Low res ( 3 meg) and High Res ( 9 meg ) available here

http://www.rlproject.com/HRSC/2039

H264 Quicktimes - the low res should play on anything, the high res, you might need a bit of grunt.


FYI - the render of 500 frames took 3hrs 20 mins on a Quad Core 3Ghz machine with 4 Gig of Ram running Win XP 64.

Doug

Oh - I like them, but I wouldn't use them to say "this is Mars" without the chance to put that in context w.r.t. false colour imaging etc etc. In publishing, that chance is rarely there.

Doug

Not sure on the vert exag myself with these yet. Thing is - the really big features (like Oly Mons) look crap without vertical exaggeration.

I'll try and do something to explain how I'm doing them - but I actually end up with two noodles for the data. One is a low res version which I actually have in 3d in 3ds max, maybe 200 x 1000 polygons, displaced by the elevation tif.

Then, there is a flat surface, which is also displaced by the tif, but in the rendering process - at it's full res, so it emulates the full res of the tif, maybe 8 million points ( 1000 x 8000 for example ).

To have the 8 million polys in real time would be murder to animate - so I drop a blank blue texture on my low res version and put it directly on top of the 'real' one. I keep increasing the displacement of the low res one until it matches (as they're displaced using different techniques they don't work exactly the same) - by rendering and re-rendering until the high res displacement, and the low res blue just about match.

THEN - I can set the blue to be none-rendered, but use it as a guide for animating the camera over.

As a result, I'm not entirely sure of the vertical elevation I'm getting. What I'll have to do is make a simple box with the length, width, and total height of the terrain from highest to lowest point - and then fit the other two to match it. I think.

Doug

Surge posts by Don & Kye moved to the Surge thread : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...0&start=300

Sorry - that discussion ran its course ( and in doing so, Don wrote enough words for a medium sized novel ).

When that thread was closed, I said

"If people wish to discuss his Meridiani theory further, then please do so elsewhere or via email.

Posts in other threads on this subject will be deleted - as a subject it's been exhausted with this thread."

Line in the sand is here.

----------------------

The above promise will be stuck to hereafter. I have reopened that thread so that stuff can be moved over into it. Without meaning to sound all condescending and overly sarcastic in a British sense of humor way I do feel a "What did I say about surge? What did I say? Get to your room!" coming on.

-------

Surge posts by Don & responding posts moved to the Surge thread : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...0&start=300

If anyone spots any I've missed - give me posts numbers and I'll tidy up.

We've done that subject to death guys - I will leave that thread open if you MUST discuss it - but multi-thousand word missives are simply not acceptable anymore.

Doug

Lady's and Gentlemen....bingo.

Emily was kind enough to put me in touch with Greg Michael who, within 24 hours, had an IDL script on the HRSCView website ( http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/software.html - bottom of ) to export 8 bit tif's of all the imaging channels, and a 16bit tif of the DEM.

As a result - the attached out of 3ds max. And yes - a movie is rendering right now 720p, it'll be done by the end of tomorrow.

Doug

If Dave Seal didn't have a Spirograph as a kid - then someone's gotta buy him one now

Doug

Nope - from that first HiRISE image (which was when Spirit was at Low Ridge Haven) - the tracks are essentially gone from Mitcheltree Ridge and before.

Doug

Fewer micrometeorites, but only by half compared to free space. Does the far side of the moon have any less or more micrometeorite strikes than the near side? I can't imagine why it would.

Doug

We don't really need to debate the semantics on this one.



That was the point you were making. This wasn't a debate about the erosion of rocks, hills, and mountains. This was about the disappearance of tracks on the ground. You suggested they were still there but being covered over by new dust, and then cited a figure for the erosion of rock - a totally irrelevant figure for this debate as tracks are not made into rock, they are made into the soil

The word 'erosion' is perhaps not geologically dictionary definition correct - perhaps 'remodelling' is a more appropriate word. Dust, soil getting moved around to render the physical imprint of tracks less obvious over time. Not just a dusting over the top, an actual softening and reduction in depth and detail of the tracks themselves. That erosion is perhaps not the right word to use, doesn't mean that deposition is the process occurring.

