Spirit retrospective, - a few details from my current project Options

[Phil Stooke]

I'm working on Spirit at the moment. I will post a few examples of things as I go.

Right now the important job is updating the contemporary route map by locating the stops on HiRISE images. The existing maps at JPL, for the early part of the mission, were plotted on MOC images with inferior resolution and lighting, so I find many locations were about 15 or 20 m out. So at every site I am making circular panoramas (examples later) for comparison with HiRISE. Here's a first example, a map of the route during the Primary Mission. I have added a few extra placenames from the MER Analyst's Notebook at PDS.

Phil

[john_s]

Gorgeous! Are these for a book?

John

[jasedm]

I like that a lot Phil - very nice.

There seems to be a trend in many space/astronomy magazine articles and books for over-doing the colour. If it is for a book, please leave it grayscale - it looks more crisp and authoritative imho.

I look forward to future posts on your progress.

[nprev]

VERY nice work, Phil!!!!

[Phil Stooke]

Hi John - it's for this book:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...mp;#entry181457


Phil

[MizarKey]

I wonder if they regret not going around Bonneville to the heat shield. Spirit could have easily made the trip and may have avoided the problem with the wheel that started around sol 125 when making the trek to the hills. Seeing this map reminded me of those heady early days when you had no idea how far they would take Spirit.

[djellison]

How would driving to the heatshield have avoided the wheel problem?

Giving the information available at the time, sprinting to the hills was clearly the right decision to make.

[ElkGroveDan]

Giving the information available at the time, sprinting to the hills was clearly the right decision to make.

Given the information we have today it was still the right decision to make.

I would also venture that the experience with Spirit's wheel allowed the team to understand the malfunction and take steps to avoid the same with Opportunity on her epic trek.

[centsworth_II]

And don't forget that Spirit made some fantastic discoveries because of that stuck wheel. Particularly the subsurface silica layer.

[PDP8E]

(1) Having Spirit driving to its crumbled heat-shield on Bonneville and the eventual wheel failure, are not related
(2) The heat-shield, while visually interesting to us (a man made object on mars!), was smashed up on the rocks and of no real value to the engineers. They could get the same results by dropping a copy over the desert in CA
(3) As we learned with OPPY, the heat-shield is a lingering source of volatiles that are not good for scientific instruments
(3) Scooting to the hills was the right exploration decision.

Here is Spririt's crumbled heat-shield (super res):
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=10115

[djellison]

(2) The heat-shield, while visually interesting to us (a man made object on mars!), was smashed up on the rocks and of no real value to the engineers. They could get the same results by dropping a copy over the desert in CA

Actually- that's not true. The engineers who looked at the Opportunity heatshield did get some value out of it. If it was of no real value to the engineers - then the geologists in charge would not have stopped to look at it at Meridiani.

[atomoid]

imho, the wreck of Oppy's heatshield was one of the most interesting stops between Endurance and Victoria. Engineers could analyse for the first time the performance of the ablative material, etc in situ, though i dont know what ever came out of that.. maybe just confirmation they didnt need to change a thing 'hmm yep, it did its job as expected!' not to mention lots of fascinating images of crumpled metal, freshly disturbed soil, remnants of destroyed spacecraft, broken springs and all so curiously tossed asunder manmade derelict debris in such an alien humanless landscape, unforgettable..

[climber]

Rob Manning recentely wrote about this here (i think) but I'm not able to find what he said. Anybody read this?

[centsworth_II]

Rob Manning recentely wrote about this here...

From these two posts in the same thread: Here and here.

"Indeed there was a lot of concern when we drove Opportunity to its heatshield after landing (at my and my team's behest). We wanted to learn more about the heatshield performance (we learned a lot!)."

"Unfortunately, while the rover was near the heatshield, apparently wind picked up some particulates that got onto the rear Hazcam lenses. It may have been a coincidence and it was only Mars dust but more probably it was char from the heatshield that the wind blew onto the lenses."

"In summary we concluded that the char depth of the heat shield material matched our predictions (yea!). We also learned that a piece of a mylar blanket that skirted the heat shield became a "flap" that induced some minor but very noticeable wiggles of the entry vehicle (capsule) during Opportunity's entry just before parachute deployment. The blanket was supposed to fully melt away during entry but we found that part of it did not (it was on Mars still attached to the crumpled heat shield). Its position and size matched our entry dynamic simulations for a flapping flap. Needless to say MSL does not have a blanket covering its heat shield (neither did Phoenix)."

