I think the Sun was overexposed. It's hard to predict the brightness with this much airmass.

Even in the best of circumstances and with proper exposure Mercury is just about at the limit of resolution.

I don't this this is a fair conclusion. The reason you see wide variation is from two sources: first, most images one sees have been processed in ways that distort the color, but the processing is rarely described or consistent, and second, the martian sky simply varies a lot in color depending on the amount of dust, the time of day, and the relative position of the sun. Sky color on Mars is dominated by Mie scattering from suspended dust, which is a much different phenomenon than the Rayleigh scattering from gas molecules that prevails on Earth.

Not really. Filter 0 on the Mastcams is very similar to the standard IR cut filter on a commercial camera. If anything, it passes a bit less blue than is typical.

They take very little effort to de-noise if you have the right techniques and supporting data. And the incremental cost to take them is very low, so even if the science return is marginal (which it is, IMHO) there's no real reason not to. They aren't starving out more worthy science images to any significant degree.

Plan, no, but it's one of many options for a very extended mission. http://www.space.com/13723-nasa-rover-curi...ale-crater.html

What do you mean by "full-res" and "raw"? Mastcam and MAHLI have no summing modes so all images are "full-res" technically. You can't tell the difference between lossless and JPEG return with MAHLI. Returning losslessly-compressed Mastcam images seems to have tailed off, is that what you mean? There are different users of Mastcam data and some would rather take more lossy images, some fewer lossless.

This is an informative page about OREx operations. https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal...ns/o/osiris-rex

On the other hand periapsis was about 1600 km so it's not like it gets deep into the atmosphere.

There might be some insight in http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1974CeMec...9..395B but I haven't read it yet.

http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/pds/viewMiss..._NAME=MARINER71



Since we don't have good tracking data from the end of mission and even if we did there are enough random factors in orbit lifetime, any prediction would be meaningless.

Since we don't know where it is, it's not really interesting to think about imaging it, though I'm sure it's "theoretically possible."

MGS was lost to operator error. Hopefully that lesson's been learned, but it's always a possibility.

I didn't say that, I said that the THEMIS Visible Subsystem was a repackaged MARCI. There are lots of good references on this; see http://www.msss.com/all_projects/mars-odyssey-themis.php or http://themis.asu.edu/ or read Christensen et al, The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) for the Mars 2001 Odyssey Mission, Space Science Reviews, 110, 85-130, 2004.

The GRS is a rebuild of the same instrument on Mars Observer. Boynton et al, Science applications of the Mars Observer gamma ray spectrometer, Journal of Geophysical Research (ISSN 0148-0227), vol. 97, no. E5, May 25, 1992, p. 7681-7698.

Not quite, MARCI was a new design for MCO but its first successful mission was on MRO (although THEMIS VIS on Ody is basically a repackaged MARCI with a MARDI frame buffer.)

MGS was primarily built with Mars Observer spares mounted on a new composite structure and propulsion and power systems.

Odyssey is mostly identical to MCO.

MRO is a larger evolution of the same basic design. All of these spacecraft were designed and built by the same group at Lockheed-Martin.

As always, history is more complicated than can be easily captured in a short post.

I think that despite its failure you might at least mention Mars Observer.

My understanding is that only the portions of the vehicle that actually touch the sample have to be IVb. http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm...e_name=Chapter5

I think speculating about how Mars2020 will interpret these requirements and implement them at this point is unproductive.

I'd have said Mastcam sees less blue than MAHLI (the cuton of Mastcam filter 0 is about 420 nm, whereas MAHLI is more like 400-405 nm.)

I don't think what interpolation kernel you use has much to do with the color, but the 5x5 preserves the image sharpness a little better. Of course once through the additional JPEG compression there's no telling what may have happened to the Bayer data; if it were up to me I would never present the data in this format.

Paul's images look perfectly respectable to me, perhaps a little off in color.

BTW, I'm surprised that lossless compression is being used as much as it is -- I'd have thought that taking more images with JPEG would be preferred, although we may be returning many images in both JPEG and lossless.

Google yields http://jwst.nasa.gov/faq_solarsystem.html

I was pretty happy with the merged MOC/MOLA map that went into the 2001 National Geographic map of Mars: http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/pro...nation-mars-map

The airbrush maps were works of art but I question if they were objectively better than a modern topography/albedo digital product.

Are there in fact any such instruments? Other than camera-based photogrammetry I couldn't find any evidence that such instrumentation existed in the Philae fact sheets. I don't think the sounding instruments can be used for altimetry.

Like what? Proposals for the current Discovery AO aren't due until 2/15 and the selection probably won't happen for ~3 months after that. AFAIK, the only AO selection pending is for the Europa instrument investigation, which isn't for a funded flight program at this point.

Like it says in the header: "DTM: Height [m] equals DN."

Most likely a byte-ordering problem. PDS files are usually in network order. I'd take Bjorn's advice and not reinvent the wheel.

Nope. It says SAMPLE_TYPE = IEEE_REAL, that's a single-precision float.

Is there any MOC coverage of this spot before the Beagle 2 landing? If it's close to the center of the ellipse I'd think there would be, and it would be useful to prove that the features are new.

The instruments for 2020 have already been selected. It would take something much more definitive than this to change that now.