In the latest exquisite super-res, are we looking at rocks dipping as evidence of a geological unit, or are we looking at evidence of deposition in a flowing medium?

This looks s-o-o-o like the Pathfinder site!

By the way, if you want to use this on your site, as long as I get credit for the super-res work, you are more than welcome to use any of the images in color mergers, of if you want to try to improve on them. This goes for anyone.

Hi,

Not really. All of that stuff was made from grayscale images with altitude converted to image brighness. Vista Pro is able to read this and convert them internally to a terrain model. So does Terragen or 3DStudio.

I just do some image searches in Yahoo or Google for "Terrain"+"Model"+"Dem"+"Mars" and find the stuff there.

A good starting point is the Celestia Motherload and the Bump Maps avaliable there. Some are of very good resolution.

Anyway, the 3d stuff in my site is just for fun What i really like is taking images of Mars with my webcam !!!

Thank you! I'll look into that in the future. Let's see if some more super-res images appear in this thread !
I'd prefer to put a link to the original BW images, besides giving proper credit. Are you going to put this work on-line ?

About the 6 bit images: Gain and offset do make a difference. It's possible to have a high S/N ratio even with 64 levels if you assign them to digitizing a small part of image brighness range. This way the sky area might be clipped but the full avaliable image dinamic can be used to record all the brightness variation of the rocks.
I used to to the same when imaging the planets in 1997 with an old Logitech Quickcam (BW, 6 bits, parallel port camera) webcam and a small telescope...

reply regarding Mars DEMs (Bob's question): the full Mars Global Surveyor MOLA data set is available in gridded format - DEMs - at this page:

pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mgs/megdr.html

look down the page... you get data at different resolutions, from global DEMs at 4, 16 and 32 pixels per degree to 'tiled' versions (global data split into sections, with maps showing the tile pattern) at 64 and 128 pixels/degree. One degree is 60 km, so you go from 15 km/pixel to 500 m/pixel.

Each dataset is in 4 sections... areoid, counts, radius, topography. You want topography for visualization work. The .img file is the data, the .lbl file is a text file giving details including the .img file dimensions.

Bob - I know that image looked as if it showed layers, but I'm not convinced they are real. But if mapping showed consistent trends I might change my mind.

This 'open source' image processing is great!

Phil

Yes, I eventually plan to put some of them up. But I am just really impressed with your colorization of that image...I have been trying but can't quite replicate. I agree about 64 levels IF most of the levels are pretty close together. When the Viking images were coverted from 8 bit to 6 bit for transmission, they tried to maximize use of the levels. Some images suffer more than others.

Similar issues with MER to some extent, Pan/Haz/Navcam take images at 12bit, and that gets converted with a lookuptable to 8bit as a form of compresison for transmisison.

Doug

Here is a super-resolution image of Big Joe, a more familar Viking scene. I had to be careful, as late in the mission, there were some changes in this area, which would have really screwed the image up.



Here is my attempt at colorizing it using lower resolution data:

Some hints:

After you have your raw color image, go to the "channel mixer" and adjust the source/output channels % to correct the filters vs human vision response

Create a copy of this image. You'll do doing further color adjustment to this version, but will need the original to get good luminance data.

Get a reference mars image from the MER rovers with apropriate illumination and rock/sand distribution and amount of sky visible. Select areas on both images on wich this elements are represented on equal amounts. The use the "Match color" command to match the Viking image to the MER one. This part is trial and error and requires some experimentation with the selection areas. The colors will eventually match, but the contrast on the resulting image will be low. This is OK, because this is just color data to paste over the original image. It's important to keep the visible part of the lander unselected, as it will fool the matching process.

Select the new color image and paste it on to a new layer over the original. Put the layer as "color" and 100%.

That's it for the most part.

If needed you can play with the levels and adjust the image some more, but the processing I described gives good results and corrects most of the bluish hues from the sky and lander.

Hope this helps ;-)

I'm working now on super-resolution compositions myself, after seeing the latest images posted in this thread !!!
This is a 3 monocrome images + 2 color images super-resolution image I'm testing with.



It looks more and more like Pathfinder...

The reference image thing would help. I think a lot of my problem is that I tend to oversaturate or make the image too red or not red enough.

