Presumably we will see a HIRISE image of the Pathfinder site at some point, so I am posting a polar view of the site here for comparison. I started with the Presidential Panorama. There was a slight mis-match between the ends of the pan - as if it had been slightly cropped for posting - which I can't fix, but it doesn't do too much damage to the polar view.
Phil
(PS - no, I can't really spare the time for this but you know how it is)
That's a bit freaky, I was thinking "hmm - Pathfinder polar....I'll do that when I've had dinner" about 2 hrs ago.
Also interesting...
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02652
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01238
And especially
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00828
and
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01150
Doug
How much bigger is Pathfinder than one of the MER's? Also, the large rock, Yogi, is even visible in the high resolution MOC images, so it should look amazing to HiRISE.
The white grid on that image is 4m squares - and the lander would probably just about fit inside one, with the airbags poking out the sides of it. 15 to 20 HiRISE pixels.
Doug
http://img141.imageshack.us/my.php?image=24744478608d265fc0aoqa6.jpg
I have posted it before, but this is a Sojourner polar from Sol 76. If it didn't move much after the lander died, it would be nearby.
Am I right in thinking that the current state of knowledge about the location is still reflected by this press release?
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/09/
Yes, except that I prefer this slight adjustment, which I think gives a better match to the North Knob and other features.
Phil
I was 18 at the time of the Pathfinder mission. I vividly remember waiting hours to download its "huge" mosaics via my 14.4 modem.
I was 18, got up early to watch some coverage on BBC 2 here in the UK, and then went to the LIbrary to download the early pans onto a floppy disk, take them home, and print them out on a 24 pin B'n'W dot matrix . Then, on a P60 (possibly with a 133MMX overdrive chip, can't remember) - trying to better line up the frames in the mosaics that were released...without much luck. I thikn that was the genesis of my image editing obsession.
Doug
Well, I guess this is the next test, Pathfinder's site.
At the top of this thread is my polar panorama of the MPFD site. Then in post 8 I show the object identified by MSSS as the lander, in their press release. That's the point indicated by the convergence of the white lines. My best guess is just a few pixels from that again, a small correction based on the polar pan and azimuths to a few surrounding features.
This story also starts with Tim Parker, who (as Matt Golombek told me) spotted the Twin Peaks on the WSW horizon in the first few frames downlinked on landing day and recognized them from Viking images of the landing ellipse. Based on that identification he predicted that a crater rim would appear on the southeastern horizon when they got more images down, and sure enough there it was. Azimuths to distant hills and small details seen on the rim of that crater confirmed the match.
Phil
And they're all OVER the place
Personally - my pin is near the fwd egress aid
Doug
Here's the comparison. I had not noticed their change before - thanks, Tim.
Phil
With Pathfinder being bigger than the rovers... i'm surprised MGS hasn't been able to provide a definitive location yet.
Folks:
Here's my last pre-HiRISE plot of the location of MPF in MOC image R0501414. Slightly brighter dot at end of yellow line is the lander.
MSSS' January 2000 release had it right, but they changed their "best estimate" locations in the 2004 and 2005 releases.
I've searched until I'm nearly blind for anything that might be shouting "parachute" or "backshell", but I think the topography at this site is just too rough to identify them at MOC resolution.
-Tim.
Whats this? Image processing artefacts a hair on the lens or rover tracks?
I like that location, Tim. I have labelled a few features seen in my circular pan (top of thread) - the long drifts north and east of the lander, and the big dark rock north of the lander on one of those drifts. A ridge extending off towards the SE shows up on mission topo maps, if I remember correctly.
Just to be ornery, and based on these few matches, I'll pick a neighboring little spot to be the lander and call your object Yogi...
Phil
Regarding the final position of Sojourner. The rover was designed to circle the lander if communications were broken with the lander. But lander communications with Earth were lost first....isn't it possible that the lander was still functioning and communicating with the rover for some time after that happened? If so, Sojourner "might" be in the same spot it was last seen in.
awwww poor thing lol. Hopefully we'll find out soon.
My money is on the chipmunks having secured the sojourner...http://mars-news.de/life/mpf-anomalies.html
Pathfinder Overhead shot is up on the HIRISE site
http://hirise-test.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/details/cut/MPF_parts_2.jpg
cheers!
Twin peaks is suprisingly a bit "hmm - where'd all those features go?"
Doug
Question: How accurate was the analysis based on the MOC cPROTO images? (http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/09/, http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/04/)
Has anybody downloaded that full res .jp2 image of Pathfinder site?
Before this (really unnecessary) site update at least see how big is that file...now for some reason that information is not available...
Could somebody please post a crop of those "twin peaks" in full resolution?
Why don't the solar panels show up at all? Too much dust?
See the old style page http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/PSP_001890_1995 it's 849Mb.
For Twin Peaks see Doug's post above (39)
James
Not full res by the way....I downsized it about 50%
Doug
Best thing I could find to overlay it one of these...
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00752.jpg
(anim gif attached)
Doug
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.
Comparing the jpgs released by NASA with the jp2 from HiROC.
