Regular ‘Eyes’ is being phased out. It’s >10 years old and in a world of smartphones, tablets and chrome books....increasingly unusable for a majority of people. The WebGL experience is where to go for EDL. The full ‘Eyes...’ experience will eventually all be in WebGL. I doubt they’ll have the resources to transfer EDL back to the old platform.

Ive not been with the Eyes team for over half a decade, and we had started trying to get off the dependence on Unity for a while even then. That MSL EDL was a very ugly hack in original “Eyes” and maintaining it has been a nightmare.

This new preview build is epic - I dropped a quick play by play of what it does into work slack to share it with the MSL team.

Bravo.....BRAVO.

Yeah - I'm not getting that. What browser are you on, I'll let the team know.

Neither used guided entry and thus didn’t need the offset CoG. Ditto MPF, MPL, PHX and InSight.

I know Sean did something a bit like this previously - I decided to make one of my own.....

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/gale-crater...5f6d6930120dc1b

The Eyes on the Solar System team have still got a few tweaks to make - but their EDL experience is up and live. Unlike with MSL when you had to download and install it - it's now a WebGL thing...... https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mars2020/

There was also a mid-drive Navcam 360 on the 3008 drive.

I would argue this is the only budget that actually matters. The others are negotiable. This one is not.

So - here's the trick. We will never take a left eye without a right eye. The right eye is the one being monitored for temperature - so if we do mono imaging ( like upper tiers ) it'll either be right eye mono - or - rarely - stereo ( you don't really get much range data on upper tiers so stereo is definitely an indulgence )

tldr You might find some mono-left-eye stuff when we were operating on RCE-A or before about Sol 1600. But since we discovered an idiosyncrasy about how the rover monitors camera temperatures - it's either stereo, or right eye mono. Never left eye mono. Our deck monitoring 3 frame mosaics and our upper tiers will usually be right eye mono

Just a thought - Are you using just the left-eye images?

You will find that when we take an 'upper tier' ( extra images to capture Mt Sharp and other topography above the horizon ) more often than not it is right-eye only....so you might be missing out on some images.

Great work though!!

I'll see if I can make something with https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Ma..._DEM_Mosaic_10m and QGIS

Edit...

Managed to generate something. This is major lines at 25m and minor lines at 1m. There's some HiRISE strip miss-match artifacts towards the right.

That's pretty similar to what they did with the USSR Luna missions in the '70s.

https://i0.wp.com/www.drewexmachina.com/wp-...a_24_sample.jpg

My guess is that the ascent stage blocked the view on the other side of the lander - and now it's gone, they might be able to do a 360 assuming everything's still healthy onboard after the impact of the ascent stage engine plume impinging on it.

There's no LED illumination out the back of the rover. That illumination is coming through gaps in the backshell

Exactly why we do these occasional NCAM movies of the MAHLI selfie process. They're fun - you maybe get motion blur - you get a GIF that explains how we take selfies - and honestly....it's just damn cool

It was intentionally planned as an in-parallel dust devil movie like activity rather than one ncam image per MAHLI frame in the hope we would see motion


The previous one ( Sol 2687 ) is in the PDS

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA23624
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA23625


https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/msl/M.../DATA/SOL02687/

Exposure times were ( example https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/msl/M...NCAM00141M1.LBL )

EXPOSURE_DURATION = 291.84 <ms>


The thing that's easy to forget with the MSL and MER Engineering Cameras - their filter is quite narrow and quite red - it's 600-800nm ( see page 5 https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/publicati...ne/fulltext.pdf )

The weirdest thing I've done with imagery from any rover was to take the mean of all the frames of that 2687 selfie movie.......

