"Matt Golombek was pretty clear that MSL will definetely not be able to climb up the "unknown material" just above the canyon that MSL will be traversing. He said it is way to steep."

Too steep there, but we can reasonably expect a long extended mission. It should be possible to work around the lower levels of the mountain to the south and maybe find other ways up. The slopes look gentler as you go further south and east. There's also a much larger and more spectacular canyon to look at.

Phil

If I remember correctly, the new landing ellipse misses the possible delta on the crater floor. With that long a mission, maybe she could make a detour across the flats.

A very good point, and I think there are other fans that could be investigated as well.

Phil

I don't think they would drive Nort if we land South of the fan but if we want to examine fans I suggest we devote our attention to UMSF fans ;-)

Paolo

This would be years from now after she has gone as far up the canyon has possible. If she has to drive back down to go to another canyon as Phil suggests, perhaps then a diversion to the delta?

We can play endless games about extended missions, and it's probably premature to do so, but here are possible routes from the primary mission target area, one going back to the plains to explore a different deposit, then to the mouth of the 'Grand Canyon' (as it was called in one MSL workshop presentation), the other skirting the mound to end up at the same place. Then either one could be extended up gentler slopes to the upper mound. Detailed DEM analysis required of course, but feasible routes can probably be found. The real point is, there is tons of potential at this site for great extended missions. (base is Astro0's mosaic)

Phil

I understand, but I still believe they would want to go up and then around Mt.Sharp before considering going North. It would be akin to Opportunity driving back north, East of Victoria. But this is just a guess of course, nobody knows for sure.

Paolo

The bit I'm missing I've marked below. Any thoughts?



The only image which you referenced that I couldn't find was ESP_024102_175N
It wasn't clear which one that might be on the HiRise site.

Looking at my mosaic, it seems to be this one.



Sorry, as I was saying in an earlier post, ESP_024102_1755 was split in two by USGS when computing the DTM. You can safely discard ESP_024102_175N, it is a figment of my imagination ;-)

Paolo

Unfortunately, it's not that one. It's a strip to the left of that one.
Somewhere between ESP_018854_1755 and ESP_023957_1755.
I might have missed it in my search on HiRise. I'll keep looking.

EDIT: After a bit of digging I found the images I needed. They don't overlap perfectly but they're really close.
I've posted the full version to my blog. It's 58.4mb and still 15,623 x 15,623 pixels.
I've also relinked the image in the post I made earlier.

That would be PSP_010573_1755 which unfortunetely the search utility does not find. I wrote a script to compute the link to the non-map projected and map projected JP2 images which is a pretty trivial thing to do and use wget to downlink them. If you use the direct link the images are still there. I'm not so sure whether it is OK for me to publish the script, but it is really trivial.

Paolo

Thanks, that works on my Ubuntu 32-bit machine--at least, kdu_expand will convert a full-resolution JP2 file to pgm format, which ImageMagick seems to be able to handle better. The files are still kind of a bear to work with (100,000 pixels high!) but kdu_expand also can reduce the size by 2, 4, etc. & that seems to work well.

kdu_expand can also crop the image, so if you have trouble with the full-size you can try splitting it in sections. Can I ask you what are you trying to do? I might be able to help.

Paolo

Well, a while back in this thread I was simply asking if someone had already put together a mosaic of full-resolution HiRISE images of the landing site. Emily Lakdawalla posted a link to this mosaic in her blog, courtesy Tanya Harrison:

http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/Gal...erged_Scale.jpg

That's about 7000x7000 pixels with a scale of about 10 meters per pixel. On a 600 dpi printer that would be good for about a 1-foot by 1-foot poster. So full HiRISE resolution (0.25 mpp) would be something like forty times larger, 40 feet by 40 feet! OK, that's insane. Practically, getting resolution sufficient to print out a detailed 4 foot by 4 foot poster (30000x30000 pixels in this case) is what I'm interested in.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking to do this myself, but nice to know about some of the tools that would be needed. The cropping feature of kdu_expand that you mention is interesting. Like maybe if one is interested in making a map of a certain region, the HiRISE images could be treated as kind of a database & relevant segments could be extracted from the various images and pieced together automatically.

Tanya's mosaic is CTX, not HiRISE.