Pictures never taken..., ... but you wish they had been... Options

[Astro0]

Shaka: Here's an interesting challenge to Astro0's Photoshop skills: "Thu's Dream"
The haunting image of Oppy giving CPR to a frosty Phoenix!

Yeh, but Oppy didn't bring any 'jumper leads' with her.

[DDAVIS]

I wish that more low sun gray scale landscape photos were obtained with the navcams. The dramatic quality of significent shadows is well known to photogrophers of nature. How many great photos of terrestrial scenery, especially in deserts, are made with the sun near noon? And yet that is the lighting of the vast majority of the scenery captured by the rovers.
Unfortunately good color panoramas at low sun were impractical due to the apparently long intervals between different filtered photos which cause color fringing in shadows. I don't know what the minimum interval was for obtaining rgb exposures of a given area with Pancam, but grayscale wide angle views were captured in great abundance by the navcam. A time lapse sequence of some dozens of frames showing changing shadows would have been cool.

I would also have liked to have seen more weather photos, although apparently aiming blindly and repeatedly shooting upwards is generally unrewarding. Perhaps coordinating orbital observations of weather systems with the rover imaging team to aim the camera at, for instance, a known location of clouds toward the west at sunset might have resulted in nice color sequences, like the numerous narrow angle color cloud images obtained by Pathfinder. I placed here an impression of how the approaching dust storm may have appeared from Opportunitys location, but an attempt to take an actual panorama of the storm at the right time could have been rewarding. One can dream.

A rare example of the dramatic effects of low sun lighting seen by the 'Spirit' rover can be seen here:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/press/s.../20060501a.html


Don

[Decepticon]

Another category could be "Pictures made and then lost" - for example, didn`t Galileo have to ditch a whole Io flyby recording for some reason? (I could be wrong)

Are you referring to Orbit insertion? I think Galileo was to Observe Europa's South polar region and do a IO flyby 1st and only during primary mission.

[Stu]

I wish that more low sun gray scale landscape photos were obtained with the navcams....

I would also have liked to have seen more weather photos... Perhaps coordinating orbital observations of weather systems with the rover imaging team to aim the camera at, for instance, a known location of clouds toward the west at sunset might have resulted in nice color sequences... an attempt to take an actual panorama of the storm at the right time could have been rewarding.

Excellent post and excellent ideas, Don! No criticism of the pictures taken and shared AT ALL, but I often wonder what kind of beautiful images would be possible if the rovers were used a little more "creatively", such as in the ways you suggest. I know, science absolutely has to come first, and - cough - pretty pictures are way down the priority list, but I hope that if the rovers grind to a halt before dying and become static but still operating platforms, as opposed to suddenly going offline without warning, then they'll be used to take more artistic imagery, both for Outreach purposes and to create stunning images that will have a huge impact with the public. The image you highlighted was, I remember, used by several people here to create a truly breathtaking colourised image that is still one of my very favourites.

[RoverDriver]

I wish that more low sun gray scale landscape photos were obtained with the navcams. The dramatic quality of significent shadows is well known to photogrophers of nature. How many great photos of terrestrial scenery, especially in deserts, are made with the sun near noon? And yet that is the lighting of the vast majority of the scenery captured by the rovers.
Unfortunately good color panoramas at low sun were impractical due to the apparently long intervals between different filtered photos which cause color fringing in shadows. I don't know what the minimum interval was for obtaining rgb exposures of a given area with Pancam, but grayscale wide angle views were captured in great abundance by the navcam. A time lapse sequence of some dozens of frames showing changing shadows would have been cool.

I would also have liked to have seen more weather photos, although apparently aiming blindly and repeatedly shooting upwards is generally unrewarding. Perhaps coordinating orbital observations of weather systems with the rover imaging team to aim the camera at, for instance, a known location of clouds toward the west at sunset might have resulted in nice color sequences, like the numerous narrow angle color cloud images obtained by Pathfinder. I placed here an impression of how the approaching dust storm may have appeared from Opportunitys location, but an attempt to take an actual panorama of the storm at the right time could have been rewarding. One can dream.