[Phil Stooke]

Here's another example of recent work. Hank's Hollow. I may be revising the route a bit but this is tied to the images as much as possible.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

... and a comparison of project mapping and my new map a little west of West Spur. This is a slide for a presentation I'm giving here in London on Feb. 17th.

The orange line is the project map based on 'dead reckoning' with occasional ties to landscape features seen in MOC images. Dead reckoning includes knowing the intended direction and using the wheel turns to estimate distance. The ties to topography were necessarily approximate because of the limited resolution of MOC (how amazing it is to be saying that - grown men wept at the beauty of the MOC images at the time, now they are of limited resolution!) A few points found by feature matching are shown as crosses on or near the route.

My route is the black line. It follows the route quite well, but actual end of drive locations are often out by 15 to 30 m along the route. These locations are matched to individual boulders and I would stake what remains of my reputation on their accuracy... most of the time!

The square grid is at 100 m spacing.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Another little detail from long ago and far away...



Phil

[elakdawalla]

Speaking of Spirit retrospective, we (that is, the Society) are thinking about trying to gather Salley's MER Updates into an easier-to-access form, like maybe a PDF (or several PDFs; she's written several novels' worth of words about the MERs). But this would be a fair (by which I mean gargantuan) amount of work cutting and pasting. Would there be anyone here interested in donating time to such a project?

[Phil Stooke]

Right now those reports are spread out among lots of other pages and they take some tracking down. Maybe all you need is one page for each rover providing links to all the existing reports.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Time for another blast from ye olde past: Spirit at Low Ridge Haven.



Phil

[Phil Stooke]

A final blast from ye olde past at Spirit's site... I've pretty much finished the image part of Spirit's journey and I'm working on the sol-by-sol text. This is a close view of the main targets of study at Troy before the end of the mission. Much more information on target names and locations will be released soon and I will be adding to the existing maps where appropriate. Meanwhile mapping is beginning at Meridiani.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

One other goodie. On sol 620 Spirit was on the summit of Husband Hill, taking a big panorama. This subframe is looking due east with three horizons visible - the near rim of Thira crater, the far rim of Thira, and in the distance the rim of Gusev itself. And in front of Thira is a towering dust devil. We normally see these DD images with the sky brightened enough to reveal the DD on the ground, overexposing anything in the sky. Here (from the 16 bit data) is the full vertical extent (cropped by the top of the frame). I found it while making a full mosaic of the rim of Gusev.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

That last image was from a new study of the rim of Gusev from the pan shot at Everest (Husband Hill Absolute Summit) on sols 620-622. Here is the full panorama turned into a circle. The rim of Gusev has been subjected to an extreme contrast enhancement relative to the near horizon, resulting in artifacts in places. But I think the distant rim has never been seen so fully. Clearer views of small parts of it were obtained from West Spur, but this is the best look at the whole thing. The processing was done from the 16 bit images at PDS. I am working on an identification of features and will post it later, but I think the most interesting thing is the view of the large flat-topped mesas south of the rover, at the supposed Ma'adim Vallis delta, and the hills beyond which extend up the valley a bit inside the breached crater New Plymouth. Vertical exaggeration at the horizon is 5.5x.

Phil

[ngunn]

Very nice Phil!

As it happens I've recently been thinking back to some long ago discussion on who-knows-which thread about some even more distant horizon features that could be seen through a gap in the Gusev rim. Is that visible on this panorama? If so where, and if not where's the location? I would like to revisit the precise identity of what may have been the most distant features seen by either rover. I wasn't paying enough attention at the time, but I don't think it was nailed down as thoroughly as it could have been, or could be now with Google Earth Mars or James Canvin-type reverse polar plots, or pgrindrod inter-visibility charts.

[Phil Stooke]

I don't remember that. If it was seen before it should be seen here. Can anyone find that discussion?

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Sightlines plotted on a merge of THEMIS IR data (with inverted shading) and MOLA topography. This is a first attempt, but I may have to make some adjustments.

Phil

(EDIT - replaced original with an improved version)

[ngunn]

It looks like it's on that line you've drawn at about half past five. If that's correct there's not much doubt about the identification. The horizon is one smaller crater-width further away. But how far is that? How does the distance compare with the Miyamoto rim peaks ('Mule Ears') seen by Opportunity?

Find the discussion - now that's a challenge. I'll have a go.

[ngunn]

Phil, can you put a scale on that image?

[fredk]

There was some related discussion in this thread many many years ago...

[Phil Stooke]

"Phil, can you put a scale on that image?"

