Don't forget

Is it me or are the images from sol 8 (possibly other sols as well) on Phoenix UoA site duplicated?

One might see the dirt on the DVD as a good thing. Protecting it from UV rays would potentially prolong its life. It may actually work if they still have DVD players around in 2020.

Anyway, does anyone happen to have the link to the page where the guy renames the images from the Phoenix website to their product IDs, and zips them up? I'm going to make my own script but I want to catch up. edit: got it, thanks for the PM!

ugorden, and yes, ever since Sol 7 (when the website got hacked) they have been duplicated for some reason (you can do an md5 on similar looking images in sequential order and they're identical). I'm sure they'll work out the reasons for that in due time.

There has been quite a bit of duplication from the word go as far as I've been able to make out.

Didn't get the chance to get, process and upload the sol 8 images this morning so I don't know if the duplication is any worse tosol.

My thoughts on this sudden celebrity status for Phoenix, if anyone has a few minutes to kill...


Click to view attachment

Hehe That is a great image Stu

Haha, Stu, viewing the thumbnail I thought those were spider monsters from Resistance: Rise of Man (it's a videogame). I know, I'm a geek. But that was cute.

Echoing Josh's post, at first glance the thumbnail looked to me like Phoenix was on stage as lead performer in a heavy metal rock band. Bizzarre, I know.

Phöenïx -- the first Martian double-umlaut band.

On sol 5 we had several SSI images apparently showing clouds, eg:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1241.jpg

In this image I can imagine that I see a halo:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1318.jpg
Here I've sketched a segment of a circle to "guide the eye":
Click to view attachment
Can anyone figure out the sun's alt/az at the time that frame was taken? Obviously it should correspond to roughly the centre of the circle I've sketched if this really is a halo.

If I read this right, the image is full frame downsampled, so is almost 14 degrees across, and so the circle I've sketched has a radius of very roughly half of that. Any ideas what angular diameters to expect for Martian halos?

Could someone point me to a good version of the 360 degree pan, (i.e. with the horizon matched up and the darker frames matched a little better than the first jpl version) I have a large format printer ( 60 inch by 100 feet!) at work and would like to print one.

Thanks in advance.

I'd wait - a 16x higher resolution, and colour version, will be following over the next few weeks.

Doug

The image called out looks like a "tau" image in that it looks directly at the sun to quantify the amount of "stuff" in the atmosphere.
if you know how bright the sun should be, what one measures can tell you the amount of material in the atmosphere that is
removing photons from the path between the camera and the sun. "tau" is just the Greek letter that is often used to refer to
"optical depth". The "tailing" structure can be caused by pixel saturation effects during CCD readout.

When sky images are not pointed at the sun, they can be looking at the angular distribution of the light scattered by the dust (or
ice) in the atmospheres...or even just for structure which would likely be clouds (but not always).

Unfortunatley I'm leaving this job in 2.5 weeks, I'll hold up a few days and see if something comes along. Thanks

I definitely spoke too soon on that one. Local time of that "halo" frame was 11:23, so the sun must be just east of south. Alt(az) of the frame was 75(293) degrees, ie very high in the WNW. In other words, that shot ain't anywhere near the sun.

Isn't it fun watching the clouds drift by on Mars, and seeing all sorts of things in them that aren't really there?

Posting this somewhat gingerly, and skirting around that which we're not going back to. With that in mind...

During the Sol 7 briefing, Ray Arvidson was asked if he thought the white material visible in the scoop was ice. He mentioned Kieserite as an alternative possibility, noted that TEGA will show one way or the other, and then said:



(bits in square brackets interpolated by me.) Here's hoping for interesting TEGA results... probably a safe bet

Anyone know if there will be a mp3 file posted for today's phone-in press briefing, as was done for the briefing yesterday? It looks like tomorrow's (Wednesday) press briefing will have video coverage on the NASA TV Media Web feed, but not the NASA TV public channel.

Ron Jones

Yes it should be on the JPL site later today.

Lots of excellent info

I was able to participate today (June 3) and ask a few questions towards the end.

It ran for a full hour

ken

Suppose they see "festoons" in the walls of the trench....

The same pan as yesterday but now with a routine to realign the filters in each image.

June 3rd news briefing (mp3 audio-only) is now up on the JPL web site. Link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/podcast-phx20080603.php

It was longer than for the past couple of days.

is it me?