A rare example of the dramatic effects of low sun lighting seen by the 'Spirit' rover can be seen here:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/press/s.../20060501a.html


Don

I agree 100%. Shadown not only enhance the aestetic quality of images but would also allow for a better understanding of the terrain configuration. Unfortunately, late in the afternoon we have the ODY pass and only during the better season can have enough uptime to do some post-ODY imaging. We have done it in special occasions, for example to evaluate the shadowing from Cape Verde at Duck Bay (MER-. This was done in preparation of the rover getting very near to an imposing wall. The other difficulty we sometimes have with low-sun imaging is glare when the camera is pointed near the sun azimuth and loss of detail in the hazcams due to the "opposition effect". This was very visible and a major hassle when leaving Duck Bay.

Paolo

[Paolo]

Another catagory could be "Pictures made and then lost" - for example, didn`t Galileo have to ditch a whole Io flyby recording for some reason? (I could be wrong)

Io pictures were lost (in the sense that they were not taken) to radiation glitches during I25, I31 and I33. Moreover, many pictures were lost during the final orbits due to a saturation problem of an op-amp of the CCD

[Thu]

Shaka: Here's an interesting challenge to Astro0's Photoshop skills: "Thu's Dream"
The haunting image of Oppy giving CPR to a frosty Phoenix!

Yeh, but Oppy didn't bring any 'jumper leads' with her.

That's hilarious , I wonder how does Spirit feel when she saw that CPR image

[RoverDriver]

I' m going to add my picture: the underside of the RF wheel on Spirit. By now it might look like this one
http://chris.pirillo.com/_photos/JetBlue%2...ident%20(4).jpg

Paolo

[Stu]

Some more thoughts on this here... don't want to post the whole thing on UMSF, too long, so read if you want to, don't if you don't!

[sci44]

That's hilarious , I wonder how does Spirit feel when she saw that CPR image

You must stop anthropomorphising spacecraft. They hate that!

[centsworth_II]

You must stop anthropomorphising spacecraft. They hate that!

I wonder if Spirit dreams of home... and of climbing hills.

[Chmee]

Are you referring to Orbit insertion? I think Galileo was to Observe Europa's South polar region and do a IO flyby 1st and only during primary mission.

Probably the greatest missed opportunity in spacecraft history would be when Galilieo was not present at Jupiter when comet Schumaker-Levy colided with it in 1994. (Galilieo was a few million miles away still). If Galilieo lauched as planned it would have been orbiting Jupiter when all the comet fragments hit. Could you imagine the photos that would have come out of that?! The pictures from Earth are pretty amazing themselves.

Unfortunety, techincal delays (and the Challenger accident) delayed launch and Galilieo did not arrive until 1995.

[mchan]

I wonder if Spirit dreams of home... and of climbing hills.

It is difficult to imagine Spirit dreaming of that particular hill as home. Nightmare, perhaps.

[centsworth_II]

It is difficult to imagine Spirit dreaming of that particular hill as home.

From sol 11 "Mars and Me" entry:
"One of the project's running jokes crops up at this meeting. It's common for people to hook up their laptops to one of the big projection screens, so we can all follow along.... When they're done, they close the application... and their desktop background image shows instead. Often, this is a picture of a beach or forest or something, and everyone will make a joke about how that's an amazing picture of Mars. It was funny for a while. (This still happens, five years on. Well, dammit, Jim, we're engineers, not comedians.)"

[sci44]

Probably the greatest missed opportunity in spacecraft history would be when Galilieo was not present at Jupiter when comet Schumaker-Levy colided with it in 1994.

Yes, although what's the betting that Galileo would have been round the other side of Jupiter's orbit at time of impact anyway?
Another "missed" set of photos - the extra pictures from the lost data channel from the Huygen's probe. (By the way, is the data definately not decodable from the carrier recieved from earth - has anyone had a second go at that data?)