Six months, assuming that the usual MEP PDS policy applies. http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mep/mepdmp.pdf

I'm not so sure, this looks like residual smear artifact to me. Maybe the JPEGed "raw" frames are not so different from the original images after all.

Yes, these were sent losslessly compressed, and then apparently JPEGed for release, which is kinda gross IMHO. Because of compression artifacts I wouldn't bother trying to do much with these, though maybe you guys will surprise me.

FWIW and just to get on the record here, it's an "it" and its name is MSL. Call me a soulless engineer if you wish.

Apostrophe error there, Doug, I recommend reading "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves":
http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-T...n/dp/1592400876

Outstanding. My request to have this printed to hang in the hallway outside my office is already in.

Section 7.2, Focus, in http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-012-9910-4

If the manual focus is set incorrectly, yes.

By the way, if anyone hasn't read Dan Limonadi's guest blog on the Planetary Society website, he gives a very clear and detailed description of how the sampling system works on MSL. Definitely worth a read, Dan did an outstanding job. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs...rs-1-tools.html is the first part.

REMS is on the part of the mast that doesn't rotate (below the azimuth actuator.) So this isn't possible.

http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/REMS/

Ostensibly, no. For some past Discovery AOs Mars has been explicitly excluded from consideration (when there was a Mars Scout program you proposed Discovery-class missions to that) but that wasn't the case with this AO, and my understanding is that Discovery, regardless of target, is independent of the Mars program. Of course how this really plays out, no one can say. Certainly the part of the planetary science community interested in targets other than Mars has little reason to be happy about this selection.

FWIW, on MSL it's not called the IDD. I used to think it was called the SA/SPaH but technically that's not the name for the whole thing. We just call the thing in your anaglyph the turret, and we call the robotic arm (RA?) the arm.

It's worth remembering that when MSL was first described in the AO it had two arms, one for sampling and one for contact sensing, but those were merged.

MMM uses plain vanilla JPEG with either 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 chroma subsampling (and grayscale luminance only for the narrowband filters.) The dimensional limits referred to only apply to constraints of image size set by the hardware compressor (and only apply if you want the thumbnail to be exactly 8x smaller with no dropped pixels.)

The main advantage that we have for "true color" is that the Bayer color responses are similar to the eye's, rather than being the square narrowband RGB filters used on MER. In my experience with sunlight illumination you really don't have to do any white balancing and the out-of-camera JPEG color is pretty accurate. See http://www.msss.com/images/science/mastcam...nyona19i_cc.jpg, which was brightened very slightly but looks fairly accurate without any processing.

MSSS could provide a range of color cameras for very low mass. http://www.msss.com/space-cameras/ More information on request.

It's an interline smear effect. I've posted about that a few times now. There are ways to remove it cosmetically from the JPEG images.

I don't know if we'll end up sending back all of the frames lossless. It would take quite a while to do so, especially in competition with other science data. And the smear artifacts would still be there to some degree.

If we only ever have these JPEGs, I'd be about 95% satisfied personally. I started working on descent imaging in 1995 for MPL and it's been a long road. (The MPL MARDI would have gotten about a dozen grayscale frames.)

Stereo Photo Maker ( http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/ ) can save a stereo pair out in MPO format, which is a Fuji format for putting two views in a single image file. LG 3D televisions can display these files in 3D directly by just putting them on a USB drive and plugging them into the TV. I'm not sure if the Panasonic supports this format but it would be worth looking into.

Read the last paragraph of http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda.../msl-mardi.html

CAHVOR model in ftp://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/MSL/kern...20120731_c02.ti

http://www.msss.com/science/msl-mardi-pre-launch-images.php have some straight lines that could be used for rough geometric removal.

Very nice. Barring some kind of frame in-betweening I don't know if it'll get a lot better than this. I wasn't expecting the actual touchdown to be so dark (the exposure time had to be constant all the way through). Aesthetically I think I might leave the lens distortion in because the curvy edges are distracting -- we're all used to looking at GoPro video lots more distorted than this Maybe having two versions makes sense.

Gee, thanks for the ringing endorsement. ugordan has it all correct. A complete description of MMM compression can be found in the Space Science Reviews paper on MAHLI -- http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-012-9910-4 -- see section 7.5 "Image Compression".

We can return uninterpolated frames if we want to pay the downlink volume penalty.

I haven't verified this but I suspect that the web release images are going through a decompress/recompress cycle.

We're in the southern hemisphere, so the sun is in the north a lot. Maybe that's what you meant? Playing with Mars24 is instructive.

AFAIK sun avoidance shouldn't be a huge factor in imaging the summit, though it does have to be checked.

Some of us would appreciate it if you said "MSSS will sort it all out" instead of ascribing the entire operation of the instrument to one person

Free. http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/

From http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1500.pdf -- "However, the instrument was limited to 30 analyses per sol, realistic for its expected laser lifetime of ~20,000 analyses."
I'm not sure this applies to the flight unit but I would expect the laser to have some finite lifetime.

We appreciate the thanks but we didn't build the engineering cameras. 3D with Mastcam will be tough because of the different focal lengths. The best 3D source will likely be from MAHLI, since we can move the viewpoint around with the arm.

I've been using StereoPhoto Maker to output images in MPO format for display on an LG 3D television. This is definitely a nice technology that didn't exist back on MER.

In theory I guess there's some information there, though it would require an understanding of how smear is formed (and since the scene is moving pretty slowly in this sequence, there's probably not much if anything that normal interpolation/tracking between frames couldn't tell you.)

Why ask me when you've got Mike Malin?

google for "interline smear":
http://www.truesenseimaging.com/support/re...ge-sensor-smear

The smear moves since the image is moving as the CCD is being read out.

Interesting article. One note: even though the artwork shows "Mars 2012" the actual cal target still said "Mars 2010" at the top the last time I saw it in early 2010 (it wasn't updated after the launch slip.) You can't see this in the Mastcam image because the gnomen occludes it. Maybe it got revised at JPL but I doubt it.