Now I have replaced the previous image with one with a scale!

Phil

[ngunn]

Thanks Phil and fredk. Unfortunately the links in the old thread no longer seem to work so I'm still not sure how thoroughly and securely distant horizon features were identified back then. First impression is that Spirit's visibility range probably exceeded Opportunity's Miyamoto sighting in several directions, though only by a few km. If she broke the 100km mark anywhere it was most likely to the S but it's not possible to tell without closer scrutiny of the terrain out there.

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, it's sad to go back and see all the things that have disappeared.

Phil

[djellison]

Imagehost, XS and others have all gone away or have a policy of deleting older content. It's a shame, but that's the risk you run with free hosting facilities.

[fredk]

If anyone's curious, here are a couple of the images from that old thread, resurrected from the cobwebby depths of my harddrive:


Those are the only Gusev rim related pics I kept from that thread.

It is a shame indeed about the hosting site. Even more so since these images were tiny - there was no reason not to put them on UMSF in the first place!

[ngunn]

Well rescued! There's all the information I was after right there - a useful complement/comparison with Phil's excellent summit pan.

[fredk]

So as far as seeing outside of Gusev, I've marked three locations on the view map:

We can clearly see the far rim of the smaller crater (New Plymouth?) at A. This map predicts that we should be able to see a bit farther to another smaller crater rim at B, but it's not clear to me whether we can see that in Phil's horizon pan or not.

I also wonder whether we can see some uncertain distance up Ma'adim Vallis to perhaps one of its walls, towards C. That would be somewhere around here on Phil's pan:

Unfortunately part of the Columbia Hills is in the way. But maybe there are pancam images that were taken from farther west (on approach to the summit) that would be unobstructed?

Phil: any chance you could post your original rectangular horizon pan at full res? Perhaps cropping out the foreground if the filesize is too big?

[Phil Stooke]

Will do when I get to the office on Monday.

Phil

[ngunn]

We can clearly see the far rim of the smaller crater (New Plymouth?) at A. This map predicts that we should be able to see a bit farther to another smaller crater rim at B, but it's not clear to me whether we can see that in Phil's horizon pan or not.

B would, I think, break 100km but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not actually visible. If I remember rightly pgrindrod's visibility maps neglected the curvature of Mars. He was mainly concerned with closer features so that was fair enough. There's no way of knowing whether this one does or not. It's worth a thorough look though.

C: The view down the valley is definitely worth exploring in detail. If the most distant point on the horizon lies in that direction it should be possible to pinpoint the location and distance with the information available.

[fredk]

There's no way of knowing whether this one does or not.

From the first post by erwin in that old thread:

I use 128 pixel/degrees data, cropped gusev area, sphericise the heights according to Mars diameter.

So it seems he did take curvature into account.

Also, he says he cropped on Gusev, so any distant far wall of the Vallis may be outside of his cropped region. So his rendering of the C region may not show a distant wall that's actually visible...

[Phil Stooke]

One other thing which I have not done yet... these images were part of the Everest panorama taken on sols 620-622, and it was multispectral. Some bands were subsampled images but three were full resolution. So it would be possible to take all three full res bands at 16 bit from PDS and stretch to optimize the distant features, and then merge them to increase signal. That might help reveal details on the distant rim.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

OK, here is a cropped version of my full horizon panorama. It's quite dirty, and got cleaned up quite a bit for the circular view. It really is quite hard to pull out that very faint detail.

Phil

[jasedm]

That's awesome!!

[Phil Stooke]

Ugliest pan ever!

Phil

[MoreInput]

Ugliest pan ever!

No, it is just one of the best panoramas ever seen on Mars, Thx for it!

[machi]

Cool, ugly panorama!

So many peaks everywhere!

[cbcnasa]

Amazing even if it is ugly

[Astro0]

Just a little side note...

Today would have marked Spirit's 3000th Sol on Mars had she still been operational

[fredk]

We also got Andromeda--it was barely detectable in the largest practical exposures.

I believe it was A/1941, night time opacity field A (aka the "diffuse sensitivity test").

(I hope Phil doesn't mind me using his thread to do some Spirit retrospection - this definitely doesn't belong in the Oppy thread where those quotes come from.)

Thanks for digging that up, Deimos. "Barely detectable" is a good description! With some effort I was able to squeeze the Andromeda Galaxy/M31 out of the 1941 pics. If anyone wants to try this at home, here are the details: I used these two frames:
2P298641880EFFB1E5P2731L1M1.JPG (frame 1)
2P298642075EFFB1E5P2731L1M1.JPG (frame 2)
I added 256 to the frame 2 values, then subtracted frame 1. The result was stretched and smoothed. (Strangely, the PDS RAD images show less detail than the jpl jpegs.)

