Sequencing those post drive Navcams on Friday ( specifically those with ncam00272 and 273 in their file name ) I had a suspicion we might get a whole horizon if we got a tiny bit lucky. Looks like about 2 pixels to spare

Not to get all ‘Greedo shot first’ but......

Sojourner did it first : https://www.flickr.com/photos/60382378@N00/295988608/

I mean....not very well....but it was color!

Sadly I couldn't get enough bits in the plan to finish that upper tier - I only had two frames to spend, and needed three

Somehow it got featured in the February Mars Report - so here's my version.

The JPGing on the raw image page really hurt the quality this time - I hope some of you will revisit this in a few months when that data hits the PDS!

DUDE.... ITAR.....

We've also learned some interesting stuff about our planning tools and the MI just by doing this.....so next time, we'll do a better job

IDD not being what it used to be is restricting us some-what - certainly can't pull off the complete 360 of a MAHLI selfie, but we're trying a few extra frames.

Well - I figure we'll do it so often now that by Sol 6000 we might not want another one

What an adventure.

I've been thinking of an MER Selfie for ten years. Fortunately, Keri (TUL) and Ashley (RP1) who were also on shift on Thursday liked the idea.

The SOWG Chair for planning liked the idea. Infact, Aileen is the godmother of selfies - having advocated for the MSL MAHLI selfies from the beginning of MSL's mission at Gale.

Then the Mission Manager, Matt, went to Project Management, John....who got a final OK from Ray

We were actually going to f'ing do this.

So - I went hunting....had we ever downsampled MI images in flight? Ever? Turns out we have - ONCE - a long LONG time ago. And it looked awful. The compression parameters for the MI are different to those for the Nav/Hazcams. So I had to take a mild stab in the dark. I wasn't entirely sure how big the final data products would actually be - but I was fairly sure they would compress well, being so fuzzy. Hence - the 4x4 binning down to 256x256.

THEN we had the SOWG meeting....and the science team went from "Huh?" to "What?" to "Well if you're gonna do it - at least prioritize the images well enough so we don't have to do it again!"

Ashley got the arm sequence drafted pretty quickly - and we found that the RP planning tools don't actually model the MI field of view very well....infact, it's WAY off. So we were planning the motion between frames using an estimated MI field of view, and holding a piece of paper up to the screen. Ashley also had to battle the software stop on one end of the turret (hence we don't see the right end of the solar arrays).

Paolo quite rightly told us to add Navcam Frame to document it the other way.

John W as RP2 had to finish up and deliver the arm sequence. John realized we need to do that Navcam frame AFTER pointing the MI for the first selfie image, but BEFORE we actually took it - so that 1... the MI was looking at the mast and 2...The mast didn't move during the selfie sequence!

We went for 16 images, as 4x4 downsampled is 1/16th of an image - so the thought was were acquiring the equivalent of one MI image. Don't tell anyone, but we added an extra frame in the 4th row to get the end of the left front solar array.

We got word that MRO was in safe mode half way through the planning day. That always makes people nervous.

And then we waited. Friday, most of us were supposed to have the day off....but most of us went in anyway. Hallie was due to be an RP, but was released. Mike fired up a terminal window to watch the packets hit the ground. We gathered around his cube to watch it. Engineering data. Then thumbnails. No warning EVRs so everything SHOULD have gone well. Then lots of MI packets.

"What are you doing over there - we've got images" Hallie shouted.

I hit refresh in Maestro to see the images - and it filled up with tiny images. Unmistakable.....the top of the PMA right there in the thumbnails.



I'll confess....I had something in my eye. Hugs all round.

And before we even had time to realize what we had done - Hallie had them roughly mosaicked - and there it was - the whole thing.



Some of you might have seen me comment about this on twitter yesterday.... the idea that

1 Opportunity would eventually do it.
2 On sol 5000.
and 3-I would be on shift to write the MI sequence to take the images.

NONE of that makes any sense.

The good news is that everyone seems to be happy and pleased with our little, fuzzy, hazy, black and white selfie. Who knows....maybe we'll get to try it again on Sol 6000

And just in case people forget....that 90 sols expectation was real. REALLY real. See this paper byJake Matijevic in 2002.



