Pathfinder site, for comparison with HIRISE Options

[djellison]

Not full res by the way....I downsized it about 50%

Doug

[djellison]

Best thing I could find to overlay it one of these...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00752.jpg

(anim gif attached)

Doug

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[Guest_Myran_*]

Thank you PDP8E.

And now lets see for those two harder to find ones, but that we might have a realistic chanse of finding. The polar lander and beagle. But we wont have the advantage of surface images to guide us right there. But if found would at least give some hint of what actually happened to them.

[jamescanvin]

Comparing the jpgs released by NASA with the jp2 from HiROC.



There is quite a difference, particularly in the apparent angle the two 'ramps' make with each other. I don't think that the jpegs are of PSP_001890_1995 but of another image (to form a stereo pair).

James.

[djellison]

Not sure if it really adds anything - but worth a go anyway.

Doug

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[tim53]

I don't know if it's common knowledge yet, but for those of you having trouble displaying these ginormous JPEG2000 images, there's a great viewer called "Expressview" by LizardTech that you can download for free. I know it's available for Mac OS X (where I hang out), but I think it's also available for PCs.

There's supposed to also be a JPEG2000 plugin for Photoshop CS2, but I don't have it.

-Tim.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Tim, given that we now know the precise location of three martian landers in cartographic space, and given that we already know their position in inertial space from radio tracking, how much of an improvement will there be in the Mars control net?

[elakdawalla]

B)-->

Could somebody please post a crop of those "twin peaks" in full resolution?
[/quote]
Here is the area around the lander including the "twin peaks" at full resolution, JPEG format, about 8 MB. I was going to do some other segments but my computer is huffing and puffing on these, and I just don't have the time to sit and wait for them to export...I tried storing the 800 MB file on a networked hard drive rather than my laptop and OpenEV runs nightmarishly slow that way.

http://filicio.us/tpss3/files/12366/pathfi...anding_area.jpg

--Emily

--------------------

My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.

[nprev]

Not sure if it really adds anything - but worth a go anyway.

Doug

Actually, it did, Doug.

I hate to come off as a heretic, but I have to wonder if Sojourner has actually been spotted. Doug's image seems to show a dark area immediately "south" of the lander that looks a lot like the soil churned up by the rover. If this is obvious (and correct), then why isn't Sojourner?

Pure speculation: Is the "airbag reflection" @ 9 o'clock immediately next to the lander actually the rover? Conversely, at 3 o'clock there's a light spot within the shadow of the lander which might also be Sojourner. (Disclaimer: I can't visualize the landing bag geometry, so this may well be completely off-base).

(Posted completely in the time-honored tradition of scientific skepticism... )

[ElkGroveDan]

Now that we see the location of the backshell, chute and heat shield segments does anyone want to make a case for a likely touchdown location and/or bounce path?

Surely there are outer parameters (and a direction of motion) that these events must fall within based on the final locations of the EDL debris.

Tim? Doug?

[tim53]

Tim, given that we now know the precise location of three martian landers in cartographic space, and given that we already know their position in inertial space from radio tracking, how much of an improvement will there be in the Mars control net?

Pretty much all of the improvement in the control net, and tying the geography (images) to it has come from all that MOLA data. It's such a reliable dataset that I've used it in all my "new" basemaps to register the images to in locating the landing sites.

I will have to check, but I think the lat/lons I came up with agree with those derived by the MOLA team to within a few thousandths of a degree, which is somewhat reassuring...

-Tim.

[tim53]

Actually, it did, Doug.

I hate to come off as a heretic, but I have to wonder if Sojourner has actually been spotted. Doug's image seems to show a dark area immediately "south" of the lander that looks a lot like the soil churned up by the rover. If this is obvious (and correct), then why isn't Sojourner?

Pure speculation: Is the "airbag reflection" @ 9 o'clock immediately next to the lander actually the rover? Conversely, at 3 o'clock there's a light spot within the shadow of the lander which might also be Sojourner. (Disclaimer: I can't visualize the landing bag geometry, so this may well be completely off-base).

(Posted completely in the time-honored tradition of scientific skepticism... )

I'm not quite sure I see what you're referring to. I don't see anything in the image to suggest that any of the known disturbed soil surfaces are still dark.

If you look at the gallery pan, at the rover petal, you'll see that the protruding portion of airbag material is shiny, not just white. I think this is glinting in the HiRISE view. Also, the lander's solar panels are indistinct from the surrounding soil in the red (at least), so I suspect Sojourner's is as well. If so, all we may be seeing is its shadow.

It's certainly possible (and intriguing) that it isn't Sojourner there, and that spot is just a fortuitous lighting effect on the small rocks and soil surfaces there in the gallery pan, but it doesn't look remarkable in any othr way from the ground view.

I've looked pretty far afield of the lander for anything like a snail trail with a "rock" at the end, and haven't found anything.

-Tim.

[tuvas]

There is quite a difference, particularly in the apparent angle the two 'ramps' make with each other. I don't think that the jpegs are of PSP_001890_1995 but of another image (to form a stereo pair).

James.

So far as I know, there hasn't been another picture taken to complete the stereo, but it could be a geographic projection or something similar to that... I did a quick check, and unless the new image didn't have the word pathfinder in the description, it hasn't been taken. So I'd bet it has something to do with geometric projections or something. It could also be an affect of JPG compression. Which of the two was the HiRISE JP2?

[jamescanvin]

jpg on the left, jp2 on the right.

That's what I thought at first, but they are very different and it looks for all the world like the jp2 is taken from directly above and the jpg from somewhat side on, making the two ramps not appear antiparallel. I'm gonna take some convincing that those aren't two separate images from different angles!

One question: When can we expect colour?

James

[djellison]

Surely there are outer parameters (and a direction of motion) that these events must fall within based on the final locations of the EDL debris.

Well - First bounce, Lander and Backshell tend to form a fairly large triangle of several hundred metres on a side. If there were a little red graph of Pathfinder bounces in the way we saw one for MERA and B, then one could overlay - but I dont' recall anything like that.

Unfortunately, I don't have the brains to reconstruct one from the PDS EDL data in the Atmospheres node.


nprev - what you're seing, imho, is a bit of a dark patch which is the resolving of a few cobbley sized rocks. The combination of a bright part and a dark part ( i.e. something with relief to it ) in a space where the pans tell us there is nothing that size there.....it's fairly convincing.


I'm fairly convinced there's two obs as well James - I really don't think that's a projection issue - it's a different picture.

Doug