Abstract
The Optical Navigation Camera (ONC) is part of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) scheduled for an August 2005 launch. The design is a 500 mm focal length, F/8.3 Ritchey-Chretien with a refractive field corrector. Prior to flight, the off-axis performance of the ONC was measured at visible wavelengths in the off-axis scatter facility at the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL). This unique facility is designed to minimize scatter from the test setup to prevent data corruption. Testing was conducted in a clean room environment, and the results indicate that no detectable contamination of the optics occurred during testing. Measurements were taken in two time frames to correct an unanticipated stray light path, which occurred just outside of the sensor's field-of-view. The source of the offending path was identified as scatter from the edges of the field corrector lenses. Specifically, scatter from the interface between the flat ground glass and polished surfaces resulted in significant "humps" in the off-axis response centered at ± 1.5°. Retesting showed the removal of the humps, and an overall satisfactory performance of the ONC. The troubleshooting, correction, and lessons learned regarding the above stray light path was reported on in an earlier paper. This paper discusses the measurement process, results, and a comparison to a software prediction and other planetary sensors. The measurement validated the final stray light design and complemented the software analysis.

I think you're all comparing apples and pears - size of data product vs optical resolution!

Bob Shaw

OK, now that's a little strange. I defintely posted that last message as two seperate messages to get under the 1MB attachment limit. But the BB keeps joining them back into one! Is this a feature of the upgrade?

The trouble is that, in this particular case, there's simply no way to avoid bringing up the issue

Question for Jim Bell:

The usual left cam 3-channel multispectal imaging is bands 2,5,7 <near-IR,green,violet> Sometimes we have other color combos like 2,5,6 or 2,4,7 or 3,5,7 (or some such.. I'd have to go back and check examples).

All of the alternate sequences seem to produce images with degraded color discrimination: two of the channels are too similar to each other, and you typically get images that are dominated by long-vs-short wavelength differences and the color differences due to the middle channel (reflecting curvature in the spectrum) are less discriminated.

What's the rationale behind some of these other filter sequences during only 3 filter color imaging?
Oh.. regarding HomePlate... it's obviously the fossilized pizza-crust of the gods. Heaven help us if Spirit finds 1 meter fossilized pepperoni, ...or anchovies!

the downlinked thumbnails

Yes... but... in this new world, where IDD deploys are going to have to be more rare than they were (and have therefore become the new coin of the realm), we are arguably *wasting* a lot of them here.

One final note: since I seem to have a perverse talent for hijacking every thread on this site for the purpose of diatribes against manned spacelight, I think it might be wise to set up a thread specifically to discuss the preferability of manned versus unmanned spaceflight down in the "Policy" section, and plant all future discussions on the subject there.

It seems odd that all that was planned for Opportunity on sol 732 and Spirit on 753 were skyspots: pancam_sky_spot_L234567R34567.