Mike Malin's proposal has multi-stage refrigeration. Well worth a read.

Chris

[quote=tedstryk,Jun 3 2005, 03:48 AM]
It is a shame that hasn't happened. By the way, there are some scans of some bad reproductions of those images you spoke of (V9/V10)

And here are my ink drawings of overhead views of the Venera sites, all hand plotted and drawn. These are scanned (although I still have the originals) from 'The New Solar System by Sky Publishing 1st ed. 1981. I largely used as reference a set of Russian prints given me by Hal Mazursky which revealed unusual details in the foregrounds, particularly the cracked 'broken pavement' rocks in Venera 10. The Venera 10 print appears here:

http://www.donaldedavis.com/BIGPUB/V10.jpg

Although later recent versions of the Venera images are clearly superior, I used the best material available for twenty years.

I have also made a set of similar drawings of the Viking sites, which appeared once in The Planetary Report. I will dig up my copies of the sample field maps with the various rock nicknames which Henry Moore gave me.

Don

Yes, my corrections are far from perfect. Some features are doubled, but I didn't even tried to correct it. Perhaps we could create some 3d images with this data

As for the curvature, I thought the same at first. But notice that the camera scan moves from the horizon down to a point in the ground in front of the lander (in a diagonal down to the right) and then back up (in a diagonal up to the right).
At least this is what I can make out based on Don's diagram.
But I'll look into this!

I had seen some reprojections of V13 data but not this V9 & V10 scans you posted.
What troubles me is that this type of projection distorts the surface near the lander and looks very different from what a "normal" camera would photograph.
The same can be said for the Pathfinder pan.

You are viewing a 360x100º (a guess, but there's just a little sky area visible above the horizon) on a computer monitor.
Normally we use this to display 40ºx30º images!

Very nice!!! This look very accurate as opposed to the overhead views generated from the photos posted by Tedstryk that look kind of distorted.

Here is my last Surveyor 5 effort. The horizon south of the landing site.




Phil

It looks like the old Voyager-Mars design!

Smaller, though...

Great pan!

Here is a first result of the Surveyor 7 work I am doing. It is a cleanup of a single S-7 frame. More to come, but this could take a while.

That's really nice, Ted. I found it on my full-size pan... it it SSE of the lander, looking back towards the rim of Tycho, but all we see is a rocky ridge one or two hundred meters away.

Will your images fit together to make a section of a pan?

Phil

I'm sure the Soviets were capable of that -- this is more like a one-night homework assignment for a math/engineering class than a serious technical challenge. Of course, they could have simply designed a camera that panned a horizontal view in the first place -- I have always assumed that the design they used was to assure scientific value per second, on craft whose lifetimes were bound to be brief. Namely, this method of scan gives a quick look at the whole continuum of distance/angle from spacecraft -- much the same as the multiple viewers on Huygens achieved. I always assumed that this showed that the Soviets were entirely interested in producing science value, PR-be-damned. (Of course, they did and rightly should have trumpted the historic nature of these images, but they showed no need to make "eye candy" out of them when a little spin doctoring in print would do just as well.)

The specs of the cameras (for V13/14, anyway) can be seen here

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Master...=1981-106D&ex=1

Well, yes. Due to the Venera's being expected to only last a few minutes on the Venusian surface (all four that imaged the surface lived longer than the minimum requirement, sending back multiple scans), and due to the desire to scan both to the horizon and right in front of the lander, while at the same time being able to return the whole image without succombing to the heat first, they got the idea of scanning as they did in one image. To go from the surface to the ground in one scan all the way across would have either been too many pixels or too low resolution, depending on which trade-off was made. To project the surface as in a MER/Pathfinder/Viking/Surveyor pan, the forground bit of the spacecraft should appear as a straight line. Although it is actually round, the camera's scan follwed this shape as well. What would be interesting to do, and now that I look at 4th rock's projection it is very close to beiing this, is make a polar projection. This would leave the forground spacecraft round, but it would be a full circle, not egg shaped. This would be much easier with exact numbers to go by.

I found this image by itself...but I have some that are pan sections.

Mare sites varies in one important parameter. Age of the lavaflows. As seen from the lander's camera, the older the site the thicker the regolith, and the larger the smallest crater with blocky ejecta on it's rim.

Surveyor 1 site is youngest, with a shallow regolith about a meter deep. Surveyor 3 site is somewhat older. I don't recall the regolith depth estimate, but landing in a crater left the results not entirely relevant. Surveyor 5 and the Apollo 11 site is on old mare flows, with an estimated regolith thickness of 5 meters. Surveyor 6 site is oldest, estimated at 10 meters.

Surveyor 7 site is so young the regolith estimate was some centimeters. Since the spacecraft landed on an ejecta blanket that's rubble and "soil", it's not as obvious how young the site really is, but regolith forms on discrete geologic units, like lava flows and thick ejecta blankets.

Well... *if* the theory is correct that Tycho ejecta caused the landslide at the Taurus-Littrow landing site (a quarter of the way around the moon from Tycho), and *if* the dating of the slide is accurate, then we know exactly how old the regolith is at the Surveyor VII site. Something around 109 million years old.

I'm one of the guys who thinks Surveyor I would have been a better target than Surveyor III, by the way. It sits on a much younger lava flow than anywhere else visited by any terrestrial probe, and the regolith there might indeed be thinner than a meter -- I've heard estimates of perhaps only 30 to 60 cm regolith depth for the Flamsteed site. And an age of perhaps less then a billion years.

-the other Doug

Here'a a rather bizarre-looking image...



It is a panorama of the Apollo 17 site taken south of the ALSEP, beside Geophone Rock (the big rock at lower left). It has been reprojected into a polar projection. The geometry is designed to make the foreground easier to map, and this has the effect of grossly exaggerating the relief on the horizon.

Phil