[X] My Assistant

[nasaman58]

Has anyone thought to make/modify a 360 panorama using Hazcam images to fill in the top portions of Aeolis Mons/Mt. Sharp?

[walfy]

Tried to match the hills from Ant's superb panorama (scrunched here to exaggerate them) with the HiRISE shot, but not sure where the hill on top image can be found in the pano. The 3D version is at bottom as well. I believe there's another HiRISE that covers more of those nearby hills, but don't have time to dig them up right now. That other HiRISE would make matching them easier.

[BrianL]

Don't recall seeing this posted, and nothing really of news to anyone here. Just nice to see coverage expanding outside the usual channels.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/260695/nasa....html#tk.hp_new

[Drkskywxlt]

EDL team believes RHA is the descent stage impact.

[Hungry4info]

Per presser, RHA is now identified as Skycrane impact plume.

[Pando]

Time for some of us to get to work! Here's my first job with MSL images: an average of the registered L,R rear hazcam view:
[attachment=27246:rhaz_lrave_sol0.jpg]
What's that just left of centre on the horizon? It's in both L and R frames! Could it be the dust from the descent stage crash landing???

Fredk, this was an excellent call. NASA just confirmed it in their press release this morning.

[sgendreau]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19198193

Includes Adam's walk-through of the sequence of cryptic calls, looks, nods and pokes before "Touchdown successful" was called.

At the very end the interviewer asks Steltzner his own future plans, and he said, quote: "I'm out of a job, officially."

I was afraid of that. I'm sure that sums up a complex, difficult situation -- but it is a shame that team has to scatter and their expertise be lost.

[kenny]

But that's not consistent with the WNW heading it took.

You're right, of course. Maybe it wobbled around before heading off on the programmed azimuth. Or maybe the soil is softer on the side with the elongated holes, and since the nozzles are angled outwards away from the rover, the reflected blast made shallow trenches radially outwards. The end of the trenches closest to the rover seem to be same distance away as the circular pits on the other side. The difference between the 2 sides is indeed curious....

[jekbradbury]

At the very end the interviewer asks Steltzner his own future plans, and he said, quote: "I'm out of a job, officially."

I heard an interview with him on NPR this morning - I think he said his next dream job would be to design EDL for a Europa lander...

[stevesliva]

I heard an interview with him on NPR this morning - I think he said his next dream job would be to design EDL for a Europa lander...

Not much "E" from EDL there. We have a good thread about that from years ago. Not sure anyone proposed a skycrane.

Also-- the team "scattering" and him being out of a job. I can buy that the top guy might be left without another top position to take, but part of me assumes that many of the other people involved aren't going very far.

[MahFL]

Nice round of applause from the press after the news conference today.

[jmknapp]

Looking forward to the EDL data download, although they said it could take weeks.

[fredk]

I'm just happy we're not losing any information at brightness extremes, at least for now.

I know exactly what you mean about saturation in the MER jpegs. But on the other hand, look at an MSL navcam shot like this one:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...AUT_04096M_.JPG
In the image proper, the brightest pixels are in the sky in the upper right, with levels of around 130. So all the information is sitting between values 0 and 130. That's basically 7 bits. If the pixel values were distributed between 0 and 255, that would be 8 bits. Not a huge loss, but with only half the grey levels, colour banding should be more visible in very smooth areas, especially with stretching.

I'm definitely not complaining here - just pointing out.

[Tesheiner]

Nice round of applause from the press after the news conference today.

The EDL team did an excellent job! They deserve it.

[ugordan]

So all the information is sitting between values 0 and 130. That's basically 7 bits.

That navcam appears to be a straight-up linear 12->8 conversion onboard judging by the bright-dark contrast in the scene. Banding in smooth, bright areas (basically just sky) should't be noticeable once you fix the levels, like here - the sky doesn't look bad at all. The bigger problem is that jpeg destroys details in really dark areas so the ground here looks blocky, but that would go away with square root LUT encoding onboard as it would then look more like the image I linked, still darker than it could be, but less details would be lost to jpeg compression.

BTW, are others having big problems even getting the raw index pages to load? I'm frequently getting empty pages with no error message whatsoever.