Phobos 2 Options

[tedstryk]

The recent Mars express imaging of Phobos reminded me of Phobos-2 imagery. It sent back some really dramatic images of Mars and Phobos, that, had it had a decent camera, would have been much more widespread. I have a certain affinity to Phobos-2, as it was during its mission that I first developed an interest in Mars. Now, granted, it had nothing to do with Phobos-2, but with reading up on Mariner and Viking missions. However, this led to the obvious question of hmmm.....Viking was launched in 1975, it is 1989, I wonder if anything has gone to Mars since then? And of course at the time the Phobos mission was the only game in town. It of course wouldn't be until Pathfinder that another even partially successful mission arrived at Mars. I have done a lot of work on the VSK television images it returned. I have done some work with the Thermoskan infrared images, and hope to do more. On my website, at http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/phobos2.html you can see my work with the images. The headline image is doubled in size from the true image (I have also posted it here, as I think it is the most dramatic Phobos-2 picture). The image below it of Valles Marineres is false color, produced by coding the visible channel as blue and the infrared channel as red with a synthetic green channel. The rest of the images are either black and white or use blue and red channel data combined with a sythetic green, and thus are closer to "true-color." The VSK also had the problem, like DIMES on the MER, of having buildup throughout the image, causing many of the images to be saturated.
I hope that current Mars missions such as Mars Express can get some views of Mars and Phobos together using their superior cameras. Viking obtained a few, though not in color, and MGS obtained one with Phobos appearing as a speck, with the narrow angle camera imaging only Phobos with Mars out of the frame.

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[tedstryk]

The Thermoscan image from my site.

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[tedstryk]

Phobos over the Tharis region - this one was almost entirely saturated except in the blue channel, which was still largely saturated. This is the best I could do to clean it up.

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[tedstryk]

Here is a new image about to go to my site. It is from a Thermoscan data set. I am about to add several images, and this is one of them.

Ted

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 Pan202.tif ( 461.71K ) Number of downloads: 306