Q & A With Steve Squyres, Coming in September Options

[djellison]

As previously reported, there's a great lineup of speakers at the BAA out of London meeting on September 3rd - including MER Principle Investigator Steve Squyres.

Steve has kindly offered some of his time so that we can meet up and do a Q'n'A based on questions submitted by you lot.

Obviously - there will be loads and loads of questions you want to ask and only so much time in which to ask them - however - I'll do what I can to pick as many of the best as I can squeeze in in the time available.

There will be a write up here, obviously, and I will try and record it as an MP3 and post that here as well.

Steve's book 'Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet' is published next week - and a signed copy will be winging its way to the person submitting the best question! *

If you have questions you want me to pitch to Steve, then drop me an email to doug@rlproject.com with the subject SS Q&A

As a heads up - please take note of the other speakers at the BAA meeting - and if you have specific questions you'd like asked of them - I'll do my best to try and get them in after their presentations at the meeting. The last two ( Profs Greeley and Muller ) are on the Sunday and the Friday respectively, but I will be trying to get down to those presentations as well - but no promises.

-Prof. Carolyn Porco, Principal investigator, Cassini imaging system
-Prof. John Zarnecki, Principal investigator, Huygens surface science
-Prof. Mike A'Hearn, Principal Investigator, Deep Impact,
-Prof. Ron Greeley, Scientist on several planetary missions, Chairman of NASA & NAS Mars exploration panel
-Prof. Jan-Peter Muller, Scientist on Mars Express hi-resolution camera team, University College London.

Doug
* 'best' to be picked by SS and myself on the day

[edstrick]

I hate to be a bit complainy or something, but I keep wondering just why the Pancam near-infrared images are clearly not in good focus... as you step through filters to longer and longer wavelengths, the pictures get noticeably less and less sharp.

[helvick]

but I keep wondering just why the Pancam near-infrared images are clearly not in good focus...

This comment from the Bell document probably gives a hint:

The approach for such a panorama will be to acquire red filter images at full resolution in both eyes,along with green and blue filter images at reduced resolution (using compression and/or downsampling) in the left eye. Such a panorama provides morphologic and textural information at the highest possible resolution, ‘‘true color’’ information at somewhat lower resolution, and good stereo ranging of the full scene around the rover.

That's for full panoramas obviously but I think the same type of strategy is used for most imaging. The highest quality imaging is done with one filter, additional images are for geological science data\context\colorizing and don't need to have the same resolution so they are downsampled. I don't think it's wavelength dependant it's a planning decision that maximises the science data returned.