Actually, it did, Doug.

I hate to come off as a heretic, but I have to wonder if Sojourner has actually been spotted. Doug's image seems to show a dark area immediately "south" of the lander that looks a lot like the soil churned up by the rover. If this is obvious (and correct), then why isn't Sojourner?

Pure speculation: Is the "airbag reflection" @ 9 o'clock immediately next to the lander actually the rover? Conversely, at 3 o'clock there's a light spot within the shadow of the lander which might also be Sojourner. (Disclaimer: I can't visualize the landing bag geometry, so this may well be completely off-base).

(Posted completely in the time-honored tradition of scientific skepticism... )

Now that we see the location of the backshell, chute and heat shield segments does anyone want to make a case for a likely touchdown location and/or bounce path?

Surely there are outer parameters (and a direction of motion) that these events must fall within based on the final locations of the EDL debris.

Tim? Doug?

Pretty much all of the improvement in the control net, and tying the geography (images) to it has come from all that MOLA data. It's such a reliable dataset that I've used it in all my "new" basemaps to register the images to in locating the landing sites.

I will have to check, but I think the lat/lons I came up with agree with those derived by the MOLA team to within a few thousandths of a degree, which is somewhat reassuring...

-Tim.

I'm not quite sure I see what you're referring to. I don't see anything in the image to suggest that any of the known disturbed soil surfaces are still dark.

If you look at the gallery pan, at the rover petal, you'll see that the protruding portion of airbag material is shiny, not just white. I think this is glinting in the HiRISE view. Also, the lander's solar panels are indistinct from the surrounding soil in the red (at least), so I suspect Sojourner's is as well. If so, all we may be seeing is its shadow.

It's certainly possible (and intriguing) that it isn't Sojourner there, and that spot is just a fortuitous lighting effect on the small rocks and soil surfaces there in the gallery pan, but it doesn't look remarkable in any othr way from the ground view.

I've looked pretty far afield of the lander for anything like a snail trail with a "rock" at the end, and haven't found anything.

-Tim.

So far as I know, there hasn't been another picture taken to complete the stereo, but it could be a geographic projection or something similar to that... I did a quick check, and unless the new image didn't have the word pathfinder in the description, it hasn't been taken. So I'd bet it has something to do with geometric projections or something. It could also be an affect of JPG compression. Which of the two was the HiRISE JP2?

jpg on the left, jp2 on the right.

That's what I thought at first, but they are very different and it looks for all the world like the jp2 is taken from directly above and the jpg from somewhat side on, making the two ramps not appear antiparallel. I'm gonna take some convincing that those aren't two separate images from different angles!

One question: When can we expect colour?

James

Well - First bounce, Lander and Backshell tend to form a fairly large triangle of several hundred metres on a side. If there were a little red graph of Pathfinder bounces in the way we saw one for MERA and B, then one could overlay - but I dont' recall anything like that.

Unfortunately, I don't have the brains to reconstruct one from the PDS EDL data in the Atmospheres node.


nprev - what you're seing, imho, is a bit of a dark patch which is the resolving of a few cobbley sized rocks. The combination of a bright part and a dark part ( i.e. something with relief to it ) in a space where the pans tell us there is nothing that size there.....it's fairly convincing.


I'm fairly convinced there's two obs as well James - I really don't think that's a projection issue - it's a different picture.

Doug

Twin Peaks, Backshell & Parachute, MPF itself -100% crop. (~80% jpeg)

http://www.awalkonmars.com/PSP_001890_1995..._crop100per.jpg

Nico

edit: I just noticed Emily had already provided a somewhat larger crop on the previous page in this thread.

edit2: just for fun, another try at a stereo, based on James' and Doug's efforts.

Good one Doug. I tossed it into Adobe ImageReady for a smoother back and forth.

The lander bounced in to it's final resting place from the east. Rob thinks the first bounce was to the southeast of the landing site, and has suggested that the "Malin Object" we saw from the ground is airbag cover that came of during an early bounce.

After landing, I located all the bounce marks I could see out from the lander to the east. I've looked for these in the HiRISE image, and can't see them. They would be dark spots, more like Spirit's than Oppy's. They must be gone.



Nope, there is only one image of the site to date. The earlier attempt was "lost in translation" such that the only coverage that came from the DSN is to the east and west of the lander. Not over the lander.

I think what you're seeing is a combination of jpeg artifacts and processing/projections done to the two versions of the image you're referring to. When I look at the anaglyph posted above, for example, I don't see sensible relief in the surrounding area, which ought to show up in stereo at this scale.

