Water vapor was detected and globally mapped by the Viking Orbiter MAWD instrument, and the residual north polar cap was confirmed to be water ice by Viking as well.

There was some Earth-based spectroscopy in the 1950s that suggested the polar caps were water ice, but I'm not sure how definitive those were.

You could possibly figure it out from the time stamps; it takes twice as long to go from filter N to N+2 as from filter N to N+1.

As I've noted previously, the thumbnail tint can be used for any filter with different visible throughput, and the infrareds can maybe be told apart from timing or the amount of dark current, as the exposure times go up as you get farther into the IR.

Then perhaps patterns would emerge as to how they're using the filters; as you observe, there seems to have been some evolution in which ones are used.

The funding dynamics for a Discovery mission are considerably different than those for a mission where the instruments are selected in an open competition.

A more comparable situation would be the SHARAD instrument on MRO, which was funded by ASI rather than ESA. I'm not sure if ESA has a program similar to the NASA Mission of Opportunity, which provides funding for US instruments to fly on other nations' missions. I don't recall for sure, but I think that SHARAD was selected by a process outside of the general AO for MRO. DAN and REMS are similar situations on MSL.

It will be interesting to see what the 2020 AO actually says on the topic of non-US instruments, and whether ESA or the European national space agencies make funding available for European instruments.

The 2020 mission is not a joint NASA/ESA mission. If you look at missions that have been, you'll see that the SDT has been jointly selected by NASA and ESA.

Future cooperation is all well and good (this isn't the appropriate forum to discuss the pros and cons of that), but this particular mission is 100% funded by NASA AFAIK. I'm not certain of the mechanics but I don't think NASA will pay the expenses of a foreign national, and since ESA wouldn't in this case, participation would have had to be self-funded (partly speculation on my part because I couldn't find the solicitation online any more, but I think likely.)

I don't believe there are any, see post #51 and following.

But those photos have never been taken with Mastcam, which was my point. The extra data volume is pretty small compared to the outreach benefits. Sometimes pretty pictures are worth taking.

"Solorrow." http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...ity-sol-43.html

The big block at the lower left also appears to have been purposefully skipped

Seriously, I don't know why they would skip a big area like that; perhaps it was covered by some earlier sequence or that's the divide between multiple sequences which will be filled in shortly?

I guess the HiRISE images are kinda blurry. Maybe somebody could capture one from Eyes on the Solar System?

I could grab one from the rover planning software but somebody would probably yell at me.

Great animations, BTW!

The MAHLI FOV, while wider than the Mastcams, is not all that wide (about 31x23 degrees.) The self-portrait required something like 30 frames to cover as much of the rover as you describe, which I couldn't characterize as "minimal", and not counting all the mechanism stow/unstow cycles. You might get some leverage by extending the arm farther and lower (might be a strange vantage point, like the belly pan) but it would still take a fair amount of arm manipulation to make it work.

This is not all about f/number, but also about pixel size, quantum efficiency, and other factors. You might compare the MER Pancam results to the recent MAHLI image.

OK. Go back to fredk's animated GIF at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=197180 -- the streaks in multiple frames not aligned with the pixel rows or columns are clearly not noise, and since they recur in multiple frames at the same angle with length varying with exposure time they are not cosmic ray hits either.

I won't try to convince you these are good star images but they aren't noise.

I'm not convinced that any camera on MSL could even detect a comet, much less produce a good image of one.

This is a good reason not to post hints. All of us on MSL are subject to rules about what we can and can't discuss. If I could say anything about this (I don't know what it is, but only because I intentionally haven't tried to find out) then I would, but I can't.

I don't know anything about this observation. I'll note that Mars rotates at a rate of about 71 urad/sec and the MAHLI IFOV is about 350 urad, so it takes an exposure time of about 5 seconds to produce one pixel of trail (if my math is correct.) Alas, we don't tell you what the exposure times are.

Or reflecting the small amount of light that the UV LEDS emit in the violet (see figure 8 in the MAHLI SSR paper.) A less ambiguous case would be if the fluorescence wasn't bluish (see figure 29 in the MAHLI paper.) I don't know what we're seeing in this image, but I am no expert on fluorescence.

My suggestion is to wait until the PDS archive data are available so you don't have to guess. We have enough trouble figuring out the range as it is. By that time it may be that the JPL stereo mesh products will be available (I don't know if those get archived to PDS or not); if so, you will know the range out to 20 meters or so for each site. I'm also not sure what you have to gain; usually you can tell where MAHLI is looking just from looking at where MAHLI is in Navcam images, and you can tell where MAHLI is in the rover frame from the SPICE data.

If people still want to look at this, the MAHLI paper has some focus/range plots and all Z-stacks are taken with constant motor count stepping (but I'm still not sure if absolute range can be backed out, at least without some measure of scale.)

Be warned that the current MAHLI depth maps are not calibrated for distance and we aren't giving you the focus mechanism positions for each frame, so it would be tough to back this out.

For RSM instrument boresighting, I find it hard to believe that the offsets you're seeing are purely parallax (as noted they are in the wrong direction) but this is something I'm just starting work on so I could be mistaken.

MAHLI is obviously a more involved problem than Chemcam because of the much larger baseline.

Are you using the individual instrument frames or the RSM frame? If the latter, the boresights of the instruments on the RSM are not especially parallel; the Mastcams are toed-in relative to each other by about 2.5 degrees IIRC.

I'm on the team that built MAHLI, and I can assure you there is no internal white-balancing. The cal target can be used to do white balance, or it could be if it wasn't covered with dust from the landing.

If there's a perceptible difference in white balance between the cameras (I just looked at a few images, and it's hard to say for sure since the imaging geometries aren't very similar), it probably has to do with the slightly different cut-on wavelength of the bandpass filter.

I don't know what you are reacting to. None of the cameras do any kind of white balance processing internally. There may be some minor color differences because of the different glasses in the optics and the slightly different bandpass filter between Mastcam and MAHLI.

Like MER Pancam, Mastcam is commanded with a single command which specifies right, left, or both at a given RSM pointing. It takes fewer commands if you want to shoot a two-camera mosaic of the same area to specify both and take a left and right at each position, but obviously since the FOVs are different for Mastcam this produces excessive overlap for the 34mm unless you subframe. One can see a lot of variation in how subframes and mosaics have been commanded over the mission; this is, I suspect, just the learning curve for individual operators and the project as a whole. Those of us who built the cameras are very rarely asked how to run them; I guess that's a good thing.

I'm pretty impressed with the work being done here with Mastcam stereo. I was pretty skeptical it would look as good as it does. I'm not sure if these two-camera mosaics are being shot with stereo in mind; I hadn't imagined this being a common usage mode.

Note that there is no hardware commonality between MoonKAM and Junocam.

And you won't have to wait until 2016; the Juno Earth flyby is happening this year (9 October).

We also want to get all the images down. Sometimes files are missing or incomplete and retransmissions have to be manually commanded, so there's some planning delay. I'm not sure what the story was with this particular image; it showed up before I could check.

There is some uncertainty in the actual radiation environment, but the planned end of mission occurs shortly before solar conjunction and presumably the spacecraft would have to be in very good shape for any extension to be allowed.