We appear to be drifting into having two MSL threads, can everyone chat at the MSL EDL one rather than here.

I'm closing this one temporarily to avoid this, admin/mods will move any useful links (as per the goal of this thread) manually

Re: Handling HiRISE images. When I've worked these in the past (most notably with the Victoria to Endeavour ripple mapping) I used the PDS_JP2 binaries to convert subsections to PDS format then those subsections back to JP2, then ImageMagick or custom code for further conversion/processing.

Slipped out of the habit of doing these again, especially seeing how good and how quick Stu is these days.

Need to get back to it ready for MSL, so her is my take of Veladero:

No Fred, the chatter on Twitter is that there is going to be a real RAT grind!

Should have just happened, images soon I hope.

All of them at full resolution except things like tau and calibration. (maybe others like sky images, I haven't checked in detail)



Yes, 8bit jpgs, they do not have lots of saturated regons, the full 12bit range is clearly mapped onto the 8bits range rather than just a portion of it with the stretched images, this does mean that some images can be a bit washed out.

I've often worndered about combining the two versions to get back to something closer to the original. But time, and the difficulty of getting images out of the app combined with a thought that this might be pushing things a bit far which would just result in getting this feed turned off (or at least switched to the same images as on the web) has stopped me.



Yes if we did want to use them properly then finding an easy way of getting the images downloaded would be needed. It is very slow emailing them manually one by one. You would have to talk with Mark about this and also about any issues if we started using them to reconstruct higher quality images.

James

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to notice that I posted that before JPL/Exploratorium had them!

They are from the 'Mars Images' iOS app (Android version also available I believe) released in January by Mark Powell from JPL.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mars-images/id492852224?mt=8
http://www.powellware.com/Mars_Images/Mars_Images_Home.html

It has been updating as normal (un-stretched images as a bonus!). The issue with it is that it appears the only way to get the raw images out of the app is to email them to yourself one by one, so fine for a one off but not for larger mosaics.

James

RAT brush of 'Grasberg1' from 2995

Steve Squyres reports on Twitter (@NEEMO_Steve) (from underwater!) that Oppy just had a big cleaning event!

Yes, but the crazy zig-zag bit is before the transit. The 'star' on the image is the position of Venus (off the disk) at the time shown in the upper right and is handily just before it executes the weird bit.

This is 13:52 local (-7 from GMT) however -134.7 longitude is very close to 9 hours behind GMT (9*15 = 135) so the sun will pass through zenith (the site is also very close to the tropic line near midsummer to ensure this) at roughly 14:00, just the right time.

@ddeerrff Correct

I think the issue is the Sun./Venus goes almost directly through zenith so from the alt/az point of view, Venus is seen to rotate 180 degrees around the sun very quickly. The limited temporal sampling of the plot gives a few straight lines where is should be a near circle around the Sun.

And 3.5m according to Paolo on Twitter.

That's right. To orientate people, the northen end of Cape York is towards the right edge.

Oh my goodness, that is unbelievable.

No, the softness of the shadow edge is purely due to geometry; the angular size of the sun and the distance of the shadow from the object.

As MSL is so much bigger than MER this image is on a different scale to what we are used to, so that will also contribute to the odd look of the shadows.

The landing is very early on Monday morning in the UK so I'll be going to bed early and then getting up and watching from home from around an hour before entry.

I'm then taking the whole week off work to follow and learn how to handle MSL data

James

Stu reports over on his blog that the JPL server that feeds Exploratorium is dead and will not be replaced. There may be a workaround, but that source of images may be gone for good.

Yeah I was thinking the same after I posted it last night. Glad you agree wih the rest of the ID's

J

A week or so ago Stu asked me for some advice on matching features of Cape Tribulation from HiRISE and Pancam. It has taken me a while to find the time, and I'm not totally sure on some of this, but here is an 'inverse polar' HiRISE image from Greeley Haven along with a pancam image with a few lines to show what I think are matching features.



James

Deja Vu - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6499

I've only just started working on my version of the Greeley Pan, but to join the party I thought I'd share an initial low res image straight from my automated process before I've done any fiddling.

James

Fantastic work on the Deck Pan James.

I know how hard they are to get right and yours is pretty well perfect!

James

Morris Hill



James

Perfect.

No worries. I am in no way disappointed, your work is beyond amazing.

You've always requested feedback and errors to be pointed out, this is close as I've come to finding anything at all and it is so tiny it's staggering.

It's only because the tread of the front wheels appears in hazcam images that I have looked at nearly every day for the last eight years(!) that this one jumped out at me.

James