Virtual Viking, Images and animations of the Viking landing sites Options

[Vanden]

Thanks for sharing your nice work Vanden. Next time please post your image as an attachment rather than a link to the full image. (your post above has been edited to do so.) A lot of people use slow connections or browse with their handhold phones and these large images can present a problem. Best to give people the choice of viewing the entire image.

Ok, I had not seen ...


Here is my low resolution color panorama :

[Vanden]

And here a portion of the assembly :

[nprev]

Beautiful. Thanks!

Always love looking at Big Joe...wonder how he looks now. IIRC, V1 observed that a small part of his sand-cap fell off at one point.

[Phil Stooke]

Not his cap but the drift at his base!

Phil

[nprev]

Was it? I always thought that a piece of the cap fell off & impacted the base dune, but by now I should know better than to trust a 30+ yr.-old memory.

(My God...I'm old now!!!)

Thanks, Phil.

[Phil Stooke]

The only visible change was at the base, no change on top, so that can't be right. I'll post pics tomorrow.

Phil

[nprev]

Oh, I believe you, man; love to see the pics!

As I recall, NASA stated that this was the first example of small-scale natural erosion on another world ever observed (actually, unless the MERs or Pathfinder saw something as well it might still be the only one. Not sure if the sublimation seen by Phoenix counts, and can't call the polar landslides "small-scale".)

[ElkGroveDan]

(actually, unless the MERs or Pathfinder saw something as well it might still be the only one. )

Regardless of the cause, the fresh gullies identified with MGS probably should be included, and some of them are very small. I guess it's all about where you draw the line and what falls in the category of erosion. Certainly the disappearing rover tracks is a form of natural erosion.

[Phil Stooke]

Viking 1 saw a second similar change later, as well. Spirit saw the little dust ripples move during a dust storm, with a nice animation posted on here at the time. We also saw tracks filling in with dust where we crossed old tracks (Home Plate, exiting Endurance, etc.) Pathfinder wasn't on the surface long enough to catch anything, and normally the MER rovers were not in one place long enough to see any changes.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Here are the two Viking 1 changes with a little bit of super-resolution to sharpen them. This is from the forthcoming Mars Exploration atlas - first draft now finished.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

I should add that the Viking Lander imagery is ripe for re-analysis, looking for smaller overlooked changes. It can be tricky getting the lighting similar enough, but there's lots to do here.

Phil

[nprev]

Awesome. I forgot all about the Whale slump.

Thanks, Phil; anxiously awaiting publication of your atlas!!!

[Phil Stooke]

Here's another comparison image showing changes at the VL1 site:



Conical Piles 2, 3 and 5 were constructed to see if wind would erode them during the mission. In the long automated mode imaging period late in the mission, one of the targets they covered was this area with three soil piles. Sure enough, more than 2000 sols into the mission, all three piles were found to have disappeared. Ray Arvidson et al. described the change in a paper in Science in 1983.

Phil

[Stu]

That's fascinating Phil, thanks. I honestly wasn't aware they'd even done that.

[scalbers]

And here a portion of the assembly:

Vanden, very nice to see your efforts as I'm catching up on this thread. Glad to see the lowres / hires combination is working. Seeing all the details that Viking showed, and in color really does better justice to the imagery.