There was a Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing at 2:00 p.m. EDT. Since I am posting this at 10:39 p.m. EDT you have missed it.

The next scheduled Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing

Live Events, News and Special Event Programs

Edit: People who should know are claiming that both a tues and a wed 2:00 p.m. EDT Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing are scheduled. Apparently you can't trust everything you read on the web. However I have found it is far more accurate than my next door neighbor.

May 29, Thursday at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

May 30, Friday at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

**ALL PROGRAMS MAY BE PRE-EMPTED OR RESCHEDULED WITHOUT ADVANCE NOTICE**

Jack

Just in case you were wondering, How to Read the Phoenix Met Boom...

Simon

What happened to the Tuesday brief?

backshell...

Todays briefing.

**ALL PROGRAMS MAY BE PRE-EMPTED OR RESCHEDULED WITHOUT ADVANCE NOTICE**

Edit: People who should know are claiming that both a tues and a wed 2:00 p.m. EDT briefing is scheduled. Apparently you can't trust everything you read on the web. However I have found it is far more accurate than my next door neighbor.

That's odd. I don't know why the Tuesday briefing isn't showing up on the schedule. There is definitely one planned for 11 am tomorrow. It will be conducted from Tucson, with perhaps one person here at JPL -- the last day there will be any component from JPL (and hence the last day I'll be reporting from there).

There was never going to be another press conference today.

--Emily

OK Now lots of bandwidth will be available for streaming . Thank you NASA public affairs dept.

MPL carried a disk with names, I know -- my name was one of them. But looking back at the time frame, I'd be more inclined to think it was a CD and not a DVD. Or it might even have been a little pack with microfilm in it... but my admittedly imperfect memory is telling me it was a CD.

Whatever happened to MPL, the names on it reached Mars, one way or another. They may not ever be readable, they may be embedded on shattered shards of a disk. But they're there.

-the other Doug

Yes I meant the Phoenix

Sorry all

My bad

-Dave

Thank you I was just wanting some feedback.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what was going on when the HiRISE picture of Phoenix was shot. The planned time of the photo was 23:34:40 SCET. It's really hard to work through the timing issues. I think it was about 2 minutes before landing, but I'm hoping you all can help me to get a better timeline.

Rock? Looks more like a high-speed turtle to me

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-074a

Times in ERT, subtract OWLT of 15m20s for SCET. So chute deploy would have been at 23:34:55 SCET. Of course, since HiRISE is a line scanner you need to figure out the linetime of the line that has PHX in it, not the image start time.

If there are better timings available yet, I haven't seen them.

Here two horizon stretches (both 2:1 ratio):
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
First one (from jg_543.jpg) has azimut between 154° and 218° and show pretty distant hills (crater walls?); I had to remove heavy jpeg artifacts, so image appear a little bit washed. Second one is from S0final.png, so quality is better; narrower azimut range should be between 336° and 352°, based on the following mosaic I made from all vertical projections available:
Click to view attachment
The pushed rock is really intriguing!

Click to view attachment

Eeek! It should be on the schedule! Tuesday and Wednesday. Will check ASAP (and always feel free to contact me or my office if you think something isn't right):
JPL Media Relations

That was teasing me too until I realized (from Alfred) that the very large Heimdall crater is in the background. (distant background). MRO is working on an image update for you all .... More fun to come....

(Did I mention that I love HiRISE?)

I spent the evening with Peter Smith et al in the SOC trying to make sense of the images .... (hint: you can make out more EDL jetsam in the distance)

amazing. What a rush. Plus I found myself surrounded by many of the old Pathfinder science gang! We all look older, but the smiles are just as broad.

-Rob Manning

Hi all

just an idea on "sliding rock" Is there any chance that the Helium venting could have moved it?
Don't if the venting had enough oomf or if it happened it this direction.
Roy

Rob,

It' SO good you're be around posting your thoughts and commenting for us.You're not ONLY good to land spacecrafts on Mars.

Trivial, I know, but I wonder if anyone's thinking about rock/feature names yet.

Here's my take on the color shot of the deck:
Click to view attachment

Nice pic. I was expecting to see lots of vesicles in most of the rocks here a la Viking 2, but there aren't as many rocks of that appearance as I had thought there would be. Maybe the geology of this place is a bit more diverse than Utopia Planitia

I'm in Milano at this time and it's hard to follow the meeting were I am and Phoenix progress at the same time
One collegue brought el "Corriere dela Sera" this morning and I sew a colored picture of Mars showing a deck in the foreground and a nice hill at the background. Also a B&W of Phoenix foot. So, thinking the picture has been release this night I jumped here to check for the nice colored picture and sew "only" a distant hill in B&W. I came back to the news paper and finally recognized Husband hill from Home Plate ... but they never said it was a picture from Spirit on the legend.
I've you seen this Dilo, Ilbaso, others in Italy?
I'm blown away. I thought we had seen everything with MERs, I was SO wrong! And the mission is only starting.
A big thanks to our pictures wizards here

Didn't mean to make you "eeek", Veronica, but thanks for checking!

