http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000934/
and / or
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects...e_20070403.html

I though I'd try and do a visualisation of the data in 3D - so I took the visible band and projected the two orbits worth onto two concentric dognuts around a sphere...obviously this isn't really accurate as spacecraft don't to 360 degrees then hop 15 degrees to one side, but it gives some idea of where the data comes from, all be it exagerated vertically.

Ooh -- funky!

The variation in this particular band is almost entirely due to geometric effects, Tim told me -- it has to do with which direction MCS is looking with respect to the Sun on each part of its orbit. The other infrared bands will have more meaningful detail in their profiles.

If you want to play some more, here are the original plots I was given. They both contain all nine channels, in the order A1-A6 and B1-B3. They both contain the same set of data. The "raw" one is raw radiance, scaled independently, and the "btemp" -- which is the one I used for the writeup -- has all the bands scaled to the same brightness temperature scale.

Have fun.

--Emily