-Tim.

I can assure you there aren't two images that were received, the first attempt, as tim stated, was lost with problems with DSN. We received only a few channels, and none of them was with the lander included.

As for color, well, that will come with the next image to finish the stereo, which AFAIK, hasn't yet been assigned. The lander was in RED6, which you're probably aware just missed the color strip.

I have to agree. Sojourner is not obvious in pictures I have seen. The best candidate I can see is the bright patch immediately next to MPL. I know that others have stated it may be the airbag, but it seems far to reflective and large for the small amount of airbag exposed. Wasn't Sojourner programmed to approach MPL if it lost communications? Perhaps it is "snuggled" next to MPL waiting for a signal that never came?

No - there really is a big bit of airbag material - with exposed foil etc - just there.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81220_full.jpg
See the glare it produces.

See the foil here..
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/81957_full.jpg

Sojourner is never going to be obvious - it's barely at the resolving power of HiRISE and is going to be a very similar colour to the terrain...much like Spirit is today
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins..._1_True_RAD.jpg

What we DO see with the HiRISE images is some rocks that appear where we expect them to - and then one about Sojourner that is where we don't expect one, in a place where it's entirely possible Sojourner could have driven to.

The sequence was never onboard to actually circle the lander ( as I used to think ) but infact to return to the lander but simulatanious remain outside a keep-out zone. She would probably (given enough time ) have tried to go around the lander anti-clockwise as a result of that. However - she wouldn't have got too close to the lander as the lasers would/should have stopped that happening.

There's no OBVIOUS sign of Sojourner - but that object that does look out of place - and in a spot that is easy to imagine Sojourner getting to - it's the only real candidate if the old girl stayed 'local'

Doug

I'm confused, can someone point to the last known position of the little rover?

If you look at this one..

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d...iRISE_annot.jpg

Sojourner was backed up to the rock called Chimp - centered on about -1X, -10Y on that graph.

Doug

IIRC, the analysis of the Ares Vallis site and the rocks found in the vicinity of the lander were found to be consistent with transportation and deposition of large rocks via catastrophic flood events. At larger scales, the Ares Vallis region certainly looks to have been the site of catastrophic outflow flooding, though it must have happened a long time ago.

However, it interests me a great deal how MRO reveals that the rocks in the "Rock Garden" seem to be defined be the rim of one of the many, many linearally-alined elongated depressions that make up the terrain in the area. And that a majority of large rocks visible in the MRO image are alined along the rims of these depressions.

If many to most of the rocks in the area were washed there via catastrophic floods, why should they appear preferentially along rim crests? From above, a majority of these "rock gardens" seem to have been the rims of the original depressions, which have since been eroded away to leave blocks of the materials that made up the rims.

Unless the *entire* surface we see here was laid down by catastrophic floods, down to a depth of several meters, then it seems to me that the rims of depressions in the ground ought to be made of the materials that pre-dated the floods. Which means that the surface that was flooded was already made up of rocks with a seemingly wide variety of types and formations.

So, by the process of elimination, we seem to have two different possibilities: either the entire surface at Ares Vallis (and, by extension, at other catastrophic outflow channels on Mars) is made up of rocks and fines deposited there by the flooding event(s), or the original terrain that was scoured down to what we see today was already composed of all different types of rocks, from frothy and andesitic lavas to sedimentary and conglomerate rocks.

Interesting...

-the other Doug

Yep. Here is the last end-of-day view (planet day 80), as well as the last view from Sojourner on planet day 81. Planet day 83 would be the last regular day of the MPF mission, and Sojourner had just finished up its APXS study of Chimp, but had not yet moved.

Replying to dvandorn,

Another possibility is that the old water-deposited stuff (from events more like giant mudflows than rivers, and some espouse a glacial origin as well) has subsequently been peppered with many small impacts, and the blocks are really just ejecta. I never believed the identification of imbrication in these rocks. So I think Rock Garden is a small blocky crater rim.

Phil

there are several things I can't understand:
- why aren't Spirit and Opportunity experiencing same dusty-doom of MPF? (or vice-versa) Isn't MPF landing site not windy at all?
- are currently Spirit panels in such a condition of the linked image???
- If NASA knew dust would at last stopped solar panels from working, why didn't they design movable solar panels, which can be folded in the original position and the unfolded again? This wuould have easily removed dust from panels surface!

And, where can I find an annotated image of MPF landing site?