The in situ evidence we have on this particular subject is this.

MI imagery of year old and new tracks at the same point at Endurance crater showed that the old tracks were being 'eroded' away, not covered up. The old tracks had pushed berries into the fine soil - and the passage of a year had allowed the tracks to be rendered much smoother by the dust being blown away starting the process of returning the soil-berry balance back to what it was.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...unity_m319.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...unity_p319.html

After an array cleaning event near Larrys Lookout, tracks were not 'covered up' - they were very nearly blown completely away by strong winds.
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins...pasorobles.html

HiRISE imagery of Purgatory Ripple shows a large bright streak from the site where brighter soil was dug up by Opportunity. The soil that got dragged up isn't getting covered it, it's getting blown around.

Yes - dust covers things up - it covers up the solar arrays, it covers up the sapphire windows of Pancam and the MI's - but it's not, by a long shot, the only reason that tracks are rendered less visible over time. We have an observed physical remodelling going on, not simply an obscuration by falling fines.

Doug

"We see this as a critical phase of work for ILO, as it will solidify the mission’s goals and priorities,"

Looks like they don't know what they want it for themselves. I've seen this debated elsewhere on the subject of NEO detetction, and simply can not seen the point of putting a telescope on the moon, when you've already put it into space. Radio Astronomy from the far side of the moon makes some sense - that I can appreciate. But anything else? Why put it on the Moon? Would a facility like Hubble, sat on the moon, be a better scope than Hubble in LEO or a Hubble like facility at L1/L2.

Yes - in 'free space' you have to manage your pointing, but you're also in a more thermally stable environment (instead of a two weeks on-two weeks off cycle), and have as much electricity as you could want available 24/7 via solar arrays (instead of requiring something else, rtg's etc). Moonquakes don't happen in free space.

A telescope on the moon will take better pictures than one on the Earth - but it won't take better pictures than one in free space, and for the mass involved in putting it on the lunar surface, surely you could design a very stable bus platform using gyros etc and maybe even a larger scope rather than a decent stage and mount for pointing. I can see why they got a UV scope out with Apollo - it was the quickest and easiest way to get that data without building full spacecraft. However, it was a short project that was wrapped up and brought home within hours - not an unmanned facility to be launched and then landed.

Perhaps I'm missing a major piece of the picture - but scopes on the moon - it just doesn't make sense to me.

Doug

Paolo's got his plunge over at Meridiani....and thanks to Ashley's driving, we now have - Stroupe's Slide here at Gusev. It took an email or two to figure out the best alliteration for it. Somehow 'Ashley's Favorable Incline' didn't quite scan, and Home Plate North is just so..dull. And where better to slide, than home plate! Even after as much careful planning ( that some suggested was too conservative ) it was still a major effort to get Spirit safe in time - so kudos to Ashley Stroupe and her colleagues for dealing with a couple of Mars jet-lagged weeks and giving us a shot at celebrating a 5th Martian Birthday.

Get comfortable, we may be here some time

Doug

Well - we can see with the MI images taken of 1 year old tracks just outside Endurance crater that indeed, they were eroding away and were significantly eroded inside of a year. We've also seen, during the dust storm, motion of tiny ripple of dust along the ground in just a few days. And up near Larry's Lookout, significant softening of track details within a couple of days. In HiRISE imagery, you will struggle to find rover tracks before the north side of Home Plate. Mars is much more active that you presume.

Doug

You mean the Zoom that has been, as of the last reports, descoped from Mastcam?

