MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[ormstont]

Ok...new images are up on the site! That strange-ish feature I'm talking about might just be normal Mars terrain (just the first time we've seen it with VMC). You can see it in the images on the gallery here: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/multimedia/vm...9.34/index.html. It's the band stretching across the bottom right of the disc - possibly an albedo feature? Always look forward to your comments!

[djellison]

What happened? Nothing in nearly a month.

[ormstont]

Hi! Sorry for the downtime for a while - we do have quite a few new images in the queue that are just waiting to be uploaded to the website. Daniel, who manages the website had a holiday in October and is clearing his other work before getting back to VMC.

Unfortunately VMC will be taking its winter holidays for 3 months from next week. This is due initially to the solar conjunction, where we shut down all payload ops on the spacecraft for a month. Then for the 2 months following that there are perfect optical conditions at our pericentre which means HRSC will be taking lots of images. With Mars far from earth though the bit rate is low so we'll be filling our downlink with data from the science instruments. As the conditions change though and the link margin improves VMC will be back with enthusiasm for its 2009 campaign. First up is our coming eclipse season, starting March 2009, which should give us "Crescent" conditions once again (for all those crescent fans out there!). Keep watching!!

[elakdawalla]

Thanks very much for the update. I do look forward to the return of crescent season!

I am sure you already know this, but if there is any "grunt work" to be done in whatever Daniel needs to do to prepare images for posting, I can speak for myself at least when I say that there are probably willing volunteers available here.

--Emily

[ormstont]

Thanks for the offer! I think we should be able to cover the prep work of getting the images online (we literally throw the raw results up), although in our 3 month break we may try and streamline the process.

What would be interesting though, and I think we'll try and publish something about this, is coming up with VMC's "Best of 2008". We created the "Best of 2007" (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/VMC/SEMZVSXIPIF_mg_1.html) just before we launched but would be great to open it up to the community to choose our "Best of 2008", probably highlighting any colour/animation/sharpened/post-processed works from the public gallery (do keep contributing to that)!

Definitely looking forward to crescent season too, hopefully we'll pick up some more cool cloud action. We'll also see with Flight Dynamics if we can update the pointing we use to track Mars, so it doesn't slide off the edge of the image. There's always fun new things to do on VMC (although I should concentrate on helping get MEX through conjunction first)!

[ormstont]

Ok...we're officially offline for the time being!! In addition to what's on the website I'd like to wish UMSF a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and hope you'll be back with us and VMC next year. Check out the website for details of what's coming in 2009 - hope it's going to be an exciting year. Also please send in your suggestions or submissions for best of 2008!

[ormstont]

Hi again! The Mars Express VMC is back! We've resumed imaging operations since the middle of February but have been working on a new website. I hope you'll all like the new and improved website, which we've moved to the ESA blog system. This gives us the ability to be more interactive, you can comment on new image sets or on posts by Daniel or I and we can respond right there.

Most exciting though is that this system allows us to use an automated image upload tool, so no more waiting for the images to be posted! After the images are captured by VMC they're stored in the spacecraft solid state mass memory and then wait for a slot to be dumped to Earth. Within a few minutes of them arriving at the ground station the software will pick them up and post them to the blog. Unfortunately waiting for the dump slot could be as long as a week but in some cases could be less than an hour - now we're in real webcam territory! That means too that you could be seeing images of Mars for the first time, before anyone on Earth has seen them!

So...I hope you enjoy, unfortunately the VMC schedule for April is only two observations but May will bring a packed schedule. Do stop by the new site, comment and say hello, and look at the latest batch of Mars crescent images!

[jaredGalen]

Wonderful!! And its great news about the new image handling and blogging.

Big improvement on the outreach that I think everyone hear will be delighted to see!

Nice one.

P.S... Can you put a link to the site in your signature?

[ormstont]

Glad you like it, I've updated my signature now, thanks for the idea!

[Juramike]

Hmmm. I am unable to get any of the MEX VMC Celestia scripts to run. After putting the .celx file into the 'scripts' folder and trying to run from Celestia, I get a fatal error that causes Celestia to crash.

For example, for the March 19th Celestia file (available here)
When I try to run it, the error states " [string " scripts/2009-03-19_19.25_19.30.celx"]:5: unexpected symbol near '/' "

I'm running Celestia version 1.5.1.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

[maschnitz]

For example, for the March 19th Celestia file (available here)
When I try to run it, the error states " [string " scripts/2009-03-19_19.25_19.30.celx"]:5: unexpected symbol near '/' "

I don't know Celestia per se, but I do know computer formats.

This file appears to have been "escaped" for some reason. Special characters have been prefixed with an escape character, '\'. Notice the instances of '\"' and '\\'. I really doubt Celestia wants it escaped in such a way. It's needlessly verbose for a script file.

Try opening the file in your favorite text editor, and doing a global search and replace, turning:
\" into "
\' into '
\\ into \

And any other escapes you might notice. Save that, and give it a shot.

[Juramike]

Thank you! That did the trick!!

-Mike

[Juramike]

I took the March 19th images and masked out the overexposed image portions to allow the cloud detail to come through. (Full details here)

Here is the before and after:


Using the corrected Celestia script (thanks, maschnitz!) to coordinate the image, it turns out that the image is centered high over the martian north pole, with the Phoenix Landing Site in twilight near the center of the terminator:


-Mike

[Juramike]

It is almost possible to correlate the processed MEX VMC image with a frame from the MARCI movie for March 16-22, 2009.
(MARCI movie is available here: http://www.msss.com/msss_images/2009/03/25/)

The lower portion of the MEX VMC Cloud Detail image matches up with contrast-enhanced image of the uppermost portion of the MARCI still from March 19,2009:


There is a swatch of a cloud band stretching SW to NE (yellow) bounded by two darker zones (blue arrows).

So the MEX VMC image complimented the released MARCI image for March 19th.

Cool!

-Mike

[remcook]

Are you sure there's not some Venus Express data in there? The swirly clouds look a lot like Venus to me.