LOL, yes I didn't mean color, it was a typo. I understand the S/N improved when you downsized the whole image, but I was actually commenting on the full resolution lander inset. It's light years ahead of the dark, original release. Maybe it's just due to the brighter background, I dunno.

It would be utterly cool if you were to find there's no corresponding dark spot in the Heimdall observation. This image just seems to have ways of getting better and better. Maybe we should be looking for fragments of the cruise stage somewhere in there as well

OK, here's my version of the Heimdall image.
Colourisation and surrounding terrain added.
Removed the inset and actual vehicle.
Added a parachute and backshell taken from the EDL animation.

Two versions on offer...
Wide poster (larger version available on request)
Click to view attachment
Enjoy
Astro0

EDIT: WARNING! ARTIST@WORK - NOT SCIENTIST!

And the desktop version.
Click to view attachment
Astro0

PS: There is a movie version on the way.

Astro, sorry, thanks but no thanks! - I think it doesn't do the picture a favour to include a big image of Phoenix. I really like your black border in the original shot though.

What I'm envisioning is the original picture, a black border and then the Phoenix inset placed somewhere in the black border, maybe centered below the main image, and with some discreet indication in the black border of where to look for the lander in the main image. Basically, an inset that doesn't tamper with the original shot, but rather has a box somewhere outside the main image.

Agree 100% with Oersted on this - there is the potential for an absolutely breathtaking presentation of what is technically a unique image here provided we are careful enough to present the key features subtly enough.

I'm not being critical of anyone's work - I can't do this sort of thing at all - but I feel that there is a magnificent composition within reach here that nobody has quite reached yet.

Sorry you didn't like it
It's an "artist's impression" after all.
Is this more satisfactory?
Click to view attachment

Astro0

Edit: Desktop-ified for lyford

I liked it.

Don't laugh! I actually think that's a good idea.

At the MPF site, there are several bright "flecks" spread over a few hundred meters around the proposed heatshield impact site (one of these was visible in the 'presidential pan' from the ground) that are puzzling. At first I thought, 'can't be the heatshield after all, because they're too far apart and if the heatshield were inclined to fall apart while descending, it would have done so first thing upon hitting the atmosphere'. So, I started to wonder if they were pieces of the Cruise Stage. Initially, Rob Manning was thinking that it should have burned up completely, but I think he now believes that some of it should make it to the ground (correct me if I'm wrong, Rob).

But lately I've been thinking that those flecks are instead pieces of the mylar insulation on the inside of the heatshield that were exposed to the wind after heatshield separation and tumbling. The bulk of the heathsield is identifiable - particularly when viewing the area in stereo - but there are a lot of big rocks at the MPF site and so we might not know for sure for a long time.

If the Cruise stage hit the atmosphere somewhere in the Heimdall HiRISE scene, perhaps the best chance of finding falling fragments would be to look for anomalously bright (or bluish, if there's color) pixels. But unless Rob has a pretty good idea of where it should be relative to the lander, it might be a ginormous task. Chances might be better around the landing site, provided it's not too far away.

I've been looking for remnants of the cruise stages for the MER rovers and MPF, but haven't found anything suspicious yet (with the exception of the bright flecks at MPF, that is).

-Tim.

Hello new desktop!

Astro0, I like both the artist's impression (which you certainly are!) and the desktop...spectacular work as always, thank you!

AstroO, me old matey, I'd parachute from a plane for your "composite images"!
If we didn't have the 'miracle' of the real photograph, your version would be indispensable.

Shaka, you bring up an interesting point. If we didn't have the actual image, then no one would believe that an artist's view like mine were feasible at all. Wait for the movie version which I hope to get done over the weekend. Found a great soundtrack to go with it.
Astro0

I think this image captures the essence of the human condition, much as Sagan's "pale blue dot", and which can be summed up in the word "poignant" -- the paradox that it is the very vastness of the cosmos that renders our personal experiences -- the love for a stillborn infant, for example -- meaningful. "Poignant" comes from the same root as "point", as in the pin that can collapse an entire balloon. Or from the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the meek" . . . So Rob, right on man! I am so damn proud to be part, in a small way, of all of this!

