[X] My Assistant

[James Sorenson]

Yes. On sol-1, The first thumbnail's from Mastcam and Navcam shows this, so it got in there during landing.

Mastcam
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/ms...1000I1_DXXX.jpg

Navcam
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...AUT_04096M_.JPG

[Tesheiner]

... and a circular version of Ant's pan...

Phil

[attachment=27414:pan_Sol_...cir_post.jpg]

Great ones, Ant & Phil!

The descent stage engine blasts are clearly visible on the top view.

[jmknapp]

Trying to see if any of the discarded hardware can be seen in the images so far, consider this ground-level Google Earth view of the crater rim looking toward the skycrane:



The location of the lander and skycrane were placed pretty accurately based on the "crime scene" photo.

I believe Google Earth is based on MOLA elevations & it's a little hard to match up the horizon but I think the above might match this image:



The GE image is tilted to more or less match this NAVCAM image.

Whaddaya think?

EDIT: looks like that's not the right photo--see below for a mosaic showing the expected direction of the skycrane, along with the chute and backshell.

[akuo]

According to Nasa TV schedule, tosols press conference will be in about 40 minutes, not 2 pm eastern, as was indicated before:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Breaking.html

[craigmcg]

Need a broom/blower attachment for the arm! Will be interesting to hear any discussion about dust/pebbles on the rover at 1:00.

[elakdawalla]

Is there a way to Wget the raw images from the MSL page? because I tried to do it as I used to dowlonad the Cassini raw images from their site and i'ts not working.

Sadly, you can't wget a directory like you can with Cassini. In fact, you can't wget Cassini directories anymore either. You have to have a list of the file names that are there. So I could wget the MARDIs yesterday because they have sequential filenames, and that's how I do Cassini's now too. (That's the only reason that I ever like sequentially numbered file names otherwise devoid of useful information; it makes batch download easy.) Since we get thumbnails quicker than fulls, if they keep up with the lag between files appearing on the server and being linked from the raws page, what I will do is make a listing of the thumbnails, swap "F" for "T," and periodically run the wget script on the "F"s that we haven't seen yet.

It's all a kludge. They're not intentionally making things difficult; they just, for reasons I don't comprehend, didn't really plan ahead about how this would work. This week is probably not the week to hassle them about working to make things better. They are sleep-deprived and drained. Let's watch how things evolve and if we have useful suggestions about how to improve things, I'll see if I can get someone's attention next week.

[ugordan]

I think we disagree a bit on the presentation of the raws, ugordan.

Oh, I'm not arguing with the fact they look dark. Still, given how 95% of the time the images will be watched and used only by enthusiasts like us, that's not much of an issue.The rest will mostly get their imagery via official NASA products.

Images not being clipped at darks/brights does not mean they have to be dark, that's due to the levels curve they used. I'm just happy we're not losing any information at brightness extremes, at least for now. They can still change their mind...

[elakdawalla]

I've tried to make that point repeatedly to NASA scientists who are concerned about raw release. They see us here on UMSF going nuts with processing and interpretation and they think that the whole world is doing science on their photos. We're an active group, but we're a small one! The vast majority of the world still gets any space news only from what's put out in press briefings.

Although....with Twitter, and the new "geek is cool," that might be changing.

[pgrindrod]

Trying to see if any of the discarded hardware can be seen in the images so far, consider this ground-level Google Earth view of the crater rim looking toward the skycrane:
...
Whaddaya think?

I did a visibility analysis using the HiRISE DEMs and Curiosity at 2.1 m off the ground and came up with the following:



These things really depend on the exact location of the viewing point (in this case Curisoity), but I think I've got it to within a metre or so (I co-registered the HiRISE hardware shot as best I could with previous HiRISE images and DEMs). The contours are 10 m elevation - you can see the seam between DEMs to the right of Curiosity (which I make to be at about -4500.69 m).

But I think overall it's showing that out of all the hardware, we probably have the best chance of seeing the heatshield from here.

Although if I can co-register the images better then I might move Curiosity slightly, which could affect the results. All good fun though.

Pete

[Richard Lee]

In the mission briefing a day or so ago, they briefly mentioned the pixel art on rover



and seemed to hint at some sort of augmented reality app tie in. Anyone know more about that?

Richard

[maschnitz]

(Web developer here) The raws part of JPL's site bears all the hallmarks of web development that was done on the quick, and on the side. It's pretty obvious that 1) they could do better (in fact, I know someone at JPL Social, I KNOW this person can do better) 2) their focus is elsewhere. I'm betting the raws part was whipped together over a weekend or two.

This happens whenever the web development is starved for time. They're too busy doing things on the part of the site that receives all their traffic, to handle things on the part of the site that receives a thin slice of traffic.

I bet it bugs them as much as it bugs us. But that's web development in a nutshell.

(BTW: Someone was asking about RESTful ... yeah, keep dreamin', dude. I'd settle for an equivalent of the Apache out-of-the-box file/directory view right now.)

[neo56]

Nice work Pete ! Which software did you use to obtain this visibility map ? Is it ArcGIS ?

[stevesliva]

And does the view to the south remind anyone else of one of the Navajo sandstone "swells" of southern Utah? Mostly a coincidence, but not completely...

I am not a geologist, but I know of what you speak, and yes, absolutely.

Granted, I think the scale's wrong, but here's a photo I took last year at the San Rafael Swell:

[pmetschan]

Is the wheel configuration in this picture nominal?

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...AUT_04096M_.JPG

I had a professor once that said silence means yes? So the wheel is nominal here then?

[pgrindrod]

Nice work Pete ! Which software did you use to obtain this visibility map ? Is it ArcGIS ?

Yep! I try to do everything in ArcGIS these days. Gone are my days of tracing paper

I just need to check that I really have raised the view off the ground...otherwise that's what we'd see from ground level!

Pete