Not sure if it really adds anything - but worth a go anyway.
Doug
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.
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?
B)-->
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?
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
Twin Peaks, Backshell & Parachute, MPF itself -100% crop. (~80% jpeg)
http://www.awalkonmars.com/PSP_001890_1995_RED_crop100per.jpg
Nico
edit: I just noticed Emily had already provided a somewhat larger crop on the previous page in this thread.
edit2: just for fun, another try at a stereo, based on James' and Doug's efforts.
No - there really is a big bit of airbag material - with exposed foil etc - just there.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81220_full.jpg
See the glare it produces.
See the foil here..
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81957_full.jpg
Sojourner is never going to be obvious - it's barely at the resolving power of HiRISE and is going to be a very similar colour to the terrain...much like Spirit is today
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/images/True/Sol1045A_P2589_1_True_RAD.jpg
What we DO see with the HiRISE images is some rocks that appear where we expect them to - and then one about Sojourner that is where we don't expect one, in a place where it's entirely possible Sojourner could have driven to.
The sequence was never onboard to actually circle the lander ( as I used to think ) but infact to return to the lander but simulatanious remain outside a keep-out zone. She would probably (given enough time ) have tried to go around the lander anti-clockwise as a result of that. However - she wouldn't have got too close to the lander as the lasers would/should have stopped that happening.
There's no OBVIOUS sign of Sojourner - but that object that does look out of place - and in a spot that is easy to imagine Sojourner getting to - it's the only real candidate if the old girl stayed 'local'
Doug
I'm confused, can someone point to the last known position of the little rover?
If you look at this one..
http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/details/cut/MPFtopo_HiRISE_annot.jpg
Sojourner was backed up to the rock called Chimp - centered on about -1X, -10Y on that graph.
Doug
IIRC, the analysis of the Ares Vallis site and the rocks found in the vicinity of the lander were found to be consistent with transportation and deposition of large rocks via catastrophic flood events. At larger scales, the Ares Vallis region certainly looks to have been the site of catastrophic outflow flooding, though it must have happened a long time ago.
However, it interests me a great deal how MRO reveals that the rocks in the "Rock Garden" seem to be defined be the rim of one of the many, many linearally-alined elongated depressions that make up the terrain in the area. And that a majority of large rocks visible in the MRO image are alined along the rims of these depressions.
If many to most of the rocks in the area were washed there via catastrophic floods, why should they appear preferentially along rim crests? From above, a majority of these "rock gardens" seem to have been the rims of the original depressions, which have since been eroded away to leave blocks of the materials that made up the rims.
Unless the *entire* surface we see here was laid down by catastrophic floods, down to a depth of several meters, then it seems to me that the rims of depressions in the ground ought to be made of the materials that pre-dated the floods. Which means that the surface that was flooded was already made up of rocks with a seemingly wide variety of types and formations.
So, by the process of elimination, we seem to have two different possibilities: either the entire surface at Ares Vallis (and, by extension, at other catastrophic outflow channels on Mars) is made up of rocks and fines deposited there by the flooding event(s), or the original terrain that was scoured down to what we see today was already composed of all different types of rocks, from frothy and andesitic lavas to sedimentary and conglomerate rocks.
Interesting...
-the other Doug
Replying to dvandorn,
Another possibility is that the old water-deposited stuff (from events more like giant mudflows than rivers, and some espouse a glacial origin as well) has subsequently been peppered with many small impacts, and the blocks are really just ejecta. I never believed the identification of imbrication in these rocks. So I think Rock Garden is a small blocky crater rim.
Phil
I found a Sojourner route map:
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/roverview/table.html
And here it is a full annotated panorama (from same site above).
Pathfinder was killed by battery failure. They tried to get it to run directly off the solar panels (rather than from the solar panels to the battery), so that it could at least work during the day, but it didn't work. When Viking 2 died, it was similar - in this case, the RTG was still putting out power, but the battery failed. Power went from the RTG to the battery to the spacecraft, and attempts to run directly off the RTG failed. If you look at pathfinder's pictures of the solar panels taken just before it failed, they still look clean. BTW, that pan has some labels, although some features, like mini-matterhorn, located at the rightmost part of the pan, next to the edge of the airbag, are not listed.
Which bit do you think is sojourner?
Doug
BTW: why is the lander so bright? Shouldn't it covered with dust too??? Not airbags perhaps, but at least ramps and Sojourner original location!
Was the lander affected by battery failure, or the rover?
Maybe Sojourner is STILL rolling some kilometers away from lander, having lost its way???
Is this theoretically possible??
Sorry, jumpjack, but Sojourner was much smaller than your size of 3 by 6 pixels. It is only about 1 pixel wide. The double line you show for the ramp is too wide as well. I think Tim Parker's identification is most likely correct.
Phil
The overhead projections are from the Planetary Photojournal.
Doug
Mabye IR will solve this issue!
That is a little missleading.
