FWIW I should have gotten a screen capture of it..when attack was finally over the home page was replaced with a web page with a black background and a small turkish flag at the top of the page.
a quote saying something like "Nasa got pwned" and a few other words... and a hotmail address...

Quick look...

Click to view attachment

I don't know if I have missed the central section of this mosaic, I'm still trying to get my head around the Phoenix data. If anyone can find it let me know.

Also as I mentioned in the SSI reference thread, there is a inconsistent offset between the pointing of the filters in some images so the full resolution image is a little hard on the eye in places. Fixing this in my processing software will take some work.



James

I don't think anything was missed, there are a lot of gaps.

Click to view attachment

You can really see how much of this area has been disturbed by the thrusters. Some of the rocks have been rolled and can clearly see the marks they left.

Is it possible these (in my red circle) cracked apart from what had been one (ice)rock? The body countours leading to the clean 'fracture' surfaces appear to match well. Could the combination of the rocket's temperature and thrust have both moved the rock, and then also cracked it apart? That group certainly looks curious. It's as if they moved, then popped, then landed, then got some more debris washed up against the bottom edges while the new surfaces somehow remained pristine.

Click to view attachment

Sudden, unlikely idea - the lander isn't sinking, is it?

(I imagine that powdery soil covering the icy layer is sufficiently solid when packed together, so sadly I doubt Phoenix really is going to take a subterranean voyage of perhaps several centimetres...)

Hmm. I wonder if the team would appreciate a sort of "best off the web" presentation every once in a while.

Try sol 3, ActID 1163, as well as sol 5 (1170) for the left workspace. The sol 3 set was a different objective and filter set, so I'd expect to see it repeated, but a repeat is obviously not the highest priority.

From the RAC thread, but replying here since it's not RAC images.

Confirmed: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/06_01_pr.php
Provisionally named "Yeti". Guess we aren't the only ones who think it looks like a footprint.

before: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1009.jpg
after: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1114.jpg

Not enough filters yet to get a color "after" image, but there is both left and right.

It sure seems to be composed of something less dense and lighter than the other rocks as the decent thrusters exhaust sure moved it around a lot more than any other rock I have seen. Maybe composed of something lighter like ice? The right edge of the bigger "Rock" (far upper left in the photo you referenced) sure does look like it has recently been broken (see close up below) as seen by the soil removal patches along the top sharp right side edge which have revealed the lighter interior colour.

Recent broken edge?:
Click to view attachment

Quick animation of the "yeti" arm touch site. Alignment isn't perfect and the lighting is very different, but you can see some pebbles get pushed around (especially up and to the left of the print), and a large stone is completely submerged.
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll223/r...rs/yetianim.gif

welcome, other newcomer, i agree

The outlined area appears to have been compacted. Is this just settling or did the arm make contact?
Click to view attachment

I'd love to know what the science team make of the smooth rounded "pebbles" in many of the images of the landing site.

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1516.jpg

Hey Sunspot, here is a color version (enlarged toward solar pannel)

I also noticed that a pebble (at approx 5 hours) has been pushed down or has been scratched. By any mean, it's no longer visible at the end. You can check it out also in reed's before/after post. My take : I do not feel it has been pushed down but get spread instead. Would have been much a clod that a pebble thou.

Alan, I'd guess that this area might be a border between polygons.

--Bill

Ditto about the pumice-stone-like rocks on the same image (top left)....
Or any of the knowledgable members here ?

To my eyes the pumice looks like indeed volcanic pumice. The other pebbles are all smooth, I suspect that is due to being moved around by the co2 frost over millions of years.

Hi all, I've made a little animation showing the scoop that was made at the bigfoot site. It's strange how the bigfoot feature is not really visible post-scooping. There seems to be a lot of shifting of material in the regions surrounding where the arm is actually making contact. Does that tell us anything about the composition? It seems to me like it acts more sandy (squishes) than dusty (compacts). Is that intuition correct on Mars?

Nice. I get the impression that the scoop does a surface contact test proximal to then distal of the region to be scooped prior to performing the scoop. Seems like a nice solution for validating the surface geometry and arm placement prior to committing to the (otherwise blind) scoop operation.

It seems a surprise teleconference for reporters is being held today, I was under the impression the next briefing was Tuesday....

Mars Phoenix Lander Media Telecon Scheduled for June 2
May 30, 2008
NASA and the University of Arizona, Tucson, will hold a media teleconference at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) on Monday, June 2, to report on the latest news from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission.