There's a similar scene in the IMAX movie, "Walking on the Moon in 3D." As the Apollo 15 LM, Falcon, is descending, there's a long shot that shows the tiny LM almost completely invisible, silhouetted against the vastness of the Hadley area. In fact, while I could see the LM in that shot in the IMAX theatre, I almost cannot discern it when viewing that scene on my 42" HDTV. Even if the Moon or Mars are relatively small compared to Earth, our measly space vessels easily are almost as nothing compared to the "magnificent desolation" that surrounds them. We're used to seeing close-up shots of our vessels, and that makes them seem bigger and somehow more impressive than they really are.

I made a quick movie out of this. Crank up the sound and enjoy!

Click on the link, then click on Heimdall1.mpg

http://www.speedyshare.com/290615381.html

(credit goes to Nico who's colorized image I used, and of course NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

If I were Ustrax, I'd hug you, Pando, if you didn't look so much like Mr. Bean.
A supernatural inspiration, but I never saw the parachute. You need to bring in the full-res enhanced parachute right below the word "parachute" and then linger on the closeup before panning out. (Sure, you might have to double up on Zarathustra, but Strauss won't mind.)

Since we opened this can of worms, what is (in principle) the delta-V imparted on the cruise stage at sep and how different is the entry trajectory supposed to be? If the thing is tumbling while burning up in the atmosphere, shouldn't that produce an even larger landing impact ellipse than the lander's ellipse due to lift/drag effects?

Very nice - could I suggest the zoom out / reveal should be a little slower?

Add myself to the list...
I downloaded the big image by GuyMac a few minutes before reaching Tman's post and thought the same about that "black dot".


http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080530.html

to open it even further ... anybody ever looked for remnants of the Mars Climate Orbiter?

I'd say that one is an impossibility. It entered the atmosphere at such a low angle that the ellipse would probably be in the hundreds of kilometers length by several tens of km in width. We'd have more chance of finding Beagle 2, I'd say...

To be honest, creating that cutout, every tenth second I was thinking "hurry up, hurry up"

Ouch, the crop....

Astro, I love this one on the other hand! Almost exactly what I was looking for.

Don't take my critique of the other composite to badly, it is just my opinion, others I'm sure like it a lot. I'm sure you appreciate that I give you my true opinion and don't just praise even that which I don't like too much. The major thing is that it is great to have all you image wizards churning out lot's of different artistic visions.

I asked Rob about how long the error ellipse might be, and I think he said "envision a great circle around the planet".

Finding the Soviet landers is going to be hard enough - requiring upwards of 1,000 HiRISE images each.

I honestly gave up the idea of finding MCO.

...for the time being, that is

-Tim.

What are your thoughts on B2 Tim? I can consign our failure to find an MPL 'chute to the changing environment, the 'rise and fall' as it were of the frost and ice etc. But the B2 chute should be as easy to find as that of MER, MPF etc.

Doug

Full inline quote removed - Doug

It will be very interesting to see what the Phoenix stuff looks like after a season. Personally, I think there's a pretty good chance that MPL just isn't in any of the hirise images taken thus far.

Good stuff. Made me think of having a go. Again, a bit of sound cranking wouldn't go amiss, but you definitely need bass...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O3AgfBLNHg

Hi Doug:

So far, HiRISE has taken 3 images of the Beagle 2 landing ellipse, all toward the east, downrange end (because both MERs went downrange of the center of their ellipses, and the atmopheric conditions were similar to Beagle 2). It looks like maybe 20% or so of the ellipse itself is covered (going on the ellipse posted on Malin's website during the MOC search). There's another image east of the end of the ellipse. I've looked at all 4 images, and haven't found anything obvious... ...but I'm planning on starting over, now that I know what another lander and its "stuff" looks like on the surface of Mars now.

