Dust Devils of the '07 season Options

[Tesheiner]

I thought it would be better to have a separate thread to follow this season's DDs and use the old "First Dust Devil this season - any bets" thread only for the bet itself.

Mods, if you think that's not appropriate please just delete this post/thread.

[djellison]

I think 'this' season needed editing as 'this' season could be any season - so I've changed that bit

[slinted]

The sol 1120 DD seemed like a good time to 'dust' off my old scripts:

B/W enhanced (3.5 meg)

false color enhanced

It's a nice tall one too, all the way up to the top of the frame towards the beginning of the sequence. This one also shows a good view of some sizable 'blobs' of dust being lofted up as it travels. It is especially nice seeing a dust devil right at the start of the movie, when we get the shorter lag between frames of the movie.

[dilo]

Excellent work, Slinted... and beautiful DD! I do not undertstand why Spirit didn't decided to continue the 3sec temporal samplingin the last frames (when DD disappear), maybe we will receive more frames later...

[CosmicRocker]

Very nice... Does the image sequence with 3 second intervals mean that this DD was recognized and imaged by the new software routine? Imagine capturing a swarm of DDs, like the sol 568 swarm, with a frame every 3 seconds.

[slinted]

Dr. Lemmon just put up a great explanation of what limits the timing of one of these 'fast' movies on his site:

New, sol 1120: See below for the best dust devil movie of the young season on sol 1120. Easily beats the 1086 and 1115 movies. It gives a good sense of the life cycle of a dust devil. The first 33 sec are rapid fire (3 sec/frame), then the pace slows so that almost 7 minutes are seen. The frame rate changes when the imaging buffer fills up. At first, the frame rate is set by the transfer time from the camera to the electronics (and we speed that up by only transfering 25% of an image). Then, the buffer is full and a new image can only be taken when all processing (JPEG) is done on a previous image. When the buffer fills is a function of what the spacecraft has been doing (it might start with some Pancam being processed for instance). In this case, Spirit was going as fast as she could.

CosmicRocker: While this was great timing, to catch one right from the start of the fast sequence, I don't know if that is an indication of the new software being used yet. I think we'll know the software when we see it (I'm expecting something that looks significantly different than the traditional DD movie sequences).

[CosmicRocker]

There appears to be a DD captured in a rear hazcam from sol 1141. Look on the horizon a bit left of center, just right of the far hills.

[Ant103]

Yes CosmicRocker, you're right .

[fredk]

A change in a big part of the sky, on the left side of these frames:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...6MP1561L0M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...6MP1561L0M1.JPG
If that's a dust devil, it's either really close or really big.

[CosmicRocker]

I forgot to mention it, but several DDs were captured in three navcam EFFs on sol 1147.

[Pando]

There were some nice dust devils on Sol 1147:



http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/navcam/2007-03-26/

Edit: CR - timing is everything....

[CosmicRocker]

Considering the fact that the images came down several days ago, it's quite a coincidence that we both thought about them at the same time.

It sure would be nice to see these DDs in a HiRise image. I've been wondering...As the season heat up, would there be any value in doing coordinated imaging with both HiRise and Spirit observing at the same time?

[hortonheardawho]

17 frame 1/2 size sol 1149 dust devil animation here.

It looks like it came very close to Spirit. Notice the traveling "shadow"(?) and the darkening at the end.

The differences were stretched 32X

[ustrax]

Thanks Horton!
That's very impressive!

[slinted]

Good catch Horton. Those features are very faint, much fainter than any of the major dust devils last season, but this may have just been bad timing. The shadows on the ground approaching the hills look legit, showing up in 5 separate frames. So it may well have been more active before we see it enter the frame, lofting and carrying a substantial dust cloud along with it.

I'm fairly sure the darkening of the last few frames is an artifact of stretching the 'fast' movie sequences. All the 3-sec-per-frame movies show that same darkening of the final few frames, probably because the noise along the borders of the image changes the stretching done to the raws.