The next televised briefing is not before tomorrow, but I just checked the NASA TV schedule and it looks like they're actually not doing another one until Wednesday -- timed, I am sure, to discuss the first delivery of samples. If everything goes well, yestersol was dig and dump; tosol is sample acquisition; tomorrow is sample delivery; so they should be able to confirm that on Wednesday.

In the meantime they're doing phone briefings for reporters. Not a surprise; they announced today's last week. Over the weekend UA conducted two, which were basically conference calls, pretty informal. Today's is being done by JPL, more formal. I have the call in number (the person who gave it to me clearly had to go away to consult someone to make sure I was a Real Reporter -- glad I passed the test ) so I'll be posting about it later.

--Emily

I've understood it was planed not surprise. I hope Emily will report right away as she did on Saturday

Sigh... typical... it's my astronomy society monthly meeting tonight! Great timing! Oh well, I'll look forward to catching up when I get back.

Just wondering... is anyone else struck by how exciting the Phoenix mission feels? I'm not sure if it's because the team are doing such a FANTASTIC job of getting pictures online - almost in realtime as they download - that's making me feel such a part of it, or if it's knowing that Phoenix is not an open-ended mission, that it is literally on a deadline, that's making it so energising. I just have a feeling of "every day counts", you know? I mean, Spirit and Oppy are marvels, but somehow we've come to think of them as immortal, as proven by the fact that we even seriously discuss Oppy travelling to Ithaca. Phoenix is different, it's going to be killed by ice and cold and darkness, we know that and know there's no getting around that.

Exciting times... exciting times indeed... Can't wait for the press conference reports!

I agree but Stu, you've got to confess that you too think that she'll may be wake up after winter
Very exciting times for sure and I was myself caught by surprise regarding how much this mission is dynamic.

Sounds like someone watched the press briefing on the recent supernova...

I do like that there's a lot "new" about this mission - exotic location, ICE!, ability to actually pick up bits of Mars and do stuff with them, 24-hour daylight, seeing the image of the lander as it was coming in, being able to look under the lander, the wind gauge, etc. It does feel more than "just another mission."

I read an interesting few paragraphs in a post entitled "Phoenix: Good News/Bad News" in the Martian Chronicles yesterday (or possibly in a link from that post).

What the paragraphs said was that mistakes had been made in commands sent to Phoenix. The mistake made was to instruct Phoenix to re-photograph an area that had been photographed on a previous day and to not photograph an area that it had been intended to photograph on that day. This could be the reason for there being a missing section in the centre of this mosaic.

The reason given for this mistake was (to me) very interesting. What it said was that when MER is asked to take photographs the commands sent are relatively simple. However, the commands sent to Phoenix are in the form of executable code. The author said that although someone checked these commands the increased complexity made errors slightly more likely.

These paragraphs have now been deleted from the blog. I guess that this was because they were dwelling on mistakes that had been made. However, it has not reduced my admiration for JPL engineers who seem to almost always write software that works first time.

I wish that there was more information on the web about JPL software. I would love to find out more about the Spirit SOL 17 software bug.

Stu, I must shamefully admit to having feelings that might be similar to yours. Suddenly, the rovers seem like old hat. Granted, not a lot is happening with them right now, but I never thought anything else would seriously diminish my interest in their daily schedules. Well, Phoenix has! And digging turns out to be just as exciting as driving, that's a surprise to me.

Sorry MERA and MERB!

http://www.klabs.org/richcontent/MemoryCon...irit_mishap.htm

Thanks. This answers questions that were not answered by "Roving Mars" or by a "MER" press conference that discussed the bug.

Does anyone know whether the early "MER" press conferences can still be downloaded from the internet? The only press conference I have ever been able to download was the one given just after Opportunity reached Victoria crater.

I guess it's still on on Mark Lemmon blog: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/blogsPost.php?bID=202

One last comment on excitement vs nostalgia. Spirit and Opportunity are feeling a bit like the older Indiana Jones of the most recent movie. As he said in the first movie, "It ain't the years - it's the miles." They've had quite a career of exploration and they still have a few tricks up their sleeve, but they're familiar and we know their "moves." Phoenix is Mutt - just starting out, unpredictable, and has a lot of adventures in store!

You are right. My mistake. I just could not find mark Lemmon's blog when I looked for it today.

Today's meeting is there (MP3) : http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/audiocl...econ-6-2-08.MP3

A couple of rough color mosaics:

Anyone care to guess as to the type of swiss cheese rock pictured in the second picture?

DIBS ON SWISS!

From looking at other pictures, It could be basaltic with all of those vesicles. Can Phoenix do remote spectroscopy of rocks?

