MSL landing site: Gale Crater Options

[elakdawalla]

Gale Crater on target to become next Mars landing site

[Phil Stooke]

This is a full resolution - but quite compressed - CTX mosaic of the ellipse area.

Phil

[jmknapp]

This is a full resolution - but quite compressed - CTX mosaic of the ellipse area.

Phil

Is an image available at full CTX resolution but of the entire Gale Crater? How about HiRISE resolution of the ellipse or larger area? I'm thinking of something suitable for printing very large.

[RoverDriver]

Is an image available at full CTX resolution but of the entire Gale Crater? How about HiRISE resolution of the ellipse or larger area? I'm thinking of something suitable for printing very large.

These are all the HiRISE images that I have analyzed for traversability.

If you go to the HiRISE server that lists all the DTMs http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/dtm/ you can download the DTMs and orthophotos for both "eyes". I stitched them together pretty easily just applying a horizontal and vertical offset. My 1mpp mosaic is about 30000x46250 pixels. Managing the mosaic at .25mpp proved to be a bit cumbersome.

ESP_011562_1755
ESP_012551_1750
ESP_018854_1755
ESP_019698_1750
ESP_023957_1755
ESP_024102_1755
ESP_024102_175N
ESP_024234_1755
PSP_001488_1750
PSP_009294_1750
PSP_009505_1755
PSP_009716_1755
PSP_010573_1755

There are some additional HiRISE mono images but I don't have a full list but I can find out if anyone is interested.

Paolo

[jmknapp]

These are all the HiRISE images that I have analyzed for traversability.

Thanks. One thing:

ESP_024102_175N

That's a typo I guess?

Also, I'm curious to know about the software you use for stitching these huge images together. Seems like Photoshop CS5 chokes on the largest ones, at least on my machine.

[RoverDriver]

Thanks. One thing:



That's a typo I guess?

No, it is not a typo. That image has been split in two parts when generating the DEM. For whatever reason they could not generate a single set of orthophotos to compute range data. I decided to call the upper part with the suffix N for North. If you are downloading and analyzing the images you can safely remove this from your list.

Also, I'm curious to know about the software you use for stitching these huge images together. Seems like Photoshop CS5 chokes on the largest ones, at least on my machine.

I rolled my own. All code for traversability analysis (about 15,000 lines of code) has been developed in house. The stitching was tricky because some of the resulting mosaics had files larger than 4GB. I haven't tried, but maybe the netpbm tools, imagemagick or ImageJ can handle this task.

Paolo

[jmknapp]

I rolled my own. All code for traversability analysis (about 15,000 lines of code) has been developed in house. The stitching was tricky because some of the resulting mosaics had files larger than 4GB. I haven't tried, but maybe the netpbm tools, imagemagick or ImageJ can handle this task.

Both ImageMagick on a Linux machine with 4GB and Photoshop on a Windows machine with 8GB fail to read the 0.25 mpp JP2 files. They can read the 1 mpp JP2 files though, which are typically like 14000x27000 pixels. Should be sufficient for hacking around. But wow, never really grokked how huge those HiRISE images are.

[RoverDriver]

Both ImageMagick on a Linux machine with 4GB and Photoshop on a Windows machine with 8GB fail to read the 0.25 mpp JP2 files. They can read the 1 mpp JP2 files though, which are typically like 14000x27000 pixels. Should be sufficient for hacking around. But wow, never really grokked how huge those HiRISE images are.

Ah, for the Jpeg2000 images I use the Kakadu software. I convert it to PGM then work from there. kdu_expand can expand at different resolutions, I believe you can crop as well. Yes the images are BIG. PM me if you need help with kdu_expand.

Paolo

[jmknapp]

Ah, for the Jpeg2000 images I use the Kakadu software. I convert it to PGM then work from there. kdu_expand can expand at different resolutions, I believe you can crop as well. Yes the images are BIG. PM me if you need help with kdu_expand.

Thanks for that tip--I see that Kakadu is fairly high-priced software but they provide "demo" packages for free with some subset of the capabilities & the Linux demo version at least has the kdu_expand command-line tool. Unfortunately for me they only provide 64-bit executables & my Linux box is 32-bit & so would have to upgrade before I can use it.

It would be fun to see a print of just one of the highest-resolution HiRISE strips, for example one of the 1 mpp files is about 7800x22000 pixels, so I assume the 0.25 mpp files would be 4x that, like 31000x88000. My printer is about 600 dpi I think, so that would be about a 4 foot by 12 foot poster! There's a nice free program called PosteRazor for printing out tiles of a large poster for trimming and pasting together, but as in this case it would be over 60 legal size sheets, I have to say it's not going to happen.