I am just used to the way the MER program handles images (file names, by sol, by camera, by filter, and a great mirror at the SF Exploratorium)
I am just stuck in my old ways or do the way these images seem to be sorted/presented look a little scatttered?
I see duplicates and such and I just dont grok the system yet?

there... I feel better

No, you're not the only one. I've provided James' download site to a couple of the other press following the mission, because they're having problems finding images and figuring out which sols they came from. I don't think any of us wants to be critical of the mission, as they are rapidly releasing the images, which is the most important thing. But I am sure we all would wish for an interface that was a little easier to understand, like the one on the MER site for the rover images.

I'm working on building some browse pages for James' renamed images. Does anybody here have the ability to write a command-line program that can pull the metadata out of the JPEG image headers for a folder full of images into a text file? Once I have metadata in text format I can nearly automate the building of browse pages. I can get a lot from filenames, but not pointing or Mars time info.

--Emily

It's not command line, but I'll add that feature to MMB tonight. Been meaning to do it for a few days now.

Mike, I'd much rather have a command line program than having it fully integrated into the greatest piece of software ever built for playing with raw mission data.

Just kidding, of course.

--Emily

People keep asking me to ask about power, and I keep forgetting. But Phoenix just Twittered the following:

--Emily

Now that I'm mapping the lg_.jpg images to their product id's, I see that the phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu site seems to be posting many duplicate images. Actually every image is being posted twice at the moment. And some images are posted many times. Sol 3 is a case study... image RS003EFF896489451_11651MRM1 is posted at least 48 times. These are not similar images... they are the same image.

So no, it's not just you...

Adding: And yes, there are a lot of images that just look similar, that comes with the territory. But there are many actual duplicates as well.

I already output a text file with the Product ID, Elevation, Azimuth when I do the renaming (to help me work out how the mosaics fit together). I can easily add in more of the metadata and post this file on my site if needed.

But maybe MMB is about to put me out of business.

I agree about the duplications nearly all are there twice many 4-5 times and that sol 3 one Mike noted seems to get posted every sol!

I write perl scripts like this for $job, so I had a go at it. Here's a script that outputs a tab-separated file (on stdout) with all the comment fields I could find.

http://airen.bcm.umontreal.ca/phx-jpg

Some sample output:

http://airen.bcm.umontreal.ca/phx-jpg-output.txt

Use it like:
cd phoenix/jpgs/
phx-jpg >metadata.txt

If that looks useful, I can make any changes you need.

I sure do. And the same goes for the pristine, dust-free optics on our new girl:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_3059.jpg

How does it work?
I have the following error.

Can't locate Image/MetaData/JPEG.pm in @INC ....................

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Ready to Gather Samples

If you're getting that much of an error then:

ppm install Image-MetaData-JPEG

should install the missing library provided you have a recent enough version of Perl.

The Phoenix lander's first dig into the Martian soil for scientific study was delayed Wednesday because of a communications glitch on a spacecraft that relays commands from Earth to the red planet.


The orbiting Odyssey satellite went into safe mode and failed to send instructions to Phoenix to claw into the permafrost to search for evidence of the building blocks of life, said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

It's the second time a relay problem has delayed the lander's schedule. The first glitch occurred two days after it landed, when another satellite, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, turned off its radio.

Engineers worked to fix the problem with Odyssey, which will remain offline until Saturday, Edwards said. A preliminary investigation revealed the safe mode was probably triggered by high-energy particles from space interrupting the satellite's computer memory.

"The lander is fine," Edwards said.

Phoenix set down in Mars' northern latitudes to study whether the polar environment is capable of supporting primitive life. It communicates with Earth through Odyssey and the Reconnaissance Orbiter, which make daily passes over the lander to send commands and beam back images.

With Odyssey temporarily out of service, engineers told the Reconnaissance Orbiter to be the middleman between the lander and Earth.

Phoenix had planned to dig the first of three shallow pits north of where it landed and dump the dirt into a tiny oven, where it will be baked and studied this week. The earliest the lander can start the excavation will be Thursday, when new commands will be sent up.

