[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

I've emailed David Southwood. I'm not happy with the second-hand info I've heard about the HSRC re it's SRC on MEX ( wow - acronym heaven)

This is what I wrote...

First of all – congratulations to all on the success of Huygens – some spectacular imagery and data to follow – something for all of Europe to be proud of. Who would have thought 20 years ago – that the first instrument to touch titan would come from Milton Keynes!



However – I email you to ask as to there status and whereabouts of High Resolution imagery from the HSRC on Mars Express. Almost a year of orbital operations – and yet not a single released image at the ~2m resolution capability of the HSRC – and not just that – but no explanation as to why there is no imagery! The rest of the cameras abilities have been published in some astonishing imagery that really does show Mars in a whole new way – it’s fantastic. But someone, I cant help feeling that us tax-paying Europeans are missing out on some information here – and doubly frustrating, missing out on WHY we’re missing out.



Whilst, obviously, NASA and JPL are much more experienced with such things – MOC aboard MGS has released of all imagery in 6 month batches, at 6 month intervals – and I cant help feel that Mars Express should be operating a similar routine – or at least explain what plans there are to do so.



Courtesy of a specialist reporter who attended a conference in the USA recently – I’ve heard suggestion that there are calibration problems with the SRC – and that scientific data from the HSRC will be released fairly shortly – but, to be brutally honest, third hand information that may or may not be accurate just isn’t good enough – and if ESA is to stand on the world stage proudly with data in hand saying “look – look at what we’ve done, what we’ve achieved, what we’re able to do – as well as anyone in the world” – then we need to have a level of disclosure much much greater than we have now – or the image of ESA as a whole will, to some extent, move away from that of an equal to NASA ( which is something it should be able to do )



I am hugely proud of Europe’s achievements in space - I see American success and, whereas not so long ago one would thing “wow – I wish we could do that” – now I can say “yes – we CAN do that” – a paradigm shift that has occurred perhaps only in the last 18 months or so – started with MEX, and exploded with Huygens – but there must be transparency and disclosure to keep this pattern on going.


If I get a response - then I'll let you all know. The address I used was david.southwood@esa.int - as that's what I found by googling for D.S.

Doug

[Phil Stooke]

Hre's a recent Mars Express image from the recent data release.

It's Phobos seen by the SRC. Lots of grooves.

I'm getting the hang of the system now. I go into ESA's PSA, search on (in this case) Phobos - or could do a lat-long search on Mars for images of a specific feature. That gives me a list of images. Then I go to PDS, look for the image in their browse directories to confirm it, then to the data directories to find the full image, and download it.

You could search for the header elsewhere but an easy approach is to open the file in Word or a similar word processor. It lets you read the header. Then open the image as raw in Photoshop or equivalent. They are 16 bit.

Phil

[elakdawalla]

Hre's a recent Mars Express image from the recent data release.

It's Phobos seen by the SRC.  Lots of grooves.

Wow, that's a cool picture. Phil (or anybody else with as crazy an amount of knowledge as Phil), have we seen Phobos at this longitude in any previous image from any spacecraft? I don't remember a view anything like this. Is there another adjacent tile in there that one could make a mosaic from?

Also, to anyone's knowledge, has any picture from the SRC ever been released to the public/press?

And, for this picture in specific: would it be a valuable activity to try any of those focus-correcting or deconvolution tools on these blurry SRC images?

--Emily

[mcaplinger]

And, for this picture in specific: would it be a valuable activity to try any of those focus-correcting or deconvolution tools on these blurry SRC images?

Despite what's been said in other discussions in this forum, you need knowledge of a system's point-spread function to do deconvolution. Anything you do without knowledge of the PSF is just regular high-pass filtering, and you can do that with Photoshop perfectly well.

[tedstryk]

Despite what's been said in other discussions in this forum, you need knowledge of a system's point-spread function to do deconvolution.  Anything you do without knowledge of the PSF is just regular high-pass filtering, and you can do that with Photoshop perfectly well.

If you can find images of point sources from a camera, you can reconstruct the PSF.

[mcaplinger]

If you can find images of point sources from a camera, you can reconstruct the PSF.

Certainly. In fact, I might say that this is the only way to reliably determine the PSF, though it's complicated by the fact that you are limited by the sampling frequency of the system's detector and you would usually not oversample the PSF as much as you'd like to if you were just trying to measure the PSF, not take useful images.

However, I haven't seen anyone on this forum going through the PSF determination process, and without doing that, you can't do deconvolution, you can only do filtering.

Just a pedantic nitpick, perhaps, but I think it's important to be precise about these things.