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More Data From Mars Rover Spirit's First Month Now Online

Millions of people have viewed pictures from NASA's Spirit on the Mars rovers home page and other Internet sites. Beginning today, a more complete set of science data from Spirit's first 30 martian days is posted on a site primarily for scientists and technical researchers, but also available to anyone who's interested.

The first installment of images, spectroscopic measurements, daily reports, and other information from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project has been posted on NASA's Planetary Data System. It is available with a new "Analyst's Notebook" user interface at: http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/meran . Home page for the Planetary Data System is http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov . Images are also available from the system's Planetary Image Atlas, at http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/MER/sea...PLORATION_ROVER . Data from Opportunity's first 30 martian days, or "sols," will be added Aug. 24, and data from later portions of both rovers' missions will be added in October.

"All the raw images and selected processed images and other information have been shared with the public since the rovers first reached Mars in January. This release adds other derived images and maps used for planning, all the non-image data from the spectrometers, daily operational reports and activity plans," said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the twin rovers' science payload.

"The 'Analyst's Notebook' is designed to help you navigate through the data and understand the synergies," he said. "You can't deal with the Moessbauer spectrometer readings from a given sol without information about other observations that go with it."

"We are proud to be releasing such a comprehensive set of data from the surface science mission of the twin rovers so quickly," said Dr. Jim Garvin, NASA's chief scientist for Mars. "It's a testament to the dedication and commitment of the science and engineering teams that this remarkable collection of information is now available to the entire world for interpretation, education, and to help guide NASA's new exploration focus," added Garvin.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, at http://athena.cornell.edu . The Planetary Photojournal, at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov , is another resource for easy public access to images of Mars and other worlds.

[djellison]

I think the PNG's have had a little auto-levelling type treatment - as they are specifically a browsing format - not a scientific format

HOWEVER

I still have problems using the IMGS from the PDS

See these two - first from the old JPL Raw JPG's, the second from the IMG's.

http://mer.rlproject.com/raw_test_tall.jpg

http://mer.rlproject.com/img_test_tall.jpg

I'm asusming its on-board auto-exposure treatment that's leading to this - the sky, and the airbags giving a tendancy to underexpose compared to the middle section. Somehow - I need to know a way ( or have some highly clever individual write a wonderfull program to...) elimiate this and essentially equalize the images w.r.t. one another.

The difference between the two data sets s fairly obvious. The JPG's are all auto-levels ( a photoshop term) - or 'stretched' on an individual basis so that they are all different to one another. Three images at the same time of the same thing thru different filters will end up being stretched differently.

However - the IMGS are clearly not. They are, on a target-by-target basis, treated the same. i.e. Same time, same target, same filters, same stretch. I assume this was done to basically take the best of the 12bit data from the CCD, and squish it into 8bit data for transmission. Trouble his - where is the informationt hat shows this - and how does one go back to data that's all on a level playing field. Using the IMG's is the way to go, I'm sure - the top image is so much better in the IMG than the JPG version - it's just no comparison!


Doug