Sol 3 and onwards - imaging Options

[djellison]

Keeping with the practice of sol-by-sol discussions, here it is.

[jamescanvin]

I don't know if I have missed the central section of this mosaic, I'm still trying to get my head around the Phoenix data. If anyone can find it let me know.

Also as I mentioned in the SSI reference thread, there is a inconsistent offset between the pointing of the filters in some images so the full resolution image is a little hard on the eye in places. Fixing this in my processing software will take some work.



James

[PaulM]

I don't know if I have missed the central section of this mosaic, I'm still trying to get my head around the Phoenix data. If anyone can find it let me know.

I read an interesting few paragraphs in a post entitled "Phoenix: Good News/Bad News" in the Martian Chronicles yesterday (or possibly in a link from that post).

What the paragraphs said was that mistakes had been made in commands sent to Phoenix. The mistake made was to instruct Phoenix to re-photograph an area that had been photographed on a previous day and to not photograph an area that it had been intended to photograph on that day. This could be the reason for there being a missing section in the centre of this mosaic.

The reason given for this mistake was (to me) very interesting. What it said was that when MER is asked to take photographs the commands sent are relatively simple. However, the commands sent to Phoenix are in the form of executable code. The author said that although someone checked these commands the increased complexity made errors slightly more likely.

These paragraphs have now been deleted from the blog. I guess that this was because they were dwelling on mistakes that had been made. However, it has not reduced my admiration for JPL engineers who seem to almost always write software that works first time.

I wish that there was more information on the web about JPL software. I would love to find out more about the Spirit SOL 17 software bug.

[mcaplinger]

I would love to find out more about the Spirit SOL 17 software bug.

http://www.klabs.org/richcontent/MemoryCon...irit_mishap.htm

[PaulM]

http://www.klabs.org/richcontent/MemoryCon...irit_mishap.htm

Thanks. This answers questions that were not answered by "Roving Mars" or by a "MER" press conference that discussed the bug.

Does anyone know whether the early "MER" press conferences can still be downloaded from the internet? The only press conference I have ever been able to download was the one given just after Opportunity reached Victoria crater.