Over in the Roving Mars IMAX thread the suggestion was made that we should storyboard our own MER movie and show them what they should have done. One of the other writers at the Society is currently assembling an absolutely enormous month-by-month retrospective on the last two years of both missions that probably no one except UMSF diehards will be able to slog through, but you guys should love it. The retrospective will be posted as a news story but what I want to do is to take it and turn it into a feature in the MER section of our site that follows the rovers' missions on Mars from site to site and traverse to traverse. But I'll need some help.

The main help I'm asking for is: how best to split the stories of both rovers into manageable chunks? You couldn't possibly tell the whole story on one Web page; you'll need to divide it, and if you divide it it makes sense to me to divide it based on geography. For Oppy you could begin with the interior of Eagle Crater, (though that might be kind of a big chunk), and then maybe make a divide at sol 57 when she exited, have the next section cover the traverse to Endurance, and then go on to the next section on the exterior of Endurance at sol 95, and so on. I need help identifying good "chunks," and which sols / calendar dates they apply to (and for the technically inclined, a sidebar could list the SCLK and site/drive ranges for each chunk). Then the fun of illustrating can begin. We'll show those IMAX folks what they should have done.


Anybody have ideas to offer?

--Emily

You've got the right idea on Oppy. Here is how I would partition the drama:

1. The Landing and discovery in Eagle Crater.

2. The trip to Endurance, starting with Anatolia and ending with that first view inside Endurance.

3. The exploration of Endurance.

4. The journey southward starting with the visit to the Heatshield and ending with the arrival at Erebus Highway. Mention Purgatory.

5. The circumnavigation of Erebus, with emphasis on the North Erebus dune field and the up-and-around jog around that dunefield.

6. Arrival at Olympia, with discussion of what has been found there. Show that evocative Lookback view towards Endurance, the heatshield glint and the monster dunefield.

7. Hopefully, we'll GET TO MOGOLLON REAL SOON, that is where the story picks up again.

8. Future dreams: Victoria.

And so on with Spirit. The journey to the Columbia Hills was a bit less-interesting, so Landing->Trip to Columbia->the Climb->we saw this->down the hill->Ultreya, the InnerBasin, this is what we discovered->and so on.

Although beaucoup time has been spent at the major sites, most of this time was spent picking through all the puzzle pieces; this can be compressed into a few sentences to make an interesting story.

--Bill

What would also be nifty for us MER-nerds is some kind of hyperlinked index of the site IDs used by Spirit & Opportunity. This would let users jump into the story at the relevant point. You probably wouldn't need to have discrete descriptions of each site ID, maybe group a bunch of realated ones together.

Does such a table or index of what site id is where already exist on the web? Google failed me - or at least I failed it with my choice of keywords...

This would be fantastic, it's a great idea for the MER-nerds anybody want to take a crack at it? Mike Howard's MMB metadata would be an excellent place to start, I think.

--Emily

Well here is my idea of how to divide the story(-ies)

Oppie

“Eagle Crater”
From landing until leaving Eagle crater

“On the plains”
From Eagle Crater to Endurance

“Outside looking in“
From the arrival at Endurance until the entry into the crater

“Inside looking out”
In Endurance Crater

“Heat Shield”
From the exit at Karatepe until leaving the Heat Shield

“Through the Empty Quarter”
From Heatshield to Purgatory

“Purgatory”
---

“Picking your way”
From Purgatory to Erebus

Erebus......


Spirit

“Early days”
From landing through recovery from flash memory problems

“Heartbreak crater”
The trek to Bonneville

“The long march”
From leaving Bonneville until arrival at West Spur

“Northern exposure” (or “Winter on a sunny slope”?)
From West Spur to Larry’s Lookout

“Getting on top”
Larry’s lookout to the Summit

”Downhill”
From the Summit to Eldorado

Home Plate......


As for hyperlinks, clickable traverse maps to jump to the right place in the story would be very nice too...

tty

Are you volunteering? If someone makes the maps for me I can make 'em clickable...

--Emily

Dear Emily,
This notion sounds exciting and long overdue, but I'm still unclear as to the intended breadth and depth of this "retrospective". Is it to cover only visual material or is it intended to tie this together with the other scientific data collected along this Third Millenium Odyssey ? I think the latter would appeal enormously to scientists of every stripe, from the graying ones like me to the nine-year-olds. How wonderful it would be to be able to "stand before" a "true color" 3D panorama of the wall of a crater or hill, to slide one's cursor across it, to see a particularly intriguing-looking rock 'light up', to click the mouse, and begin a journey into that rock.
We see a closeup and read a basic description, we see it brushed and ratted and (if we keep clicking) we can persue a Powerpoint presentation of its spectral and mineralogical properties and their implications, eventually reaching references to the published papers that discuss them, and even a selection of the 'media reports' that followed.
We see a cloud, click on it and begin to learn about the Martian atmosphere, a dust-devil and reach a summary about their observation, timing, track directions, seasonality. Click on that spot in the sky and be introduced to Phobos and Diemos.