92 sols for MER A if sent to Gusev
100 sols for MER B if sent to Meridiani.

Tomorrow, we plan sols 5000 and 5001.

Do you mean at night?

If so - yes - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4121

Yes - looks to be a new but of dust picked up on the optics. I'm currently on Paternity leave - but when I'm back on MER in a few weeks, I'll be attempting to acquire a set of NavCam flatfields using a technique already used on MSL that might end up being rather timely to calibrate this out.

Well - the data is all here : http://pds-atmospheres.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/gp_0001/data/

Wouldn't take much to start graphing some of it.

Damn - that's a nice dining room table.

So - apart from doubling the data volume* for observations like this - there's another problem. The PRT used to monitor the Navcams is on the right camera.

Just under a year ago - we had an instance where we were taking dust devil and cloud movies, early in the morning, with the left camera - under the assumption that the heating being used that put the right camera into the allowable flight temperature range ( -55degC ) meant the left camera was in that safe range as well. On a few occasions due to lighting conditions, rover orientation etc...it wasn't. The left camera was used

The result is - we now have a thing called the no-heat-window - a period of time when it's OK to use both Navcams because the thermal team are confident that they'll be warm enough to be used anyway. Inside that window - we can do stereo. OUTside that window ( and it's typically around 1100 to 1800 at this time of year ) we're not allowed to use the left camera at all.

So - while ENV (environmental stuff - clouds, dust devils, etc etc) observations get done all over the place - the really nice early morning ones couldn't be done in stereo anyway because of this thermal constraint.

If you're wondering when this all happened - find the time when those observations swapped over from the left navcam to the right navcam ( shortly after Sol 1602 I think )




* There are some tricks one could maybe use in terms of issuing a data re-prioritization ...but that would be a BIIIGgg data management headache)

I can prove, with data, that by the mid 2030s - there will not be time for sporting events. Singing the national anthem is taking longer and longer...soon, it'll last hours and everyone will have to go home afterwards.

I call the step change in the 1980s the Whitney Houston Discontinuity.

Then again - the same math proved that ExoMars was accelerating into the future and therefore wouldn't fly before the heat death of the universe....so...you know.....

The spacecraft would not have survived the trip. Remember - the reason Cassini was scuttled was because it was almost out of fuel for attitude control.

Here's a cheat for those following along at home. Every day there is a drive or robotic arm stuff planned, ECAM delivers a sequence called FHAZ00190

It's an off-nominal image - if something happens that causes a drive to abort early or an arm sequence to stop unexpectedly....then FHAZ00190 gets taken.

Such as https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/ra...90M_&s=1839

If it's a drive - quite often - the rest of the post drive imaging will still occurs such as a normal end of drive FHAZ, RHAZ and series of NavCam sequences - which is why there's an FHAZ00337 taken shortly afterwards..
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/ra...37M_&s=1839

In a similar vein - Marie Curie - the flight spare of Sojourner ( and at one point scheduled to fly onboard the '01 Surveyor Lander ) is in the Air and Space Museum in DC.


I got chills just looking at it.

Yup - that's a caching issue.

For what it's worth - I have no such problem here. Chrome on a Mac (and on 'droid and iOS) And those software upgrades haven't started yet.

Caching issue between your browser and ISP I'd have thought.

Yeah - that was a fun shift yesterday (1829) - did my best to raise the drive direction (ncam00267) to cover Mt Sharp without getting a hole in coverage between it, the Workspace (ncam00375) and the ChemCam targetable region (ncam00312) - a lot of back and forth, relying on an end of drive pitch/tilt to make it work.

Super relieved that it all worked out

So - there was a non zero chance that they would have run out of fuel before the proximal orbits were finished. Hence the drop dead simple plan that set it up all the way back in April - concluding with that one Titan flyby earlier this week that dropped periapsis into Saturn. It was a very elegant (and safe for planetary protection) mission design.

They really left nothing on the table.

Possibly the INMS cover that was jettisoned after SOI many many years ago