Has anyone ever thought "Why didn't they take a picture of... xxx?" during the MER mission? One image that wasn't attempted - and it's always baffled me why not - was a shot Oppy's reflection in the backshell at Endurance. How cool a picture would that have been?! Maybe they didn't want to drive in amongst all those sprinngs and cogs and wreckage (fair enough) or maybe it just wouldn't have worked, technically... not a reflective enough surface or something, I dunno, I'm sure someone will give the specs... but I like to think it would have looked something like this...

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I know this was not feasible, and was considered to dangerious, but like Stu, I would have liked to see a 360 degree full color pan (including deck) over at Oppy's aeroshell and parachute. I just think that bright white chute, and that chared aeroshell would have looked so cool with a rover self portrait and Oppy's arm reached out at it .

Backshell & Chute for me as well. It would have been a two week excursion JUST for pretty pictures (wouldn't get close enough to do the analysis we had at the heatshield)

The self portait would have struggled - I might be able to fudge a simultion from the MER model and the terrain wedge of Navcams from there.

Doug

Now that's something I'd love to see!

Try shaving, using kitchen foil as a mirror

Point taken, but still think it would have been a cool photo. Even if it was just a blurrysmudgeysomething it would have been quite inspiring, I think.

We will have to satisfy ourselves with this "shaving mirror" self portrait:

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And rovers and parachutes don't mix - cool as it would be to see, it could end in tears.

Don't know if you noticed that Stu's image is a self portrait simulation. The MER body looks good to me but the mast looks too solid and clear.

Everyone's a critic...

Just a bit of fun, anyway. Guess I'll just have to make do with MSL taking Oppy's photo when the two meet sometime in 2010...

With the way the MERs are soldiering on, they may someday get to take portraits of each other!

I thought we were going to get Oppy to film MSL`s EDL..

Another catagory could be "Pictures made and then lost" - for example, didn`t Galileo have to ditch a whole Io flyby recording for some reason? (I could be wrong)

In my craziest dream, I want to see Oppy (since she's closer to the North) travels all the way to Phoenix lander the next Martian spring and wakes it up

I sort of wish that Spirit had navigated around to the other side of Bonneville and taken some closer-range images of her own heat shield where it augered into the side wall of the crater. I understand that the crater is just an impact hole into the thicker-than-anticipated lava cap over Gusev's floor, and there was nothing mineralogical of interest in the newly disturbed crater wall, but it would have been an impressive set of pictures.

-the other Doug

Here's an interesting challenge to Astro0's Photoshop skills: "Thu's Dream"
The haunting image of Oppy giving CPR to a frosty Phoenix!

But we had to hurry up and try to get to the Columbia Hills before Spirit died.

It would have been great to have a small camera on the landing platform to image the rover as it first investigated nearby targets and then receded into the distance on its long journey. (I know, a wasteful indulgence.)

Shaka: Here's an interesting challenge to Astro0's Photoshop skills: "Thu's Dream"
The haunting image of Oppy giving CPR to a frosty Phoenix!

Yeh, but Oppy didn't bring any 'jumper leads' with her.

I wish that more low sun gray scale landscape photos were obtained with the navcams. The dramatic quality of significent shadows is well known to photogrophers of nature. How many great photos of terrestrial scenery, especially in deserts, are made with the sun near noon? And yet that is the lighting of the vast majority of the scenery captured by the rovers.
Unfortunately good color panoramas at low sun were impractical due to the apparently long intervals between different filtered photos which cause color fringing in shadows. I don't know what the minimum interval was for obtaining rgb exposures of a given area with Pancam, but grayscale wide angle views were captured in great abundance by the navcam. A time lapse sequence of some dozens of frames showing changing shadows would have been cool.

I would also have liked to have seen more weather photos, although apparently aiming blindly and repeatedly shooting upwards is generally unrewarding. Perhaps coordinating orbital observations of weather systems with the rover imaging team to aim the camera at, for instance, a known location of clouds toward the west at sunset might have resulted in nice color sequences, like the numerous narrow angle color cloud images obtained by Pathfinder. I placed here an impression of how the approaching dust storm may have appeared from Opportunitys location, but an attempt to take an actual panorama of the storm at the right time could have been rewarding. One can dream.

