There are some vertical lines...wonder what that's from?

To be fair, the Moon's is a much more challenging thermal environment than Mars'. I think.

2. Such a fast schedule is not unheard of. The Mariner 9 mission, the US's first Mars orbiter,
was launched in May 1971, 2.5 yr after the formal project start in November 1968.

And being seasonal and the result of precipitation they can't be much else besides pure ethane or methane.

Do you mean the little fleck on the middle top of the recent daylight Phobos pics?

why wasn't the situation fixed...

Maybe the Moon as well?

So, I guess this is based on the most-recent data...

can please someone explain why the calibration target on MSL does not have a dustcover or some sort of dust removal technology?

Permanent ring-magnets have also been built into the calibration target of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), the same type of ring-magnet used in the Sweep magnet experiment on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs). Unfortunately, on MSL the ring-magnets were included at a very late stage in the development of the target (actually the target was a flight spare unit from the MER mission). This resulted in the ring-magnets being positioned at a depth of 0.8-1.0 mm below the surface instead of the 0.4 mm used on the MERs and Phoenix. From preliminary computer simulations this didn't appear to make a significant difference, other than in the size of the magnetically protected area. However, wind tunnel experiments using Salten Skov dust have now demonstrated that this relatively small difference in depth causes the "protected" area to disappear, so that with this new configuration the ring center will accumulate more dust than the reference areas free of influence from any magnetic field. With no clean area at all, magnets in this configuration will have the opposite effect to what they were intended to provide, attracting significant amounts of dust and retaining it on areas that are meant to be used as "dust-free" calibration standards.

looking at http://www.msss.com/msl/mastcam/MastCam_description.html the Mastcam34 sun filter is 440 nm which should be blue/violet and the Mastcam100 is 880 nm which should be near infrared.

The MSL version still seems lossy to me.

We've discussed before (image thread?) that the MSL public navcams appear to be stretched/lut'ed/delut'ed differently from the MER navcams.

But for MER Navcam images, the JPGs on the web usually are about 200K or more in size; MSL Navcam JPGs on the web seem to be usually around 100K or less.

I though the cameras basically return JPEG compliant data so that there shouldn't be a need to decompress/recompress the stream again. Are they really doing that for color images?

PDS Archives must comply with the following
• All EDR image data delivered for archiving must consist of simple raster images with PDS labels

I've noticed that they're really compressing the living daylights out of MSL images before putting them on the web...

Unfortunately NASA/JPL stripped the EXIF so we can't say what camera they used.

there appears to have been a small void in the adhesive pre-flight and the roof of the void has now been removed.

This should should be about the relative sizes of things in the mastcam34 frame.

Maybe software could use sparsely timed images (like Spirit's DD sequences) to detect a DD with software and then trigger high frame rate video (without motion detection).

Eyes on the Solar System says the transit should be happening at the moment...

I've been wondering if it is technically feasible to use the Mastcam Video capability to search for and record dust devil activity.

since MEX is over the horizon for hours sometimes, do they plan to take advantage of its communications capability.

Sub frame image of the same view but haven't a clue why it's gray.

MAHLI is sending a set of new images with a slightly different filenames...

[The MAHLI cal target is] dusty, but not so much when compared under same light conditions.