Sol 3 and onwards - imaging Options

[elakdawalla]

Another minor formatting comment - it would be nicer to let the images "float" I think as now for each sol/sequence/camera type you sometimes have to scroll sideways on the browser (at least in IE) to see them all. That means you have to use sideways as well as up down scrolling, a very painful combination.

Well, one minor style sheet comment - add a small (say 5px) margin to the pages so the text doesn't sit against the left margin. And also a "last modified" timestamp to all the pages so we know when something changed.

For a long time I've put off learning how to use the "float" class -- I think in tables and want everything to stay put -- but it does make sense to use it here, so I went off and did my homework and learned how to make use of it and now the thumbnails float so no more right-left scrolling. You're welcome.
http://planetary.org/data/phoenix/raw/index.html

Rather than put a date on the individual pages that I will probably forget to update, I think I'll just put last-modified commentary on the index page.

By the way, I tried to ask nicely today in the press conference why they take so few images in the runout sols. It seems to me that if they're doing no arm activities they ought to gave time to take a boatload of SSI images. The response was that the science team is looking into expanding these plans, as "we find ourselves using these days." I think that while they expected to lose days (their plan allows for mission success to be accomplished in 60 sols of activity, so it allows for up to 1 in 3 sols to be lost, the same figure that was used for planning rover success goals), I think that in their planning minds those sols would be lost due to anomalies on Phoenix rather than anomalies on orbiters. So now they're scrambling to make better use of Phoenix when sols of activity are lost due to comm problems that have nothing to do with their own spacecraft.

--Emily

[Deimos]

By the way, I tried to ask nicely today in the press conference why they take so few images in the runout sols. It seems to me that if they're doing no arm activities they ought to gave time to take a boatload of SSI images.

The runouts are built by the same set of people who do tactical plans, did writing and validation of our commands before landing, and are continuing to validate things like our sample delivery commands. So, the runouts end up low on the totem pole. The first was a simple one just to have something. The second was considerably more ambitious, but with a small PM downlink. If we get all the data down, it will easily trump the first. I say "if" because we put runout data in the bottom bin for saving. Data we command on purpose is both downlinked and saved in flash first. Both of those are a factor: MER has maybe 20 sols worth of downlink that can be stroed in flash; with Phoenix, flash is 114 Mb and downlinks have sometimes been well over that (counting all passes in a sol). Much of our potentially repeatable imaging is fire and forget, and when things go wrong with comm, it can just go into the "forget" bin. Before you ask: Scout. Many of us fought the flash battle, it was easy to see coming. While it was painfully difficult to get the extra millions to make EDL safe (money well spent), it was not possible to get the extra half million or so to use modern flash capabilities. And, before you ask, yes it would have cost that much, or more.

Anyway, the science team is now building more ambitious runout plans, but it may be a week or two before we use them. The new runout is the sol 10 runout with a new pan section. But, the pan is updated to a more ambitious mission success pan (stereo at full res, less downsampling for color). As soon as we have more downlink (sols 10 and 11 are low data volume) we'll get the pan going. Sol 10 was supposed to start it with some (I think) dramatic images, but we'll just have to get back to that later.

Mark

[jamescanvin]

Note that quite a bit more colour came down to add to that pan tosol, it's now a reasonable sols worth.

I'm not sure if I'm get time to process it today, busy this evening (and for the whole weekend), might have a go at lunchtime...

James

[jamescanvin]

Very rough and ready but gives you the idea - a better one next week when i have the time

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[elakdawalla]

Oh, my, that's cool. It brings home the "like a fishing pole" comment Ashitey Trebi-Ollenu made about the Phoenix RA.

--Emily

[ugordan]

A sort of a salvage job on the automatically generated mosaics. Not accurate, merely for aesthetic purposes. Obviously not the complete runout image sequence was included in the mosaics.



The pointing errors are pretty nasty, hopefully there'll be some sort of a fix for that.

[elakdawalla]

My page is now updated to sol 11.

Thanks to those of you who've sent PMs with scripting help and notes about some broken code. With my vacation looming I probably won't be able to get to any modifications or stuff until after I get back -- at which point my efforts may have been rendered obsolete by someone who can do better...

--Emily