I've always pronounced it like Faberge, but with out the 'ber' in the middle

Doug

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4785340.stm



Get well soon Patrick - The Sky at Night needs you!!

Doug

Partly just to see if they can, partly to add another point of data to the Pioneer anom. data set.

Doug

I'd rather Spirit and Opportunity stayed over there. Gusev and Meridiani are home for them. They should stay there, wherever they stop working, and then people should be able to, a hundred years from now, visit them and wonder at the little rovers that taught us so much.

The wheel tracks will be long gone, but in my minds eye - I've often walked along Spirits route, looking at old rat holes, scraping out the dust with a gloved finger, and sat upon the rim of Endurance crater.

Doug

I don't think I've visited a forum where "small.....faaaaar away" hasn't come up at least twice. Fundamentally, it's the reason I set this place up, so I could have further excuses to quote Python and Father Ted

Doug

It's not a case of memory to burn, it's simply what's important. These images are not important. They were the extreme ends of a focus-pull for the MI etc. Spirit's been very busy in the last few months, and so has had lots of high priority imagery ( for driving, new panoramas etc ).

How many other images are up there? According to the pancam tracking page,

There are 3633 individual imaging products onboard totallying 700.3 Mbits on Spirit, 3946 products totalling 923 Mbits on Opportunity. Some of these will simply be images that have been downloaded but not deleted, some of them will be one's that have not been deleted. Huge numbers (the vast majority) of them are likely to be tiny reference files, downsampled autonav imagery etc - things that hardly even count as images.

Doug

I just hope there is a thorough investigation into why the mission ended up being scrubbed - as it is a mission failure. Just because it failed on the ground doesnt mean is should escape a mission failure review board. A root cause should be identified, and if it was a contractor - then the contractor should be penalised for it.

Doug

It's the other way around. UHF comms wouldnt get in the way of MRO - but DTE and DFE to the LGA or HGA have potential for cross talk with MRO.

The tracking site often mistakenly repeats sequence listings - the spacecraft can manage packatising the imagery itself, there's nothing specific required to do that.

Doug

It's...er... filter - video - deinterlace, can't remember the options in that, but it's the one that isnt ticked by default iirc

Doug

Well - it's a shortfall with anaglyphs - or anything that 'leaks' a bit of the wrong channel to each eye. I've even seen it on Imax 3D and LCD flicker glasses, some are better than others.

I suppose some of the really expensive headsets that have two tiny monitors, one for each eye, would work better as there's no cross talk, but other than that, I'm not so sure.

X-Eye methods should work (but they give me a really good headache

Doug

Anaglyphs, as with any other means of visualising 3d imagery, are essentially a con. It's lying to your eyes - and your eyes will only 'buy' so much of it before going "pah - that's rubbish"

WIth anaglyphs, the filtration works fairly well, but you still get a margin of 'cross talk' as it were between the eyes - but when there's not too much disparity between the features, the eye will 'buy it' - and the brain process it properly. As the disparity increases, then the brain refuses to process it properly.

The way I get around it is always co-register an aanaglyph by hand, with zero disparity at the point of interest. This means that you could produce 3, 4 anaglyphs from a single stereo pair, in each one focusing at a different point. It's a little like depth of field with focus - things only stay sharp across a certain depth of field. Anaglyphs only work over a certain depth of 3D. Beyond that you have to re-register the images, or essentially, re focus.

Now personally - I leave the blue channel of my anaglyphs black ( so the resultant anaglyphs appear 'yellow' ) - this isnt a technical call, it's just what I prefer having seen an early ESA MEX HRSC anaglyph use this.

Attached - the same stereo pair but co-registered at three different points to illustrate the effect.

But think of the odd's you could give yourself

Doug

You're assuming that the Hubble images are right, given my processing so far, I'd wager they're more wrong that right.

Doug

Waiting for Jim to get back to base, then we'll sort something out

Doug

Registax

Doug

You need the latest Quicktime, for H264 support.

Doug

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images.../ndxpage13.html

Bit of a stitch job - just for fun

Now extrapolate to the complete traverse from the lander to Bonne

All I need is the wedges - and I have no idea how to get them out of the PDS data sets.

Doug

Proven in the use of the RD180 in the Atlas 3 and 5

Doug

15MB 720p WMV-HD movie of it
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...751_3d_720p.wmv

Doug

I've been waiting 2 years for files like that.

A little animation is on the way.

The ideal scenario would be the conversion of the pds released wedges and textures ( I desperately want to combine multiple Navcam panoramas complete wedge-sets into a 3D terrain from the landing site up to Bonneville crater and animate the complete traverse that way )

BUT - this is the first MER wedge's I've seen - and as a result, they are beautiful
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...it_751_2nav.mov
(720p WMV-HD version on the way, hopefully - that QT is H264, but approx 420 x 270)

Doug

Buran was a victim of the politics and finances of the Soviet Union break up - it never had the chance to become a flop for reasons that might lie at the feet of its designers or managers.

Doug

Not suddenly - but one need only look at the state of the arrays to see how quickly they go dusty in the 650-750 time frame.

Going to the hill isnt precautionary - it's fundamentally necessary for the survival of the rover.

Doug

Go and listen to the second Pancam update I did with Jim Bell - we talk all about the bpp and so forth.

http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/ma...vers/audio.html

Doug

If they get away without TCM5 ( the last minute job ) then it will have been a quite outstanding navigation solution - TCM2 was a peach

Doug