I found a Sojourner route map:
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/roverview/table.html

And here it is a full annotated panorama (from same site above).

Pathfinder was killed by battery failure. They tried to get it to run directly off the solar panels (rather than from the solar panels to the battery), so that it could at least work during the day, but it didn't work. When Viking 2 died, it was similar - in this case, the RTG was still putting out power, but the battery failed. Power went from the RTG to the battery to the spacecraft, and attempts to run directly off the RTG failed. If you look at pathfinder's pictures of the solar panels taken just before it failed, they still look clean. BTW, that pan has some labels, although some features, like mini-matterhorn, located at the rightmost part of the pan, next to the edge of the airbag, are not listed.

My 2 cents about possible final sojourner location.

Which bit do you think is sojourner?

Doug

I'm donloading the TIFF version of the image...
But from jpeg version I obtained this image.

Given that stero pairs allow a virtual resolution increasing and that TIFF are less noisy, I think Sojourner could perhaps be found by comparing 3d panoramas to 3d orbital photos (3d allows better association between objects in panorama and objects in aerial map).

BTW: why is the lander so bright? Shouldn't it covered with dust too??? Not airbags perhaps, but at least ramps and Sojourner original location!

Was the lander affected by battery failure, or the rover?
Maybe Sojourner is STILL rolling some kilometers away from lander, having lost its way???
Is this theoretically possible??

Sorry, jumpjack, but Sojourner was much smaller than your size of 3 by 6 pixels. It is only about 1 pixel wide. The double line you show for the ramp is too wide as well. I think Tim Parker's identification is most likely correct.

Phil

Ops, you are right, upper left "ramp" is actually an airbag, as per this attachment!
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&id=8990

Where can I download from thee two images used for this animation?

The overhead projections are from the Planetary Photojournal.

Doug

which post are you referring to?

Mabye IR will solve this issue!

http://science.qj.net/MRO-finds-Pathfinder...pg/49/aid/79098

What are they talking about? Where do they think Sojourner is??

That is a little missleading.

HiRISE is 10 x 2000 pixel wide CCD's to make 20,000 pixels wide. The middle two of these are also replicated in the Near IR and Blue/Green - so giving a false colour 4000 pixel wide swath down the middle of HiRISE images. It is not at higher resolution though - it is the same res as the rest of the instrument. They missed Pathfinder with the colour first time around, but I am sure they will have another go at it.

The idea is that while everything looks very 'similar' in the normal red channels - perhaps the lander and sojourner will be a little more forthcoming with the nIR and B/G channels.

Please look at the rest of this thread and the HiRISE website for their preliminary location identification which is already very compelling given the fact that there is a roughly sojourner sized feature at a space where no such feature exists from the Pathfinder surface imagery.

Doug

Yeah after my last post I went and made an anaglyph of the whole region with both jpg/tif and jp2 coverage and couldn't really convince myself that there was any stereo, so fair enough it's the same image. I did have to do quite a bit of streching to get the images to overlay so clearly one had been projected differently. I'm still really surprised at how different the lander looks in each image though.



Ahh so you missed the lander with the colour this time, I wasn't aware of that, thanks.

James

".. Power went from the RTG to the battery to the spacecraft, and attempts to run directly off the RTG failed."

Actually, as I understood it, the RTG system was putting out it's constant 50 or so watts of power, but *DOING* anything useful, most specifically playing data back off the tape recorder or taking a real time image AND transmitting the data and doing spacecraft housekeeping, took more power than that 50 watts (or whatever). The battery couldn't buffer the surge in power demand, so the spacecraft had an instant "brownout" drop in voltage and safed itself every time they tried to do something. They turned off the vehicle's transmit mode to the last surviving orbiter (both direct-to-earth transmitters had failed), which shortly after ran out of attitude control gas and was turned off too. End Of Mission, with or without battery failure.

I *think* Pathfinder died while they were trying to configure it for a no-battery mode, and the software they uploaded wasn't really ready... some capabilities they were planning to put in weren't there yet or something, so they uploaded a "beta" version when it became an emergency. The expectation was that it wouldn't last long due to damage from deep thermal cyclling even if they could get it into a no-battery mode, but they were hoping for days or even weeks.

It's unlikely the rover went that far. It would have bumped into rocks and probably <i presume> gone into safe mode and hollered "Mama!", and gotten no answer.

