website is nothing but conspiratorial nonsense. You should ignore it entirely

That's a debate that's been a part of planetary cartography for a very very long time - and there are cases to be made for both conventions. Neither is right, nor wrong.

The PDS - as this doc states - typically works in 0-360
http://pds.nasa.gov/documents/sr/stdref3.7/Chapter02.pdf

"The PDS recommends that the planetographic longitude standard be followed, but also supports the traditional method. Specifically, the longitude range of (-180, 180) is supported for the Earth, Moon and Sun"

P2445

I've got a lunch in the 167 cafeteria that says it's our shadow

Yeah - go up there and replace the blue pigment with one that isn't massively nIR bright. That blue pigment is much much brighter in L2 than it is in L6 or 7.

L257 is almost nIR, G, B. Not RGB

Page 23 of http://marswatch.tn.cornell.edu/Bell_Pancam_JGR.pdf

.

I abandoned the very same data set for the reasons you mention.... GREAT work.

I paid not much less than that to get the BluRay of Kaguya HD footage from Japan. Worth every.single.penny.

We have absolutely no idea. After the spacecraft turned toward it's entry attitude, and (as expected) went quiet...nothing was ever heard again.

I'm afraid none of your candidates stand out to me at least. One could easily find many similar features in a swathe of HiRISE images. Moreover, since the last post in this thread more than 5 years ago - we have an interesting analogue to compare to.

Look at the images of Phoenix after just one Martian winter.

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2010/...16_2485_cut.jpg


An intact lander that safely touched down without trouble, along with a heatsheild impact, a backshell and parachute landing nearby - their visibility has been massively compromised after just one Martian winter.

The parachute is entirely invisible. The backshell is visible, but much less defined, the heatshield impact has been rendered, in my opinion, indistinguishable from the natural terrain - and the lander significantly degraded. If it had never deployed it's solar arrays and just smashed into the ground rapidly (as the MPL investigation suggests it might) then it could be argued it would be no more visible than the PHX heatshield is now.

Now extrapolate the same problem to MPL. Let's assume it got thru EDL to the point of separating from it's back shell - and thus the back shell with Parachute, and heat-shield would have impacted just like with Phoenix.

Take the obscuration of the Phoenix hardware over just one Martian winter. Now multiply that by 3, 4 or 5 (depending on what season you are picking images from) - that polar lander site has been thru several winters - coverings and exposures of frost etc.

Honestly, I don't think even if it's there, we could, with confidence, identify it.

I think if you're going to expend energy on this - far better to do it at an equatorial site ( where, for example, we know a parachute like Mars Pathfinder is still visible - http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d...MPF_parts_2.jpg - after 10 years ) with sites like Beagle 2 (where we have a fairly well constrained entry ellipse). I would urge caution for the Russian sites....the area required to be searched is simply massive, and I doubt if any genuine attempt has been to cover those sites with HiRISE at all.

I cried watching the trailer. Oh boy.

It is... well - for a rover anyway. That's a rover wheel track.

AHHhh - I was using Level 3. I'll try again with l2 tonight.

D

I'll have another hack it it tonight, see what happens.

And JS's pan polar-projected.

Saturated white pixels - meaning I can't make a shot like that one, as the polar cap is bleached out.

Did you just do img2png.exe *.img - or did you use any tags on the end?

D

Are we (apart from UG) using img2png? I'm getting a combo of very very dark moon images from the Earth flybys, but full pixels in some of the Mars images.


D