[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Bingo - it'll either be "take a tau, then watch a transit" orrrr the other way around.

Now I've got to start convincing the team to do a Hazcam movie during a good Phobos transit to see the terrain 'dim'.

Doug

[helvick]

Assuming this is a full transit then there would be arund a 40% reduction in light so the dimming in a Hazcam movie would probably be very obvious but even though it would be quite cool to see I'm at a loss as to what scientific merit it would have at all.

[djellison]

It's a discussion JB and I have after the last round of transits when they managed to get 4 sec-per-frame shooting of one of them. Purely for cool factor.

From the top of Husband hill looking west or east you might see the darkening moving - but from where we are now it's simply a case of cool factor. downsample them to 512 x 512 - compress them hard - get 12 into the budget of a single normal FHAZ frame and make a movie

Doug

[Airbag]

Problem is, the effect might be almost impossible to see on the "raw" streched images - any dimming will be counteracted by increased stretching perhaps. Depends on stretching algorithm, of course. Presumably we'd see lower contrast with the shadowed areas either way.

Airbag

[djellison]

Oh - impossible on the raw....but very visible with calibrated imagery

Doug

[fredk]

From the latest update:

Sol 1075: Spirit observed the morning transit of Phobos using the miniature thermal emission spectrometer...

Sol 1078 (Jan. 14, 2007): Plans called for Spirit to ... survey the sky and ground during the Phobos transit at 1:45 p.m. local solar time using the miniature thermal emission spectrometer.

Does anyone know what the temporal resolution or sampling rate of miniTES is? Could it be better than pancam and so better resolve the brief transit?

[climber]

Another weird idea about the eclipse. Instead of taking a movie of the scenary around, can Spirit take the IDD's shadow before during and after pending it's in the correct position? Any benefit of that?

[djellison]

It's not really about benefit - it's about cool factor...little else really

Doug

[alan]

Lots of new super resolution images posted at the Pancam site
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...t/superres.html

[Ant103]

Hu hu hu hu !

[Gray]

Amazing !!!!

[Guest_zoost_*]

Any ideas what formed the tiny spaghetti like features on the top of the accretionary lapilli?

[Tesheiner]

Dust/sand grains or ...?

It would be nice to see another MI at a different illumination angle.

[CosmicRocker]

They really do convincingly appear more like lapilli all the time, don't they.

As for the spaghetti-like things, there are views available of the same area with different illumination. The shadowed version is somewhat suggestive of a dust layer adhering to the underside of the layer, but I suppose it could be other things, like remnants of a lower layer of angular clasts, a weathering rind, or a salt deposit. Curious...

[nprev]

Can the TES derive any meaningful information about the "spaghetti's" composition from such a limited (in terms of surface area) sample? Seems as if there's a lot of interesting questions with regard to Martian minerology here that are worth investigating (esp. the influence/effects of atmospheric characteristics vs. mafic influences).