Sol 12 on onward general imaging, First TEGA delivery Options

[djellison]

Looks like the Sol 12 images are coming down
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?...3286&cID=50

Motion in the scoop for sure, so hopefully a full delivery will be imaged...in full.

[Stu]

... and another...

[ugordan]

Backshell in approx. natural color:




This is still half the maximum SSI resolution. Is the backshell really coppery-red from the inside? There's a dark object way out in the distance beyond the smaller rock in the foreground. A large boulder?

Fred, the HiRISE team says the parachute is lying in a small depression so that's why it's not visible to Phoenix.

[Doc]

Backshell in approx. natural color:




There's a dark object way out in the distance beyond the smaller rock in the foreground. A large boulder?

Most likely yes. Probably blasted from the nearby crater (wats its name?).
The terrain is actually very interesting (the polygons are awesome) especially the rocks (to bad they dont have rock analyzing instruments )
The original surface rocks that we see as light_coloured seem to have suffered significant weathering (glacial?).
The more angular darker basalts are probably from recent impacts.

Anyone want to comment?

[ugordan]

Yes, that dark object appears to be a big rock in the distance when seen in higher resolution.

It probably should be visible in the pre-Phoenix HiRISE image based on the lander location. Here's the color shot merged with a full-res red frame in an attempt to get best of both worlds. Not terribly accurate.

[tedstryk]

I can't wait until the full set from this mission is on the ground and I can start building some super-res shots of the stuff on the horizon. BTW, this still feels like an MER mission. As long as it is digging the hole and we don't have full resolution color coverage for the whole 360 degrees, it seems like new goodies just keep showing up. By the way, perhaps I have missed something obvious, but why can't Phoenix downsample images and then transmit selected full resolution shots later a la MER? Is it a memory issue? I imagine it has to do with the fact that while SSI has a pancam CCD and it is the "new" mission to Mars, this is in many ways a mid-nineties spacecraft.

[djellison]

Is it a memory issue?

Yeah - Phoenix is pretty sucky for flash storage. They can't take half a full 360 in four filters at full res in a single sol and downlink over a week like MER can - there isn't room.

Doug

[ugordan]

I only found out today that the lossy compression used on SSI is not the wavelet-based ICER algoritam used on the rovers, but ordinary JPEG. A step backward, no doubt it's Pathfinder heritage. I'm fascinated by the engineering aspects of these things. The imagers on the MERs were very well documented (and accessible to ordinary folks). I wonder if more details about the detector bit depths, downsampling method to 8 bits (LUTs?) etc could be found.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/14803.gif - all goldish MLI on the inside

Ah, so it's not a processing artifact after all!

[tedstryk]

Oh my gosh. The RAM and flash memory combine to a whopping 74 megabytes. By comparison, the MER rovers have 256 megabytes of flash memory. Still small by today's standards, but a whole lot better. Of course, had it had its original CCDs, that would have been just fine. This is bringing back memories of my computer equipment in the late '90s.

[jmknapp]

Oh my gosh. The RAM and flash memory combine to a whopping 74 megabytes. By comparison, the MER rovers have 256 megabytes of flash memory.

On the other hand, being in the extreme north PHX has more exposure to the relay satellites MRO and ODY than does MER. The MERs get about 5 passes per sol with at least 10 degree elevation (MRO+ODY) while PHX gets about 16.