I will stress that my best-looking image, as I say on my site, is a "What if" image - it is speculative overprocessing to the max. I would LOVE to locate the original transmission. First, to see if the nature of this fragment can be resoved once and for all, and second, to see if modern techniques can pull out the signal from farther in. I believe that at the one or two minute mark, it would have transmitted the first science data (temperature, pressure, etc.) That would be wonderful to have. Probably a pipe dream though.

I really like how you've enhanced this particular image, Ted. Nice work. As usual

I didn't realize that the site was yours tedstryk...






Yes, I've been following the amazing work in here but haven't seen anything on the lander data so far...

I basically binned the pixel, reduce speckling at certain levels, and got rid of darkening around the edges. I have an image on my site in which I removed any extreme deviations -
I merged that with an version that allowed the most dark and light areas to stay, so long as they were of sufficient length and width.
I am working from memory here though...I lost my notes on what I did step-by-step in my computer crash.

Playing with the Mars 5 dataset

The 3 color mosaics, with partial color filter data used (just red/green or green/blue) for maximum coverage.



I'm also doing some mosaics, and there's a good overlap of the images, but the original data has nasty brightness gradients that are dificult to remove.

Interesting the fact that the early Mars probes didn't make a good global coverage of the planet at moderate resolutions...

Well, early is relative here....Mariner-9 had already provided more complete coverage. With Mariners 6, 7 and of course 4, it was a bandwith/data storage issue. Great work with Mars-5. I would suggest you increase the hue saturation a bit though.
My results are on my page, although I haven't update in a while. The version on the top is my data merged with a soviet version of the color.
http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/mars6.html



On another topic, let me also say that this is the Mars-3 version that my earlier description of processing described. The color version is from the same version, but has been hacked at considerably - in other words, I did things like smoothing the sky without the ground. Here is how it looked before such alterations. The bright spots near the "horizon" are processing artifacts, and can be seen to "echo" from the dark spots.

First, it is important to note that the Mars-3 camera scanned vertically. It was essentially the same camera system as Luna-13, a panoramic scanner with a 360-degree view, consisting of a reciprocating mirror and a photomulitplier tube. So all of these images of the transmission should be rotated 90 degrees.

[attachment=5988:attachment] [attachment=5989:attachment]
(left) Luna-9 Camera, (right) Mars-3 Camera

The BBC's program, The Planets showed this image allegedly from Mars-3. That's a great documentary, but it frequencly misidentified Russian images. I have never seen this picture in any Russian film (and I've seen pretty much all of their documentaries on planetary missions). The claim that this is the horizon of Mars was made by the journalists at the BBC, but it is not what the Soviets have ever said. They claim that the transmission from Mars-3 contains no image features.

[attachment=5990:attachment]

Here is a more reliable view of the Mars-3 signal, being plotted on paper. This is from a Soviet documentary about the M-71 mission. It is not a color transmission from Mars, that just happens to be the ink color.

[attachment=5991:attachment]

In the upper portion, notice the vertical stripes on the left and right sides of the plotted picture. These are the sync signals from the camera. At the bottom is a section of what appears to be just random static, no sync signals. The BBC image might be another view of that random static that preceded the "image" data from the camera.

It is hard to tell... I wish someone could get ahold of the original transmissions (mainly because I want the Orbiter images, which I know were made, but also to resolve what happened to the lander).

Mars 3 landing site:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/m3ls.jpg

17Mb resolution image here:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/mdim-bin/data...at=48S&lon=210E

Following from the landing site all the way south is that ice or just high reflection?...

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/m3pi.jpg

Here is a little pan I have always found cool. Yogi, from behind the rock garden. It really shows how long the rock actually is. Pathfinder looked at it from an angle that made it look much smaller.

This image reminds me of this one:

http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2003-00060.html

Looks like they're both using the same cheap third-party ink-jet cartridges. :-)

Looking at the Planetary Society website, it seems that the Pioneer Anomaly group has not just managed to track down the trajectory data for Pioneer 10 & 11 but also their science data as well.

It may just be that the raw imagery data from the missions may become available in the near future.

See the Planetary weblog.

Graham

I'm very suspicious about that supposed Mars-3 lander image, too -- because of what the Soviets said at the time, which was that it contained "no discernible differences in contrast" but that it did indicate an "ambient light level" of (if I remember correctly) 25%. Now, they may have been referring to just the part of the image that showed the Martian surface -- but, if it had even shown the horizon, wouldn't the Soviets, always frantic for any propaganda edge no matter how small, at least have mentioned that?

Bruce is right. Absolutely anything, however useless, if it could have been hailed as the first image from the surface of Mars, it would have been. And why not?

And replying to the point above, from gndonald, I didn't think that report implied raw image data. I thought it was just referring to engineering-type data on spacecraft temperature etc. It would be nice to be wrong.

Phil