That's because Ares Vallis and Chryse Planitia have a lot in common -- both appear to have been carved by catastrophic flooding events. Such events pick up rocks, carry them along for up to hundreds of kilometers, and dump them out in characteristic ways, which are visible at both sites.

The problem, of course, with that is that both sites are littered with rocks picked up somewhat randomly along the flood path, so the surface rocks don't always particularly correlate with the underlying geology. But for a good (if somewhat random) sampling of diverse rocks from different landforms, they were both good landing sites.

-the other Doug

Here's the MER image I usually use as reference:



Hope it helps!

I have tried with a new super-res version of the crater pan. The color for this area is a bit easier in that ther is a good, high resolution, tricolor image set to use. Does anyone know if this crater has a name?

Beautiful picture, but the crater doesn't have a name. Viking had local names for rocks, but never got into the frenzy of naming we have seen in more recent missions.

Phil

A slight revision.

Very nice !!!
It's a very good image. Lots of details and color variation on the rocks.

I've taken the liberty of adding color to your BW super-res image of Big Joe. Not that your color version wasn't ok, but I do prefer a darker image. The basaltic rocks on earth are very dark ;-)

So here's my version. Please notice that I've also mixed the luminance from the color image with the super-res, to balance the lighting angles and overall contrast. This makes the image look a little out of focus, but helps to get natural colors.

At least to my eyes it look as I'm looking at a basaltic rock covered in sand ;-)




Just one more thing regarding processing: adjusting the luminance image levels in LAB gives better results than in RGB. The colors remain constant and don't tend to saturate

Is there a list of named Viking lander rocks anywhere? There's not much online.

SFJCody asks:

"Is there a list of named Viking lander rocks anywhere? There's not much online."

I will be compiling maps showing these names in my *next* book! (now I'm doing this for all lunar locations) - but there is no online list I know of. But you can find them in Jurgen Blunck's "Mars and its Satellites" (second edition) - 1982, Exposition Press, p. 186.

Phil

It's great to see all this excellent Viking related work. A few years ago I laboriously retouched the RGB channels of the sky in the classic V1 'sunset' shot, filling in the 'missing brightness contours', to attempt to synthesize what a 24 bit camera might have shown. I also brought out the marginal detail in the dim foreground, which actually supplies a fair amount of information in similar scenes from both landers.

Don

Great color work 4th rock! BTW, I have begun putting recent work on the web.

http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/viking.html

Phil (or anyone else) - Do you have Tim Parker's color s-rez pan of Big Crater from Pathfinder? I have a black and white version and a color version with labels all over it. But I don't have a clean copy of the color version.

Sorry, Ted, I don't have it. I have the same things you have.

Phil

Great looking! It does need a little "Salt And Pepper" filtering to remove those dark and bright specks.

I assume you split out the luminance channel of the color images to stack with the monochrome images, before recombining, to help sharpen the color images!

There are no color images. Just monochrome images taken through different filters. In the case of Viking, usually the rgb images are of so much lower resolution than the broadband images that they are useless in the super-res stack, but on other image sets, such as Voyager, where the color-filtered images can be just as sharp, they can be added to the stack. I think (and I could be wrong) that, film cameras that were returned (Apollo, Zond) nonwithstanding, the first spacecraft to transmit color images in a single frame will be MSL.

I think you're right. Even the color TV cameras on the Apollo missions were color-wheel systems, in which a wheel of R-G-B filters spun in front of a monochrome vidicon tube. When the image was received back on Earth, it was passed electronically through a set of video generators that combined each tri-color triplet into a single colored TV frame.

I believe the shuttle and ISS are now both equipped with TV cameras that send color frames, and I know they have been using digital color still-picture cameras on shuttle and ISS flights, so MSL won't be the first spacecraft of any type to transmit single-frame color pictures. But I think you're right, it will be the first lunar or planetary probe to do so.

-the other Doug

What about the rear (?) camera on the Pathfinder rover? It was equiped with a color matrix CCD. OK, the images are useless but they are single frame color.

Actually - technically - they were still greyscale - they had filters over individual pixels in a particular pattern that was then reconstructed into colour on the ground - but the images transmitted were greyscale.