Anyone know how to decipher the Phoenix image file names? For example:

SS001EDN896305593_10CF0L1M1.jpg



896305593 appears to be the spacecraft clock (SCLK). Not sure about the other fields.

http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/filenames.html

First letter is S, R or O for SSI, RAC or Optical Microscope

The next S is for Surface
The next three are Sol Number ( in this case 001 )
EDN = downsampled raw
then the time, then a _ then the four digit observation code, then a single character for the observation type - leaving us with...

L1M1

M1 means MIPL, version 1

The L1 is the 'eye' and 'filter type'

http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/SSI_filter.html

Left eye - red stereo filter.

A useful tag is that for camera and filter, RA, RB and RC are right eye, RGB.

Doug

Woaw Doug, a big thanks for you. This is exactly that was expected found. About the A, B & C filter, I had actually the sensation that it is RGB filters. Now, I'm sure. It will be easyer to compose color pics, no?

So, here is a try :

Looking at this picture blown up a bit, it looks like the hills have stripes or layers on them, did any one else notice that ?


Hills

Those look like classic binning/compression artifacts to me.

Perfect!--thanks. Was thinking about making a web widget to do the decoding, unless maybe there's one out there already.

Welcome back to the forum, Joe!

I'm really impressed with the data release policy so far. The mosaics on the LPL site were showing up right alongside the raws, and the tags inside the jpg images will be a great tool for working with the raws. Huge kudos to the team for making the effort!

And finally, since it seems to be a regular old-timey color party in here...

No site/drive numbers?

Beautiful job Dan.


Looking at the surface, and speaking to Pete during our Marslive coverage - the surface looks very 'soft'.

Maybe ( and I'm guessing ) we'll have a fairly large layer of dust here - think about the dust falling onto the frost as it forms. As that frost goes away, it will gently drop the dust onto the surface. It'll only have half the time to be blown away during the year, and the frost forming will 'hide' dust from the wind. You know how cocoa powder sometimes barely feels like it's there - soft, fluffy, totally uncompacted. Totally unscientific guesswork, and we'll get answers soon enough I'm sure!

Doug

I hope exploratorium starts carrying raw jpgs for Phoenix in the same way that it does for the MERs. Not that there's anything wrong with the main Phoenix site, I just like the 'one stop shop' aspect of things

Apparently there is a shot of the workspace ready to go up. Can't get the fullsize one though or the article.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/.../testindex.html

That is just MER testing imagery as a stand-in for putting together the website.

Doug

Ah nuts, thought I had a scoop!
Though looking closer at the image, I see it now.

Yeah - I use "ESA" as probably too broad an umbrella title for the PI's of instruments not directly under the control of ESA per se. But I think the cultural difference is an across-the-pond difference. That the PI's are not held to a centralized outreach responsibility is the problem. 'ESA didn't pay for it' as their get out clause. My take on it is this, ESA did pay (and thus I paid), by bolting them onto a spacecraft and flying it to wherever it is going. As such, ESA should command from on high " You want to get on this spacecraft, you better start telling people about what you're doing, regularly, fully and quickly"

The best example of this I've found is Rosetta on the PDS. Alice data is there in full from the Earth flybys and the Mars Flyby. It's the only intrument to have put its data out.

It's good to have your thoughts though

Doug

I just build a windows program to do this. I could share it.

edit: I just uploaded the program here: http://www.olafzalm.nl/mars/
Comments are welcome

What a time for me to have problems in web access...

I have so much to catch up...

Amazing...just fantastically amazing...Phoenix, her images and you guys...just amazing...

Oh, BTW, I've been playing around with the timing a bit more, I think the real time of the observation was closer to 23:36:24 SCET. That translates to 23:51:44 ERT. That would put it right after the legs deployed, heat shield jettison, and radar being activated. Finding it's altitude is a bit more difficult at that moment, but I'm guessing 4 miles or so? Anyways, just thought I'd add this bit of analysis to the mix, thanks to mcaplinger for providing the web site!

I was not aware that the Mars Express team was also going to try to get an image from the EDL phase? I thought that their task was only to relay data.

Can someone tell me where is it stated that they were going for a picture?

See this thread. Could it be false? Well, yah...

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEM3ZB1YUFF_0.html

" It is planned that two Mars Express instruments, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and the Ultraviolet and Infrared Atmospheric Spectrometer (SPICAM), will be turned on for observations during the Phoenix EDL."

Were the images taken, were they succesfull, what do they look like if they were. Someone knows. We don't.

Doug

Well thanks, through the text in that post I got to:
Timeline: Mars Express support to Phoenix landing

So I guess they really tried. Probably they pointed the instrument to the place where Phoenix was really supposed to be and they didn't catch it.

I didn't see the comment here but, my opinion is that we can see one of the legs deployed on Emily's enhance image
Click to view attachment

If I'm correct, the sol1 images included the workspace on the north side of the lander. I'm not sure about the distances, but I expect a large part of these mosaics to be in reach of the arm:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/230713m...0D0E_R111M1.jpg

And the anaglyph which I already linked to yesterday:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/230627m...0D0E_A111M1.jpg

Based on the angles, I estimate that mosaic goes out to about 3 metres.

Why does this rock have so much dust on it?

Click to view attachment

Link to image: SS001EDN896307254_10D0ER1M1.jpg

(It is located close to the "Rolling Rock")

-Mike