[X] My Assistant

[pgrindrod]

I couldn’t find this anywhere else, so hopefully this is the right place for this request…

I’m aware of many excellent examples of how people here, and elsewhere, have used images from spacecraft, and in particular from rovers and landers.

But if there was a hypothetical rover on Mars in the near future, taking stereo images on a daily basis, and you could help define how those images are released, what would be on the dream wish list for those images, assuming a similar policy to MER and MSL?

So things like: what image format and processing would be best, the preferred type of website/database serving those images up, what metadata is essential/would be good, and anything else that would be useful.

I have also been trying to collate examples of how these images are used, but it would be good to be directed to any cases that people found to be particularly inventive/impressive/useable. Of course, it might not be possible to predict all the ways that images might be used in the future, but having a list of best practices for sharing these images would be useful.

Many thanks for any input people might have.

[scalbers]

I would vote for all-sky images or better yet 360 degree spherical imagery. This might call for a wide angle camera of some type, as we do not get sufficient coverage from stitching the typical camera images.

[Herobrine]

@pgrindrod Are you asking for our dream list for daily release images, or for PDS data products?

I'll second the spice kernels. I've generally found the CAHV(OR(E)) model data invaluable, so definitely that, along with reference frame stuff. If there's any way we can magically reduce the rate of frame drift to zero, that would be nice.
One thing that I've often been uncertain about is exactly what a given data product had been through, processing-wise. I think that information is supposed to be able to be determined from the LBL data and the product type combined with the SIS, but I've felt...less-than-fully confident in the past, when working with imagery, that I had a correct understanding of what processing steps had already occurred and with what values.
One thing I've been particularly unclear about is shutter correction. With these electronic shutters, you get this readout smear that supposedly can be best corrected by doing a 0-second exposure immediately before/after the image is acquired and subtracting it from the acquired image (or something like that) before storing the data. I've read that the active rovers have the ability to do this, but it's never been clear to me whether, in practice, they ever actually do this. There are flags for it, but I can't recall ever seeing one set to TRUE. It's entirely possible I've just missed it. Assuming they don't normally do it, I'm sure someone has figured out that it rarely make a significant difference, but this is my dream list, so I'd include the on-board shutter correction to be done by default.

I would vote for all-sky images or better yet 360 degree spherical imagery. This might call for a wide angle camera of some type, as we do not get sufficient coverage from stitching the typical camera images.

Could kill two birds with one stone....

Try not to think too hard about the decision to put sponsor decals on the side of a Mars rover

[mcaplinger]

One thing I've been particularly unclear about is shutter correction...

Can be done for the engineering cameras, does not exist for Mastcam/MAHLI/MARDI because the amount of smear is vastly smaller with their interline sensors than for the frame transfer sensors of the engineering cameras.

From the MSL camera SIS http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/msl/M..._SIS_latest.PDF :

Keyword SHUTTER_CORRECTION_MODE_ID
Specifies whether shutter subtraction will be performed.

• Eng. Cameras
0 = “NONE”
1 = “CONDITIONAL”
2 = “ALWAYS”
• MMM Cameras “N/A”