Doug

That's exactly what I'm planing I did a spreadsheet comparing total system cost to render speed (basically frames per hour per pound purchase prices) for various options. I've always had this belief that the best cpu in performance/£ isn't always the best component because it's only a part of the whole system...and indeed and for £300 I can do exactly the sort of rig you suggest - little asus barebone boxes, Q6600's, 2gb and a small SATA drive. I'm looking at the various asus boxes carefully as I used Win XP 64 and would like the same OS on the nodes for rendering consistency - and if possible, I'd like to do what I've done on my desktop rig which is overclock the 2.4 gig Q6600 to 3 gig - 25% extra free, and it's been 100% stable on my desktop rig

I literally, set the fsb from 266 to 300 by accident when I built it, so it was at 2.7 all the time before I noticed - and seeing as 3 gig is the fastest quadchip they'll sell you, all be it at 3x the £150 price of the Q6600, I thought it was worth a stab, so I set the FSB to 333 and it's been 100% perfectly stable ever since - even when rendering for 3 days straight over Christmas. 3ds Max is the only thing I can give it to 'fill' all four cores

However - I don't really need a farm just yet - so I'm going to hold off as long as I can, and then maybe sort something out in a few months time. For £1k today, I could have 12 cores - and technically quadrouple the rendering performance of the shed.

I'm also looking at ISIS again on my Macbook. Last time around I gave up before I even got any app working. Last night I got vicar2isis working for HRSC dem's - but in trying to shortcut the data rsync, I'd missed some template it needed so I've got a day of that to get thru yet before I can try that, and I'll try MOLA thru it as well.

Doug

I'm reminded of a chat I had with David Southwood at ESOC on the night of the Rosetta flyby. We were walking through the control rooms and he explained that it's fantastic to have VEX, MEX, Cluster, XMM, Integral, SOHO, Ulysses all deep into or about to start extended missions - but it makes it really hard to fund the new stuff they want to do. All that lot combines is eating up actually, quite a lot of cash.

I wouldn't do Alan's job for all the money in the world. Brave guy.

Doug

There are PDF's at the JPL tech reports server that discuss it - and at 1000 cycles, something like 80% capacity should remain.

Doug

At the HRSCView site, they now have a downloadable IDL VM tool - and if you download the complete set of level 4's for an observation, you can do some primative processing yourself.

It includes a perspective viewer - which can do things like the attached. It has an export-to-vrml option, but the VRML's it produces are enormous files that no application I can find can use.

If only...if only I could get these HRSC DEM's into 3ds max

Doug

HOOTENANNY


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootenanny_%28UK_TV_Show%29

Ahh - good old UK....running on GMT. I like 2007 - it's nice - I've got 46 minutes of it left

For those who've already embarked upon, or who are about to embark upon 2008 - may it bring you everything you hope for (apart from a dedicated server for UMSF, because we can't afford it )

Doug

It's not the efficiency that's dropping - that's probably a bad choice of words all round - it's the dust loading. One good cleaning event and we're back to 10-20-30 percent.

And we're not having another 'after victoria' discussion about driving 15km to another crater - there's one already.

Doug

If they can close from 15m to 5m - that's quite a lot more resolution on the Xbedding.

If it was worth doing super resolution imaging to get a few 10's percent increase in resolution - it's worth driving a little closer to get a double in resolution.

But - not so close that it'll impact power and comms.

Doug

That would help a bit, for now - but...

These things take 2 or 3 days to render out a 4k res sequence of 1800 frames

What I'd really like is to get both the 16 bit sorted AND use the 64 ppd data. That means getting the four panels processed the same to mosaic them up as one roughly 20k x 10k mosaic and the way NasaView loads them, it stretches each, unequally.

So I'll hang tight till I can figure out the processing at 16 bit, mosaic them, then get re-rendering ( I think a cheap render node or two might be usefull in the meantime!)

Doug

NEARLY works with Photoshop.

The dimensions are in the LBL, but I'm getting an odd clipping whereby (I think) I'm getting two hacks at 16 bits, with the depths resetting from black to white to go deeper. Odd.

Works a treat for CTX...not so good for MOLA.

Doug

They're a very different scale to that of the HRSC images - 50x higher res probably, hence things are a lot 'rougher'. I"m hoping to get some HRSC DEM's figured out (that's today's little project) - it'd be amazing to have them for HiRISE, I know Randy was hoping he'd be able to at some point.

Doug