The result is that most of the frame averages to neutral grey. Any real object (eg a star) will appear as a lighter-than-neutral-grey streak adjacent to a darker streak, which stands out very well. I've identified M31 in this crop:

It's clearly fuzzier than the stars, and it is exactly where it should be, as you can see from this flicker gif comparing the difference image with a star chart:

Extragalactic imaging from Mars!

[Phil Stooke]

It's not my thread! It belongs to all of us. Thanks for this - very nice.

Phil

[CosmicRocker]

Yes, very nice work, Fred. Thanks.

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a text file containing descriptions of Spirit's activities for every sol of the mission. It is just the data from the PDS Analyst's Notebook mission summary, but in a different file format, in case anyone may find it useful.

 spirit_activities_by_sol.txt ( 104.38K ) Number of downloads: 475



Phil

[vikingmars]

Thanks a lot Phil : yes very useful. I'll compare it with my own log

[Phil Stooke]

Looking back at our dear departed Spirit one more time...

This is an image of Phobos made by Spirit during the sol 675 eclipse ingress sequence. I collected six 16 bit frames from the PDS, stretched the contrast, enlarged each frame x3, sharpened it, stretched the contrast more for the part wholly on the disk, and combined them - in effect the super-resolution process. I don't recall seeing Stickney so clearly before from the surface.

Phil

[ElkGroveDan]

Amazing Phil. Never would have thought you could do this with MER photos.

[PDP8E]

Phil, that is incredible!, thanks

[vikingmars]

.../... I don't recall seeing Stickney so clearly before from the surface. Phil

WOW ! WOW ! WOW ! Phil you did a great "premiere" (as usual). Lots of congratulations !

Thanks a lot for sharing this fantastic image with us. Now, just imagine what we could do with the Mastcam 100...

[RoverDriver]

wow, just wow. I can't imagine what Phil would do as a rover driver!

Paolo

[djellison]

I have concerns over what he might attempt with respect to +Z motion

[brellis]

Gorgeous, Phil - it needs to be on the cover of a Mars novel

[Phil Stooke]

You write it, I'll provide the cover art!

Phil

[JohnVV]

A synthetically bumped up copy of Phobos

[Bill Harris]

More and more detail!! I tried to find "a similar" image of Phobos taken by a Mars orbiter, but no luck. But I wonder if one could use Celestia (which I don't have) to generate a modeled view of Phobos from this perspective?

--Bill

[Phil Stooke]

This is the same viewing angle but different lighting - it's MRO's CRISM observation of Phobos.

Phil

[Ant103]

This is just GREAT Phil, I love this kind of work

[Phil Stooke]

And I love your work!

Phil

[RoverDriver]

This is the same viewing angle but different lighting - it's MRO's CRISM observation of Phobos.
...

Wow, just wow. I wonder if HiRISE was ever pointed at anything that was not Mars, and if so, what was imaged.

Paolo

[Bill Harris]

That is what I ran into-- "same viewing angle but different lighting" in many cases. The viewing angle is fairly fixed-- being the "middle of the subarean hemisphere" (within bounds of nutation), with the lighting being the variable...

--Bill

[Phil Stooke]

"I wonder if HiRISE was ever pointed at anything that was not Mars"

Paolo, there are spectacular images of Phobos and Deimos from HiRISE.

Phil

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/phobos.php

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/deimos.php

[Phil Stooke]

And - this is Mars Express - it's from a sequence showing Phobos and Deimos in the same frame, not quite the same view but close, with opposite lighting.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda.../2009/2250.html

Phil

[Ant103]

About PDS imagery, I think I forget to show you this late afternoon Navcam panorama taken at Sol 1984. I've made this about 1 year ago.

[Phil Stooke]

Spectacular! I love those oblique lighting images.

Phil

[vikingmars]

About PDS imagery, I think I forget to show you this late afternoon Navcam panorama taken at Sol 1984. I've made this about 1 year ago.

Congratulations Ant103 ! Beautiful work indeed
Yes : images taken with loooong shadows are always very beautiful...
As a reminder, here is the triplet I made end of 2010, carefully extracting colors from the images from the Calypso pan and merging them with the images taken on Sols 2001 to 2003.

Explanations are found at : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=169422
Enjoy also