HiRISE is 10 x 2000 pixel wide CCD's to make 20,000 pixels wide. The middle two of these are also replicated in the Near IR and Blue/Green - so giving a false colour 4000 pixel wide swath down the middle of HiRISE images. It is not at higher resolution though - it is the same res as the rest of the instrument. They missed Pathfinder with the colour first time around, but I am sure they will have another go at it.
The idea is that while everything looks very 'similar' in the normal red channels - perhaps the lander and sojourner will be a little more forthcoming with the nIR and B/G channels.
Please look at the rest of this thread and the HiRISE website for their preliminary location identification which is already very compelling given the fact that there is a roughly sojourner sized feature at a space where no such feature exists from the Pathfinder surface imagery.
Doug
".. Power went from the RTG to the battery to the spacecraft, and attempts to run directly off the RTG failed."
Actually, as I understood it, the RTG system was putting out it's constant 50 or so watts of power, but *DOING* anything useful, most specifically playing data back off the tape recorder or taking a real time image AND transmitting the data and doing spacecraft housekeeping, took more power than that 50 watts (or whatever). The battery couldn't buffer the surge in power demand, so the spacecraft had an instant "brownout" drop in voltage and safed itself every time they tried to do something. They turned off the vehicle's transmit mode to the last surviving orbiter (both direct-to-earth transmitters had failed), which shortly after ran out of attitude control gas and was turned off too. End Of Mission, with or without battery failure.
I *think* Pathfinder died while they were trying to configure it for a no-battery mode, and the software they uploaded wasn't really ready... some capabilities they were planning to put in weren't there yet or something, so they uploaded a "beta" version when it became an emergency. The expectation was that it wouldn't last long due to damage from deep thermal cyclling even if they could get it into a no-battery mode, but they were hoping for days or even weeks.
It's unlikely the rover went that far. It would have bumped into rocks and probably <i presume> gone into safe mode and hollered "Mama!", and gotten no answer.
The rover was programmed to - after a while - backed up to where it last had succesfull comms with the lander. If that failed - it was programmed to drive back toward the lander - but also maintain a keep-out zone around the lander. This would have resulted in the rover heading back toward the lander ( a fairly clear route that indeed includes the spot where we think we see Sojourner ) and then probably turning right and circulating that way until its position knowledge would drift and it would start roving just about anywhere.... the 'return and circle' sequence didn't actually exist per se.
I'm fairly confident that Sojourner could very easily have got to that point we see in the HiRISE images - I can quite believe it got that far.
Doug
You jest - it would be suprising, but not beyond the realms of possible to see that little feature move. Sojourner is designed to be totally solar powered and did work for about a month with no other power source after its non-rechargable batteries had exhausted. She might be too dusty - and things may be broken inside - but it's plausable that the old girl wakes up every morning, tries a bit of a move, and then goes to sleep with the setting sun. Despite the enormous cool factor - this would also help confirm the current Sojourner feature...rocks don't tend to walk
Doug
Reality to one side - naturally the Romantic in me sees the plucky little rover wandering across the Martian sands, stopping now and again only to admire the view (and because of the darkness at night), wondering why she's not heard from home...
...0.4 m/min for 9-and-a-half-years makes for - a thousand kilometres! Hey, she could be just have made it to Viking 1, or be halfway to Oppy by now.
(Is MSL reading this???)
Andy
Nix, I hope you don't mind my http://www.strykfoto.org/acrawlonmars.html of your site.
No I don't mind at all, it's quite amusing actually!
What's picture #77?
I really enjoy your work on MPF btw... and glad to see your site growing!
Nico
I'm still wondering how you did those - superb work, a data set that needed a proper 'going over' - and oh boy did you do that
Doug
Thanks for that The real pity is that they didn't get a GOOD colour image of the lander. A few nice B'n'W ones - but not a nice colour one really.
Doug
I don't think it ever got ANY color images of the lander.
Hmm - I'm sure I remember an image that showed a bit of egress aid - but now I'm not so sure. Maybe an overactive imagination coloured in a greyscale one.
(edit...
Perhaps I thought it was this one - http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfr-m-rvrcam-2-edr-v1.0/mprv_0001/browse/rvr_edr/rvr_clr/r1557518.htm
but looking at your work - it's just bracket )
Doug
I have seen that identified as the lander. However, here was Sojourner's orientation that day (and it didn't move much on the sols immediately before or after that):
And here is the view from the front camera:
As you can see, there is no way that could be the lander.
Hi Ted,
Fantastic work again with these images. In your post immediately above, the comparison of the image of the rover from IMP to the picture seen from the rover was REALLY useful to help me visualize what the heck it was that Sojourner was looking at. If it's not too much trouble, I think it'd really help to put similar images, where available, on your Sojourner images page, to help provide that context.
--Emily
Thanks. I am planning to do that, as well as process the images from the other rover cameras. I just got to the point, after doing these, that I didn't even want to think about Sojourner for a while
It is possible that on sol 14, the rover caught a bit of the lander. It moved, and may have at one point been pointed a bit more directly at the lander than this image.
That might be a bit of an airbag in the upper right-hand corner. Might not.
Ted - let me add to the chorus of praise! And i am so glad to see the webpages coming back up....
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