The rover was programmed to - after a while - backed up to where it last had succesfull comms with the lander. If that failed - it was programmed to drive back toward the lander - but also maintain a keep-out zone around the lander. This would have resulted in the rover heading back toward the lander ( a fairly clear route that indeed includes the spot where we think we see Sojourner ) and then probably turning right and circulating that way until its position knowledge would drift and it would start roving just about anywhere.... the 'return and circle' sequence didn't actually exist per se.

I'm fairly confident that Sojourner could very easily have got to that point we see in the HiRISE images - I can quite believe it got that far.

Doug

Imagine if in next hirise shots we'll se just a single pixel different in each image...
Maybe Sj is circling around the lander since 10 years!
ok, just kidding...

You jest - it would be suprising, but not beyond the realms of possible to see that little feature move. Sojourner is designed to be totally solar powered and did work for about a month with no other power source after its non-rechargable batteries had exhausted. She might be too dusty - and things may be broken inside - but it's plausable that the old girl wakes up every morning, tries a bit of a move, and then goes to sleep with the setting sun. Despite the enormous cool factor - this would also help confirm the current Sojourner feature...rocks don't tend to walk

Doug

Reality to one side - naturally the Romantic in me sees the plucky little rover wandering across the Martian sands, stopping now and again only to admire the view (and because of the darkness at night), wondering why she's not heard from home...

...0.4 m/min for 9-and-a-half-years makes for - a thousand kilometres! Hey, she could be just have made it to Viking 1, or be halfway to Oppy by now.

(Is MSL reading this???)

Andy

Nix, I hope you don't mind my blatant rip-off of your site.

No I don't mind at all, it's quite amusing actually!

What's picture #77?
I really enjoy your work on MPF btw... and glad to see your site growing!

Nico

It is a fragment of an image that would have been very similar to sol 78, but most of it was lost in transmission (I am not sure if this happened between Sojourner and the lander or between the lander and earth).

I'm still wondering how you did those - superb work, a data set that needed a proper 'going over' - and oh boy did you do that

Doug

To tell it the short way, slowly.

To tell it the long way, the first part was figuring out how to put the puzzle together. The images were all transmitted in little subframe chunks, with the exception of four large images. Those four images all had areas that were horribly overexposed in some of the colors. Then I picked an image to use as my standard (after converting everything to 16 bit). I did my best to tweak the brightness and contrast of the other images until they matched. Also, in a few of the images, I had to correct for shadows moving between the framlets. In some of the very underexposed framelets, I had to do a lot of noise reduction, and I had to adjust the color to correct for the fact that there was an annoying "glow" in blue that skewed dark areas. Once this was done, I re-aligned the color channels. Most significantly, the green channel.

Doug, I think it was you who once asked about making red-blue images and chucking the green channel. This does not work well, because the CCD had far more green pixels than anything else, so the already really bad resolution gets worse. However, there was an annoying echo in the green channel, which had to be reconstructed for each image, and then subtracted. I greatly smoothed the color data, using photoshop's smart blur so as to blur together groups of pixels without bleeding occuring between the surface and pieces of the rover.

I wish I couldh have automated the process of cleaning and aligning the channels. However, nearly all the mosaics of framelets only cover a fraction of the CCD, and there is no information on the PDS cd to indicate where on the CCD each one is from. Since the severity and the direction of the distortion varies throughout the image, one had to manually assess the situation for each image.

One problem was the fact that the camera used some type of auto-stretching. So, if there was a glint off a piece of a rover in an image, the surrounding area would be nearly black. Then, in the next image, with no glint, it would be a nice, bright, well exposed image. With no guide to calibrate the rebalancing process, a lot of guesswork was required. Also, because the bright areas were totally saturated (most of the time), it required a lot of guesswork to reconstruct the greyscale to match other images. Often, pieces of the rover were washed out in some of the channels. That is why color varies in some of the images...a standard was really hard to find.

Soon, I hope to do the much easier task of working with the front camera images.

Thanks for that The real pity is that they didn't get a GOOD colour image of the lander. A few nice B'n'W ones - but not a nice colour one really.

Doug

I don't think it ever got ANY color images of the lander.

Hmm - I'm sure I remember an image that showed a bit of egress aid - but now I'm not so sure. Maybe an overactive imagination coloured in a greyscale one.

(edit...

Perhaps I thought it was this one - http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfr-m-rvr...lr/r1557518.htm

but looking at your work - it's just bracket )

Doug

I have seen that identified as the lander. However, here was Sojourner's orientation that day (and it didn't move much on the sols immediately before or after that):


And here is the view from the front camera:



As you can see, there is no way that could be the lander.