Doug

The Pioneer Jupiter/Saturn images were simultaneously obtained Red/Blue two-color images. The light from the lens was split into red and blue channels, I think by a dichroic mirror, and detected in separate synchronized channels

Um.. Application Technology Satellite 3, in geostationary orbit, had a color spin-scan whole Earth weather cam. R/G/B channels. I've never seen tech specs for the camera, but the imags were not sequential, and I suspect the scan lines were not sequential.

Note: ATS 3 was *not* the first spacecraft to take color pictures of the whole earth from geostationary (or near geostationary, I'm not quite sure) orbit.... I'll leave that question for space history junkies to solve...

Ted, 4th Rock, I just gotta say those super-rez colourized Viking images are amazing!! Keep it up and please let us know when you add more images to your sites!

Since no space history junkie responded.. for your erudition:

In around 1965, the Department Of Defense Gravity gradient Experiment was launched into geostatoinary or near geostationary orbit. (before ATS-1 with it's black and white camera)

DODGE was a small engineering sat that extended a mass on a multi-meters long boom toward the Earth and then attempted (successfully) to stabilize itself with the weak gravity gradient present in high earth orbit. It had a black and white slow scan (or some such) TV camera with a 3 position RGB filterwheel that it used to monitor the dynamics of the boom and gravity gradient mass. The Earth provided a geometric reference in the background for the observations and by aligning successive images, they produced fair quality color images of the whole (except poles, which are beyond the horizon from geostationary orbit) Earth.

National Geographic had an article with a sample of the images, probably some time in 1965. After the much better ATS-3 color images and the images from Apollo, the DODGE pictures were instantly forgotten.

I guess the DOD bit means we will never see data for it - but the grav-grad stab technique is one being used quite a lot now - the comms sats of the type that recent Darpa misison tried to rendezvous with use one, which doubles as an antenna I believe. Some Cubesats use them as well

Doug

It's a lot easier to do gravity gradient stabilization in low earth orbit.

I suspect a lot of old stuff like this was never really "archived" in the first place. Analog tapes were expensive and tended to be recycled, or if hanging around years after a project was done, and were an obsolete format, got dumpstered.

Believe me, you aren't missing much with the DODGE photos. As I recall, in the Geographic article they all looked like Jackson Pollock paintings.

<grin>
At least they're better than the Luna-3 farside photos.... though to give the mission credit, those pictures were supposed to be the "contingency" transmission, and apparently something failed before the spacecraft got closer to Earth for the primary shorter-range transmission (according to the old Sky & Tel Atlas of the Lunar Far Side translated from the Soviet Luna-3 report.)

This was mentioned in another thread, yet I'll add it in here to consolidate within this topic. I have a few links to some Viking Hi-res mosaics on my website at this URL:

http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/viking.html

The reproduction on that page is rather low quality of an early version, while following through the links goes to the later, high quality mosaics. I'd have to confess to some bias here, but I'd venture to say this is an example of some good early processing of the images that was not much in the public eye in the late 1970s when I had the pleasure of working on Viking (Aug 1976 - Mar 1977). One idea for improving them today would be to add the low-res color information to the hi-res black and white.

Just discovered some close competition! Not from GEO, but the rather strange high northern hemisphere apogee Molniya orbit... ...I wonder which took the pictures *first* - DODGE or Molniya-1?

The Soviet Union used a constellation of satellites in Molniya orbits, with a low southern hemisphere perigee and a high northern hemisphere (ie slow-moving against the sky) apogee for many years for internal satellite communications - it suited their largely high-latitude location very well.

The Molniya photos actually came first -- the Soviets released at least one black-and-white one from one of their first Molniyas in late 1965. However, it only showed about half the Earth, and was almost as lousy in resolution as the DODGE photos. For these reasons, none of these early fuzzy full-Earth photos made much of a splash -- the first one to do that was Lunar Orbiter 1's famous black-and-white photo of the earth from the Moon (which was plastered on the wall of Grand Central Station as a billboard), followed by the black-and-white photos from ATS-1 in Dec. 1966 -- the first really good full-Earth photos.

Surveyor 3 -- thanks to landing on a tilted crater slope -- got some EXTREMELY fuzzy color photos of Earth from the Moon, and even during a solar eclipse! But full-Earth color photography only came into its own with ATS-3 in Nov. 1967.