A rare example of the dramatic effects of low sun lighting seen by the 'Spirit' rover can be seen here:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/press/s.../20060501a.html


Don

Are you referring to Orbit insertion? I think Galileo was to Observe Europa's South polar region and do a IO flyby 1st and only during primary mission.

Excellent post and excellent ideas, Don! No criticism of the pictures taken and shared AT ALL, but I often wonder what kind of beautiful images would be possible if the rovers were used a little more "creatively", such as in the ways you suggest. I know, science absolutely has to come first, and - cough - pretty pictures are way down the priority list, but I hope that if the rovers grind to a halt before dying and become static but still operating platforms, as opposed to suddenly going offline without warning, then they'll be used to take more artistic imagery, both for Outreach purposes and to create stunning images that will have a huge impact with the public. The image you highlighted was, I remember, used by several people here to create a truly breathtaking colourised image that is still one of my very favourites.

I agree 100%. Shadown not only enhance the aestetic quality of images but would also allow for a better understanding of the terrain configuration. Unfortunately, late in the afternoon we have the ODY pass and only during the better season can have enough uptime to do some post-ODY imaging. We have done it in special occasions, for example to evaluate the shadowing from Cape Verde at Duck Bay (MER-. This was done in preparation of the rover getting very near to an imposing wall. The other difficulty we sometimes have with low-sun imaging is glare when the camera is pointed near the sun azimuth and loss of detail in the hazcams due to the "opposition effect". This was very visible and a major hassle when leaving Duck Bay.

Paolo

Io pictures were lost (in the sense that they were not taken) to radiation glitches during I25, I31 and I33. Moreover, many pictures were lost during the final orbits due to a saturation problem of an op-amp of the CCD

That's hilarious , I wonder how does Spirit feel when she saw that CPR image

I' m going to add my picture: the underside of the RF wheel on Spirit. By now it might look like this one
http://chris.pirillo.com/_photos/JetBlue%2...ident%20(4).jpg

Paolo

Some more thoughts on this here... don't want to post the whole thing on UMSF, too long, so read if you want to, don't if you don't!

You must stop anthropomorphising spacecraft. They hate that!

I wonder if Spirit dreams of home... and of climbing hills.
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Probably the greatest missed opportunity in spacecraft history would be when Galilieo was not present at Jupiter when comet Schumaker-Levy colided with it in 1994. (Galilieo was a few million miles away still). If Galilieo lauched as planned it would have been orbiting Jupiter when all the comet fragments hit. Could you imagine the photos that would have come out of that?! The pictures from Earth are pretty amazing themselves.

Unfortunety, techincal delays (and the Challenger accident) delayed launch and Galilieo did not arrive until 1995.

It is difficult to imagine Spirit dreaming of that particular hill as home. Nightmare, perhaps.

From sol 11 "Mars and Me" entry:
"One of the project's running jokes crops up at this meeting. It's common for people to hook up their laptops to one of the big projection screens, so we can all follow along.... When they're done, they close the application... and their desktop background image shows instead. Often, this is a picture of a beach or forest or something, and everyone will make a joke about how that's an amazing picture of Mars. It was funny for a while. (This still happens, five years on. Well, dammit, Jim, we're engineers, not comedians.)"

Yes, although what's the betting that Galileo would have been round the other side of Jupiter's orbit at time of impact anyway?
Another "missed" set of photos - the extra pictures from the lost data channel from the Huygen's probe. (By the way, is the data definately not decodable from the carrier recieved from earth - has anyone had a second go at that data?)

I am very regret that we could not see in situ the disintegration of the comet.
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The loss of the probe Contour it was a great loss. Contour was scheduled to visit comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 in June 2006 (HST image obtained in April 2006)

Well, such things happen. But hey, at least we had Hubble on orbit AND repaired by -93 service mission so it was running smoothly and offering great views! Few years earlier it might have been blurrier event for us. And few years before that... no Hubble, no so many large telescopes on the ground either.

Actually, had the comet hit Jupiter 20-30 years earlier (blink of an eye in cosmic scale) we might have missed the event altogether, or maybe just seen the aftermath when only few lucky ones had been watching the planet closely 24/7 and then reporting to others. These impacts on this scale occur once in a millennium or so anyway...

So, at the end, I feel that we were quite lucky and have been and will be witnessing more great moments in space exploration during our lifetime...