The above text may have inspired you and your colleague at the Society to consider resigning and moving to Paraguay, but I hope NASA is cognizant of what it has achieved on mars over the past two years, and also of the potential to present to the world that achievement in a totally novel, unprecedented way. The IMAX folks don't even know the half of it!

I'm waiting for the Jennifer at the MER notebook to pull out the course png's from the mobility reports before I make a series of very very big, very very accurate route maps of the rovers, and actually they'll be split into sections about the same as the suggestions here It'll be a big project, and probably a few months in the making, but it might make a sensible addition to a big mer-report.

I'll probably split them into smaller chunks that a 'tell the tale' story might do however.

As for our own MER movie...well...I've done some technical experiments in to panning around MER panoramas at WMV-HD 1080i resolution. 720p resolution is probably more realistic in terms of platforms that will play it, but it is, again, a huge huge project. I would very much like to put together a little Sol 1000 movie but wouldnt dream of trying to put anything over the web at 720p res. In my mind it goes to specific music tracks, but copyright reasons would preclude me including that, and it sort of ruins the effect

There's so many ways to tell the story, so much story to tell, and so little time to spend telling it

Doug

Whatever our scope is, it's not that broad More seriously, I will basically be starting with a large amount of good text about these journeys, and I want to illustrate and annotate that text with excellent images and other useful facts like site/drive numbers, wheel odometry, etc., trying to come to an even balance between text and imagery, and index it well to make it easy to navigate. Other data is of course valuable in telling the story and especially in explaining the scientific conclusions drawn at each stage, but I'll be the first to admit that I have a heavy bias toward images. I can't really manage much beyond text, images, and creative hyperlinking within the design of our website (or within my own skills), and it will certainly not cover every rock target or every sol. It will be an overview, hitting the high points; the point will be not to get bogged down in the details but instead allow someone who's interested in the mission but not necessarily been paying daily attention to get a solid grounding in the major events, discoveries, and sights seen throughout the missions.

--Emily

If you can pencil in the sol-ranges for each 'section' I'm sure someone ( well, I'd do it ) could produce FHAZ and RHAZ movies for each section in turn.

I showed a little FHAZ movie of the first 495 sols of Spirit at the talk I gave on Wednesday evening, and it got child-like giggles out of these 50, 60+ year old experienced astronomers, they LOVED it

Doug

Fun idea! Maybe what I should do is try to lay out one "chunk," maybe that first one for Opportunity, and see what elements are useful, how they'll fit on the page, etc. I've looked back at the images and I think it would make sense to have the first chunk go through the capturing of the Lion King pan, which would go to sol 61.

--Emily

One of the joys of the present computational era is the availability of (reasonably) large-capacity DVD storage at trivial cost. To send gigabytes of data even by broadband is still a royal pain in the seating department, but popping the devils in the post takes seconds. May I suggest that the way forward for any *serious* presentation is by physical delivery of media? It's no longer difficult to manipulate the images, or to create presentations, yet it really does remain a problem if you want to send anything that's high-quality over the WWW.

Perhaps we could look towards a co-operative DVD creation process, providing a range of skeleton products for use in UMSF-allied presentations? And we're talking full-res, not the stuff that's practical for a website. That's not to deny the WWW a place, but it's clear to me from various recent posts that half the folk who post on here have a commitment to spreading the word, and would enjoy having the means to do so (oh, and BTW, slides still have a charm!).

Bob Shaw

Have you considered following a format like, say, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal? In my opinion, Eric Jones does a fairly good job subdividing the lunar surface EVAs, which are essentially geologic traverses (e.g., see Apollo 16). Of course, the human element of the Apollo missions may not match up to the unmanned MERs but there are parallels, I think. Especially if one factors in MER's "human dimension" (i.e., the scientific planning and engineering/operations).

It's a thought, worth about $0.02

Yes it does, at the MER Analyst's Notebook, up to sol 450 (duh, me)

So I went and compiled the data found in the "Sol Summaries" and "Maps" pages for Spirit ('cause she's my favorite ) into the attached Excel file. Note that I used the alpha designation for site 100+, since it's what we're most used to looking at. I also did not drill down into the position numbers for each site - that would be a good deal more work. Let me know if I made any transcription errors.

This could be a starting point for the hyperlink table I suggested above. If you think it's useful, Emily (or anybody else), I can do one for Oppy as well.

Going beyond Sol 450 will require more grunt work, of course...

Click to view attachment