Here's mine http://s289.photobucket.com/albums/ll223/r...t=yetianim2.gif

It looks to me like the top part of yeti gets covered in material dug out but not picked up by the scoop. It is interesting how far away from both the touch and scoop you can see things disturbed.

That sounds about right. More than likely basalt.

Thanks to Mark I've filled in the missing bit in yestersols pan with the sol 3 data, and extended each side with the sol 7 stuff.

This isn't that great, but it's late. The shadows are quite different between many of the frames making things difficult for my software. And I still haven't had a chance to implement a fix for the misalignment between some of the filters.



Note this includes the disturbed regolith from the first scoop.

James

Just to be perfectly clear... ... I absolutely do not feel like the rovers are "old hat"; I was just saying that there's a different - I hate the word but I'll use it - 'vibe' to this mission, a thrilling and enthralling sense of urgency if you will. It's like watching events through a window, but the events you're seeing are speeded up, taking place in a bizarrely accelerated timeframe. Strange, maybe it's a familiarity-breeds-contempt kind of thing, but every morning when I get up and get ready to go to work I can click on the Phoenix raw images and know I'll be seeing something brand new and possibly exciting, too. When I go to the MERs' raw images I know I'm going to be greeted with images of familiar scenes, with subtle differences. That doesn't mean one is better than t'other, but there's certainly an on-a-rollercoaster feel to Phoenix...

EDITED : WAY much better report by Emily there : http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001490/
(I guess, next time I'll just listen and read Emily's )

Here is what I've got from the teleconference of today.
Do not take this for granted since my understanding of English is what it is !

Back-up filament in TEGA works as the original one (now shorted) and as expected
TEGA is nearly fully open (see Doug post)
Soil is crumbly with a light tone bed in the trench
They will take 3 samples near each others to "feed" the 3 instruments with alike soil : TEGA, Microscope, didn't get the 3rd one
Ray said that there's a nice trail of white material at the deapest part of the dig
First sample will be delivered to TEGA on sol 9-10 if TEGA confirm it works ok
The foot print shape is a coincidence : the press was on a slope so one side pressed more than the other
What's happening today? Stereo of Holy Cow, further retract of TEGA, remote sensing atmosphere
They want to take pics at different time of the day. They'd like the arm shadow on Holy Cow for better ???. They will take a pic at around local midnight
They will be able to reconstruct the forces that have been needed in the arm to dig; they didn't look at the telemetry yet.
TEGA analysis is a 4-5 days process depending how long they pose between the different heatings
No more arm tests will be done : they are ready to go.
What they see from the ground is what they were expecting from orbital analysis. Nevertheless, they think they are in the ejecta of Heimdal so the place could be an unique environment
Regarding temperatures, they see a rapid change during afternoon (?) partly due to the lander itself. Peter said that if you were standing on Mars your feet would be cooler than your head by 20°.

Another media teleconference is scheduled tomorrow

Does anyone else still get goosebumps from seeing NEW SHINY SOLAR PANELS against a Martian background?
It's been a while since the twins have been showroom fresh

New images are coming down. Here's an even nicer shot than before of scoop, soil, and DVD in one picture.
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?...2266&cID=38

This looks like a long-exposure shot of Holy Cow, to get a better look at the non-bright terrain under the lander....
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?...2275&cID=38
and here's a short exposure view
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?...2289&cID=38

And climber: please don't stop posting your version of events. I'm constantly being distracted and missing important details -- other sets of ears are very valuable!

--Emily

Emily, any idea what this and similar images are? Been thinking it's a shot of Phobos in transit, but not sure if it's even visible from Phoenix's latitude; IIRC, both Phobos & Deimos are in near-equatorial orbits.

They're atmospheric observations, either pointed at the Sun or for figuring out dust in the atmosphere, but I don't know specifics about what they're for or what exactly they're supposed to be looking at when they're not Sun-pointed. Clearly the auto-stretch algorithm is doing bad things to these images. You can tell from the pointing information on the annoying flash popup caption that they're not pointed at moons -- as you say the moons are equatorial and very low altitude so to point at them Phoenix would essentially have to point at the horizon (elevation ~0), and these have much higher elevations, in the 30s and 40s.

--Emily

Got it; thanks!

Yeah, I'm not wild about that pop-up caption feature either; would rather have stable text al a the Cassini site.

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_2267.jpg

*tsk tsk* Phoenix sure is messy. Now it is dropping dirt on the DVD.

Oh, well spotted, VP! Hope we get that in color soon.

I think the whole deck is going to be very dirty by the end of this mission!

--Emily

So, not only are our names on Mars, but now Mars is on our names...