MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[tedstryk]

Wow, 64 images! amazing!

[elakdawalla]

Repetitive work is my friend I spend what little kid-less time I have thinking about how to develop the workflow, then while kids are around and are almost entirely distracting me I can perform a repetitive task with almost no brain cells focused on the problem.

[tedstryk]

Good, because repetitive work is my enemy. I would have gotten bogged down in the idiosyncrasies of individual images and never finished.

[djellison]

09_352 (Dec 18th) Low Flyover Mosaic - GREAT sequencing boys, I think there's possibly a better flatfield to be made out of this as well!

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[djellison]

09_349 as well...

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[djellison]

And a second set from Dec 15th

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[ugordan]

I think there's possibly a better flatfield to be made out of this as well!

Definitely more varied material to work with than usual, will have to force myself to attempt improving the flatfield one of these days.

[Juramike]

Composite of Valles Marineris and Argyre Planitia (and all the cool-o stuff in between) from December 23, 2009 MEX-VMC images:



Full resolution and detailed processing methods here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4230483496/

-Mike

[Juramike]

Mars Express, baby!

Image Capture at Mars: January 11, 2010 at 01:43 UTC
Image Arrival on Earth & Post to MEX-VMC Blog: January 11, 2010 04:11 UTC
Image processed and posted to Flickr: January 12, 2010 01:20:53 UTC

[Juramike]

We got an opportunity to do a low-altitude limb pass so caught quite a few shots of the planet limb and there appear to be some very interesting clouds on these images.

Nice impressive detail of the upper atmosphere clouds!



This is Image 57 with the limb masked out and Image 58 underneath it. Very little additional color balancing was done. Processing details here.

[ugordan]

Very cool stuff, Mike!

[H. Griebel]

Dear VMC comunity,
My name is Hannes Griebel and I work on the Mars Express Flight Control team. I am a spacecraft engineer and mission planner. Your excellent work has inspired me to spend some free time of my own processing VMC images. So far my image composites are only uploaded to my facebook account, as I have no flickr account (yet).

To improve things, I have recently taken an image north of Alba Mons in an attempt to create a flat fielding correction of the brightness variation across VMC images.
The reason why I chose this region is because it has a comparatively high albedo and is relatively smooth and featureless. Plus, a close-range VMC observation was scheduled anyway for northwest of Alba M. on January 14th, so it required no extra effort to squeeze the shot in. The relevant images are the first 17 of the set acquired on that day.

A calibration base file was chosen, which I converted into a grayscale and removed noise through averaging.
The gray-scale was then used to flat-field the raw VMC images, even before running the latest vmc2rgb. This procedure yielded the best results. Flatfielding an image after vmc2rgb processing did not yield quite as nice results, but also showed an improvement.

Image 10-014_17.42.41_VMC_Img_No_5.png yielded the best results of all calibration shots. One disadvantage of the image is that due to the spacecraft's inertial pointing mode, a tiny bit of limb is visible in the upper right hand corner, but from all tested shots it delivered the best results. An attempt to stack all calibration exposures with RegiStax did not yield better results, but since there is a lot more that can be done here and my knowledge in the field is limited, I leave it to someone else to optimize the brightness correction flat field. I believe it can get a lot better!

Here is my preliminary calibration flat field:


Here is an "unmolested" VMC raw image (only saved as PNG so it can be shown here). It's no.27 from the set acquired on December 29th, 2010:


Here is the image after processing as described:


And this is the image after converting the so corrected RAW with vmc2rgb into a png:


I'd be delighted to hear your opinion on the calibration shot and whether it works for you as well. If someone manages to provide a better version, I'd be naturally very happy to see it, as I am no image processing expert and can only marvel at the outstanding work published in this forum. Also, the time I have to spare for such things is unfortunately very limited. So I am certain that someone can do a much better job.

Until then, feel free to use my calibration image provided here at your leasure. It is in no way connected to my professional work in interplanetary space flight.

Have fun and keep it up! Your work is brilliant and much appreciated here at ESOC.
Hannes.

[elakdawalla]

Thank you Hannes!!!

[H. Griebel]

Following up on my last, here is an image composition of the Tharsis region, made from two recent observations. Map projection is cylindrical and annotated.
The individual images were processed as described in my earlier post. The so obtained pngs were then treated to noise removal by averaging, contrast enhanced, saturation enhanced and unsharpened. The images were then map projected and assembled. This was done manually since I do not have a software to do that for me (hence the brightness variations across the composite).

Here is the result:


Have fun,
Hannes.

[H. Griebel]

Here comes the globe projection of the same composite.

Note that Tharsis has a very high albedo and a very "shiny" surface. Check out the specular reflection near Alba Mons.

The horizon by the way doe not match because the first series of pictures shows the terminator, which merges with the limb right in that frame.



The globe was obtained from Google Earth in Mars mode and shows MOLA images. The context map with ground tracks was obtained from a special ESA mission planning tool referred to as MAPPs and also shows a MOLA elevation map. MAPPs is not available to the general public. It is a specialized mission planning tool for Mars Express.

Cheers,
Hannes.