Like helvick said for Windows, or 'cpan Image::MetaData::JPEG' on unixy systems. I didn't realize that didn't come with perl. Here's a version that doesn't need any perl modules, but it can't tell the image resolution:

http://airen.bcm.umontreal.ca/phx-jpg-nomod

Well, now that Mike has upgraded MMB to download and rename the Phoenix raw files, and also to spit out a metadata table just for me, I have been able to create one of my usual browse pages for the Phoenix data. Let me know what you think of the layout and organization -- it's very bare bones right now. I can drop the metadata output from MMB into an Excel spreadsheet that automatically creates all the table code for me.

Raw images from the Phoenix mission

Sadly, because I'm going on vacation for a week starting Sunday, you all won't be able to rely on this being updated all next week. But I'll make sure it's updated right before I leave.

I'm aware that there's a couple broken images for a few solar observations; I didn't bother looking in to that because I didn't figure anybody cared about the solars.

I see there's at least one place where SSI and RAC were shuttering simultaneously (or alternately), so the organization-by-activity thing didn't quite work, but it mostly succeeds, I think.

--Emily

Now that we have file renaming by MMB and the browse page from Emily, I'll probably discontinue my raw image page unless there is significant demand for it. It's served it's purpose.

Emily (and Mike),

Marvelous work! Very useful as usual.

The layout is ok for me. Regarding the organization, I would prefer a separate window for each sol and a sol list like this http://www.greuti.ch/phoenix/ (the textstyle data are missing here)

Your site is very useful. I prefer downloading from your page.

Wasn't Phoenix supposed to start on the high res colour pan? I see lots of downsampled pics.

It looks like the same type of sequence that ran on Sol 2 when there were no commands.

Emily and Mike, a great new resource!

I too would prefer "one page per sol" format as it takes a long time to load all the thumbnails for all the sols at once and that will get worse as time goes by; the alternative is to have a big browser cache which gets larger and larger...

I'd be OK with using the filter abbreviations instead of the full names (e.g. R instead of RED etc.); easier to scan in my mind but that may just be me being so used to the MER format although where are those L4/5/6 images?

Also, I think the page might be easier on the eyes with a black background and white text; especially the darker images would look better that way and avoids the visual "glare" of that bright white background.

Nevertheless, almost perfect and way better than any of the alternatives out there - I find that Flash version one particularly annoying.

Airbag

Hmm, with a total black background there would be too little contrast to the pictures. Dark pics would nearly disappear. Any little darker background may be more welcome - however, because I have reduced my screen brightness anyway, white is ok to me.

Mike,
How hard would it be to add a plugin to MMB for creating automatic telltale animations? Give it a start and end date, and it searches for all images matching the telltale azimuth/altitude. (ideally rejecting images below a certain size as possibly corrupt)

Given the metadata, I think somebody could do that with a script. Seems like a good idea.

And lucky for us, there are now several different potential sources for the metadata.

That's a fabulous site, Emily, thanks. I'd only second (or third or whatever) the one page per sol idea. Also, if time permitted, perhaps the option of sorting the images by camera, then by time for each camera, would be nice. And if you really had a bunch of spare time on your hands, applying colour coding in some way to indicate the filters/LEDs would be a treat...

A color mosaic using red and 4x4 binned green and blue data, possibly from the runout sequence after ODY safe mode:



Left mosaic edge is precisely to the north.

Click to view attachment

If it look like Ice, and feels like Ice , it is probably Ice!

Really nice color rendition! Looks just like the calibrated MER color images.

Airbag

Thanks. I only just noticed that the stupid Fileden file hosting service reduced the size down to just 256kB when I specifically uploaded it there to keep the higher quality file. Groan.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Background colors are easy to change because that's just a style sheet thing. I was thinking that in order to solve the problem of simultaneous activities, I would sort by camera within each sol. I can easily add color coding to table cells to indicate filter colors, again using styles. (Realize, though, that this will make the page rather garish; SSI has no clear filter, so most of the SSI images are red.) The hardest suggestion for me to implement is the sol-by-sol pages, because that quickly multiplies the number of files I need to update, reducing the level of automation, increasing the possibility of error, and decreasing the likelihood of regular updates. The challenge is the same as with MER -- Phoenix doesn't return all of its images every day, so every day's downlink contains images from multiple sols, and that means I'll need to update multiple files. What I had been planning on doing was maybe grouping them 5 sols at a time to keep the number of index pages manageable. But I can give the sol by sol pages a go and see if it's workable.

--Emily