Sorry if this was asked before or if it's just a stupid question, but do the photos taken by the rovers have a serial number or any other way of knowing that they were taken in a sequence, without missing photos?

In other words, is there a way of knowing if there are any missing photos?

Thanks.

What do you mean by missing? All of the photos that come down from the rovers are posted directly to the web. Occasionally they only request certain batches of images due to data limitations and others come down days or weeks later, but as far as I know none get lost, and if any do get deleted due to storage space issues or data overwritten, they know which ones. But, that's extremely rare. My point is that if any images were "missing" there would be an easy process for JPL to track down which were missing and what happened to them.

Images are identified by type, time they were taken and sequence that was used to take them. On the marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov there is a link some place that details the description of the filename which contains all this information. Every day we get a list of data products (files) we generate on each sol and at time of scheduling the activities (i.e. before taking the images) we model how many images we can get that day, and set priorities for each DP. When we downlink the data, the images (together with other engineering and science data) will be sent in order of priority. So we know exactly which images we take, which images we should receive and what images we actually receive. Since we gather more data than we can downlink we often take images that we do not actually receive on earth. So in a sense we do skip images, but it is not a random event, and it is under our control.

Paolo

This is the best place to look to see the rover file ID's broken down

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/edr_filename_key.html

Thanks everybody.

I know about the file name identification of time, place, etc., I was thinking about some way of showing to some people that say that NASA does not publish all the images that NASA does publish all images, but for that I would need something like a sequential number of some kind.

If I tell them what RoverDriver said they would talk for months and would probably create a dozen new theories.

Thanks for clearing that up. There's no place for that kind of discussion here, please do not direct such people to this site. Nothing will ever convince them, and those discussions are banned under section 1.9 of the Forum Guidelines.