When I first popped the pathfinder pan back over the pathfinder dem.... I swore quite loudly.

"**** off, no WAY is it going to match that well"

And it did.

I'm trying to improve it with an HRSC or CTX image as a virtual table-cloth under the place-mat that is the HiRISE dem. Sadly - the HRSC DEM of that site isn't available ( as far as I can tell. There were two observations on that orbit. 3147_0000 and 3147_0001 gues which one's pathfinder. Now guess which one's got a DEM available on ESA's PSA... yup - the OTHER one)

And CTX has spotted over 100 new craters on Mars in our brief history of Martian exploration.

Time for DEM hatrick....

One of Pete Grindrod's DEM's - Candor Chasma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaEdssbD1LU

One of the HiRISE teams - Slope Streaks (NW scarp slope of Olympus Mons, I beleive)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQFyW4a-oDw

And the one I've been dreaming of for 3 years. Mars Pathfinder. DEM by Pete (with hindrance and biscuits by me ) last week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE_Ih0hgnlw

For those that don't know - Adrian and I go back 10 years (we attended the opening of the National Space Centre back in 2000!) - and he made some stunning fly-through software for MOLA data back then. (I made a little Mars-Plane to go in it for fun)

And now he's BACK... with THAT.

Nice work

It's rendering now. Start with Pathfinder pan view like that screenshot - fade it out to DEM - fly up and out, round the back of Twin Peaks - over to Big Crater, a high pass over to the top of the DEM, then fly back past North Knob to the landing site with a view of Big Crater, and fade BACK to the Pathfinder Pan.

Simplest explanation is internal reflections etc. within the camera. If the levitated lunar dust were that obvious - we'd have amateur astronomers seing it all the time from the Earth.

Just getting the data that Pete helped me make (in the same way a surgeon 'helps' a patient have surgery) into 3DS Max.

Early results = promising.

At a basic level, documenting the key waypoints of our traverses is just common sense.

Time and again we've played the X metres in Y sols means Z progress game.

It never works

Ever.

What's kind of cool is that these images of the horizon were taken 16 hrs ago. Seriously - just 16 hrs ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AohxBIDukc

Going to step away from DEM's for a few days - my workstation has begun crying

Two more - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswCRehrBNY - West of Juventae Chasma and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4w4d_pfBS0 Bahram Vallis.

When she can communicate, she will.

Interesting in what way Good/bad/indiferent

I think it's being selective in not generating more polys than the are pixels to enjoy them - so in the distance, they are less dense. It regenerates every frame, producing the polys as they're needed. You can turn it up and down, and I basically turn it up till till it start having artifacts, or stops improving in detail. There are far better ways of dong it - you and Adrian have the know-how there. I'm just a tempramental artist

Update : - Gale Crater uploaded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh_bfrl9wk0

It's done in the renderer as required by each frame - I've done actual models of most of these as well, up to about 1.2 million polygons, and in the near-field, these renders look better than those models. Certainly several hundred thousand in each rendered frame. Technically - you could pull about 50 million polys out of each one.

It's all dependent on how much tilt we can find before the power gets below anything drivable. It also depends how much more dust deposition or cleaning we experience. Trying to forecast how much power may or may not be available in the future for activities is premature. Basically, we'll find out when we get there.

Little to none. The point is that she will barely have enough power to remain active at all - so asking how much power will remain to do science is somewhat moot don't you think.

The results of processing the new HiRISE team DEM's are beginning to appear. They're not as polished and pretty as the Columbia Hills one. Main reason is time. These are taking approx 1-2 mins per frame, at 750 frames each, so even with my i7 desktop, plus Q6600 render zombie (with occasional pauses for Helen and I to have some practice in dealing with the upcoming zombie apocalypse via L4D ) - it's 6-12 hrs each. So I had to turn down the 'pretty' quite a lot just to get through them in terms of rendering - AND in terms of processing. BJ's all new img2png helps speed up the processing pipeline massively.

Early results so far :

Athabasca Valles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQYDElIMQ2s
from http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/dtm/dtm.php?ID=PSP_002661_1895

Mojave Crater
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp8WU05W0Jg
from http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/dtm/dtm.php?ID=PSP_001481_1875

My render queue still includes Gale Crater, Bahram Vallis, Candor Chasma, Juventae Chasma. If you see a particular DEM from HiRISE and think " I MUST SEE THAT " - shout, and I'll see if it's worth animating.

A little something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZdpxCY7ugI

1280x720 version with fog etc, rendering over the next few days (my render queue is fairly full thanks to the HiRISE DEM's )

Did you remember to nail the solar arrays to the perch as well. They could well be pushing up the daisies.

I remember watching you retell it on the BBC flagship series 'The Planets'

A hell of a time to have been involved in it - thanks for visiting UMSF !

The Spirit Wiki article isn't great - but it's actually reasonably comprehensive and up to date.

But for the sorts of figure we're talking about ( <10-15 degrees ) it holds pretty damn close.