MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[djellison]

I heard about this 24 hours ago, and couldn't believe it - this is EXACTLY what has been missing from ESA. MASSIVE kudos to the ESOC MEX flight ops team for doing it

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/VMC/index.html

The last time I wrote a post and hit 'submit' at UMSF with a smile this big on my face, was when Oppy successfully got out of Purgatory.

[ormstont]

So, looks like our other MEX instrument teams are working hard to find out more about our strange cloud - looks like we could be in for more too - they said that this is the season we'd be expecting these clouds on Mars (although the VMC cloud is larger and more pronounced than anything seen before!). Will keep you posted when I hear more!

For the crescent images - sorry that they're all really saturated - those problems were one of the reasons I've moved to doing the 4 exposure step cycle (even though it cuts down the number per observation of properly exposed images) you see on the current images. The nice thing about the saturated images are that we see the features in the night side, over the terminator (I know...excuses, excuses!!). I promise to try harder at the next crescent season! Of course - any suggestions on how best to set the exposures or timing of images let me know - you're the operators of this camera!

[ugordan]

I'd be interested in knowing what the difficulties are in adjusting exposure for a given observation. Is it the uncertainty of how bright Mars will be at certain phase angles?

While we're at the subject of exposures, knowing how long each raw image was exposed would be of additional help in processing.

An unrelated observation - it seems to me that if only we had a flatfield frame for the VMC we'd be able to get much better images out of it. A lot of the noise seems static on the detector.