This is the only selected SOFIA observation out of 7 rounds to mention the moon.

https://www.sofia.usra.edu/science/proposin...ls/abstracts#61

Proposal ID: 07_0061

Principal Investigator: Paul Lucey

Title: Water abundance on the Moon from 6 µm observations

Abstract: This Thesis Enabling Program aims to detect or place upper limits on the abundance of molecular water on the lunar surface. A hydrogen-bearing species is causing an unexpected 3 µm absorption on the lunar surface. However existing data, including the proposers’ observations of the Moon at 3 µm using the InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF), cannot resolve the chemical form of this hydrogen, whether molecular water or the hydroxyl radical. The chemical form of the 3 µm absorber provides information on solar wind interaction with the lunar surface, and whether the hydrogen bearing compound is mobile. Low resolution spectroscopy at 6 µm is uniquely sensitive to the presence of molecular water in a spectral region both inaccessible from the ground and lacking in existing and planned spacecraft observations. SOFIA observations will enable definitive establishment of abundance limits of water and its degree of mobility. The project will produce 6 µm spectra of the Moon as a function of time, location and temperature for use by the wider planetary astronomy and lunar science community.

Yup - here's one image showing the cable is absolutely fine.

After a ~18 month hiatus - the Navcam quicklook mosaics are flowing to the public website again - these include Az/El grids and are PNGs, not JPGs

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/mosaics

Those thumbnails are not part of the JSON feeds that drive Nogal's tool - they're part of the Mars web team's implementation and thus are probably an order of magnitude more likely to get changed, moved, broken as a result.

That's awesome!

So - I'd actually be cautious about using the thumbnails.... all thumbnails are full-frame, but all dust devil movies or upper tier images or other sub-framed pictures are not full frame, so the thumbnail might be missleading? I've got a couple of ideas / requests

1) Have a thumbnail on/off button ( to stop them showing in the list at all to avoid duplication)
2) Have a text list at the bottom of any page with a listing of links direct to the images so people can do a bulk download of data for any given sol.
3) What some people are beginning to figure out is how useful the Sequence name is.... ( in a file like NRB_655824982EDR_S0822188NCAM00595M_.JPG the SeqID is the NCAM00595 part ) - being able to filter by SeqID for a given Sol would also be really good as that would let someone ( combined with 2, above) download, say, all the images in a single dust devil movie or MastCam mosaic on a given sol.

One bug to report - it's not a constant sol number - but sols before about 2785-2775 or so, it will return an image count, but not return any actual images.

If you don't mind me asking - how long did this take you?

It's analogous to the HiRISE imaging of Phoenix and MSL ( and unfortunately missed imaging of InSIGHT ) during EDL.


It's just damn cool.

Any time there is something that isn't a dust devil / cloud survey / documentation image.....then the mosaic gets remade.

In this case - it would have been remade on 2858 with the addition of this workspace image

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/m...NCAM00353M_.JPG

The MSL mosaic page appears to be getting updates again

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/mosaics/

I'm afraid some extreme bubble bursting is required here.

How are you going to pay for, operate, communicate with and build these?

Note - the only cubesats to successfully operate beyond the EM system were the MarCO pair each of which were 6U cubesats of 13.5kg each. They were not 1kg 1U 'standard' cubesats. They lasted ~9 months. They required DSN time (which is tens of thousands of dollars per hour). They had deployable high gain antennas, a finite attitude control system, and a budget of over $18M for the two.

They had basically no instrumentation beyond a UHF radio for InSIGHT relay and two 50g worse-than-SD-quality cameras (of which only 1 of the 4 flown actually worked properly) They could communicate at only 8kbps during their prime mission.

The Delta IV heavy you propose using is a $400M launch vehicle. You can't just replace its second stage - that's required to even reach LEO. A Delta IV heavy WITH it's second stage can't even get a Black Arrow to GTO, let alone a trans lunar injection.


You're definitely going a bit beyond blue sky thinking here.


The way to do Cubesats beyond the EM system is to piggy back a couple at a time on a larger dedicated missions as MarCO did with InSIGHT - or to pay for a dedicated ride with someone like Rocket Lab whose upgraded Electron rocket can now deliver Cubesats beyond the EM system.

What cubesats are doing is incredible.

They are not some magical panacea that can be scattered across the solar system by KSP style magical engineering.

Well spotted Phil - It's one of the best I've ever seen. Tried processing from the raw JPGS - lots of noise but it comes out well if you diff it to a mean of the full sequence.