Surveyor 3 could only see the Earth near the edge of the frame with the camera in the wide-angle zoom mode <they had a 2 position zoom lens on 1 TV camera> It was outside the field of view of the narrow angle mode.

Surveyor 7, at high latitude, had a good view of Earth but had substituted polarization filters for RGB color filters. They took one day's Earth rotation sequence <about 8 or 10 pics> and one image sequence every day throuth the mission, showing gibbous Earth changing to a crescent.

Bruce:

The DODGE image was better than I remembered - I found the article in the National Geographic CD-ROM set, and it's not *too* bad... ...much better than the Molniya picture!

Bob Shaw

DODGE is apparently....still alive....

somebody contact this guy for pics and invite him to the forum!

Some years ago, ATS-3 was still alive, though not capable of pictures. Some high capability HAM operator had some sort of actual permission to turn it's transmitter on and off or some thing.

I followed the link and yes, that guys seems to be DX'ing the old can, amazing!

OK, so it maybe was almost perhaps pipped at the post for the 'first photo from more-or-less GEO altitude' but surely it wins a prize for 'Best Newcomer of 1965'!

I hope we can see some of the images...

NASA Science News for July 11, 2005

In 2008, NASA plans to send a satellite to orbit the Moon: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). As it surveys the lunar surface, LRO will get clear pictures of Apollo relics for the first time since the 1970s.

FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11....htm?list161084

The Science@NASA Podcast feed is available at http://science.nasa.gov/podcast.xml.


So how long did the camera on the Lunar Rover last? How long did they pan around with it?

How long did the ones on Apollo 15 and 16 last?

Were any TV cameras abandoned in place by earlier missions and did they continue to function after the astronauts left?

The rover cameras on Apollos 15, 16 and 17 didn't last very long - I don't have the times in front of me (I have to go home some time) but only a few hours, at most a day or so, after the ascent stage liftoffs. It was overheating that really did them in, not so much battery power.

The earlier Apollos didn't leave functioning cameras, in fact Apollo 12 brought theirs back to diagnose a problem, thereby causing a bag of samples to be left on the moon in its place - the weight and storage was so tight. (samples from Halo crater, if I recall correctly). Now that's a crime.

Phil Stooke

Apollo 15's camera -- which had already developed a problem in its vertical tilt drive, forcing cancellation of plans to follow the LM upwards after its liftoff from the Moon -- overheated and failed just a few hours after that liftoff. However, the cameras on Apollos 16 and 17 worked for at least a week after landing -- and, I believe, for the entire lunar day. In fact, the Apollo 17 camera was used to look for any visible signs of the explosions from the radio-detonated active seismic charges the astronauts had scattered across the lunar surface (they turned out to be too distant to be visible). I can't remember whether the camera on Apollo 16 was used to observe the firing of the seismic-grenade mortar on that mission, or whether the firing was delayed until after the camera had failed.

What I do distinctly remember, from having watched the live TV coverage of those missions, is that they were the only cases we have so far of honest-to-God live 24 frame-per-second video from a spacecraft camera that is nowhere near any human being at the moment -- and there was something distinctly eerie about looking at the cameras panning back and forth to examine the now-deserted lunar landing sites, including the LM descent stage sitting abandoned on the Moon. I wonder whether the coming Mars surface videos from MSL will be as emotionally evocative.

I also remember reading somewhere (maybe the FPSPACE list) that they tried to observe one of the surface impacts of the LM ascent stage but missed it. I do not remember the details, sorry.

Now that would have been quite a sight.

Speaking of Apollo objects left functioning on the Moon, I know that some of the ALSEPS worked until they were deliberately shut off in 1977 to save a few dollars.

Did they detect any interesting impacts after the astronauts went home?

The LM impact would have been visible to both Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 rovers. Apollo 16 would have struck a bit over the horizon to the SW. The rover TV was pointed at the spot in the hopes of seeing a debris plume, but as the LM ascent stage lost control after being jettisoned it didn't impact as expected.

Apollo 17's LM would have struck high up on the hilside south of the rover, easily visible. But the TV camera overheated and failed before the impact.

Phil

Actually, the camera didn't over heat -- the Lunar Communications Relay Unit (LCRU), which handled the camera's signals and generated the broadcast signal, overheated. It was cooled with radiators and beeswax, incidentally.

-the other Doug