I forget how big the Beagle chute was, but there were two of them - a drogue and a main, IIRC. Even the main is small compared to MER, but I think you're right and, if it worked, it ought to be fairly easy to spot.

-Tim.

There is a good chance, since as Rob pointed out, initial targeting fell west of the center of the ellipse - and so there's a "painful gap" just east of the center of the ellipse by a few kilometers.

I can't wait for the sun to come back up.

-Tim.

There's an RGB slice of the crater rim in Heimdall Crater Rim PSP_005717_2485. Looks more grey than red.

Sorry guys, I can't understand a thing:
is thise image a detail of the overall "heimdall image"?


If yes, why is it black, and why is the lander moving in the opposite direction wrt big image?!?
If no... where is the remaining of the HiRISE image?!?

Other question: why "hi res" images of heimdall still do not show lander and parachute in full resolution?!?

Final question: first caption in descent image said it was under investigation if lander shadow is visible on crater rim: is this investigation still going on?!?

Because the dynamic range of the image is huge - the parachute is much much brighter than the background, thus to render the parachute visible, one has to tone down the rest of the image.



Opposite direction to what? EDL started from the left of that image, the landing site is below it - that orientation is correct


They're still working on the full image - it's a very unusual and off-nominal observation for HiRISE to do, so it take manual processing to get it right.

Doug

It IS true that the smaller image shown above for some reason is flipped horizontally compared to the big image. But Hirise took just one image, so that is the one we see in all the different versions.

Note that Rob Manning didn't get to see the big shot either in the very beginning. He only saw that complete image of Heimdall crater later on and thought it was a fake, until he realized it was true enough.

BTW this week's The Economist carries the amazing picture prominently:

http://www.economist.com/science/displayst...FTOKEN=15088232

- Good article.

full inline quote removed - Doug

The parachute image is not flipped, it's just rotated differently. When the HiRISE team was looking for Phoenix, they had no idea they had caught Heimdall crater in the background because it was too big to see in the individual CCD images. When they found the parachute, they just cropped it out and rotated it manually to make it look nice. It was only later when they stitched together the other CCDs and saw the picture of the crater in the background that they were able to rotate the image to the proper orientation.

I've put together an animation of what I think will help put this breathtaking image into context. I've made a very crude chute and backshell model, put it over Tim's May 25m map of the landing ellipse, and start off with as similar view to that of HiRISE as I can fudge, and then zoom right in, fly around it, and fly out and above it to show the landing site below. It's rendering now, I wont have time to get it finished and online before I do my uStream lecture at 2230BST, but it'll be online tomorrow.

Doug

sounds good, can't wait!

OVER HEIMDALL

Look…

Two specks. Two snowflake flecks of white
drifting through a fire-threaded sky:
a sign that for a brief, bright golden time
Mankind reached out across the Black
and grasped the many mysteries of Mars…

Far behind and far, far below, the great hole
of Heimdall gazes at the sky, an empty eye
socket in the ice-scraped skull of the northern
plains, stained and tamed by Time,
sighing as the Phoenix flew on by…

Just two full stop dots on a portrait of
a planet far away, but their presence proves
the paws of curious apes reached out and touched
the face of Mars; built a glittering steel butterfly
to try and tell them if they really are Alone…

Two mere pin pricks on a pixelled picture, but they
scream into the dark “We failed but tried a second time!”
And like a lamp, lighting up the abyssal martian night,
those Phoenix flames ignited the sense of wonder yet again
in all who watched her landing.

© Stuart Atkinson 2008

Zooming from 700km to 50m, 1 deg FOV to 45deg FOV is quite a long camera pull, and it wasn't really working - so I'm re-rendering now - shouldn't take took long. Here's a preview JPG of just using the initial shot ( 1deg fov ) with a subset I added on of 0.1deg FOV. I fudged the elevation around the crater, I don't have the MOLA data to do something cleverer than that - but if you compare and contrast with the HiRISE image - it's 'representative' if not accurate.

was checking the phoenix landing site on MOLA map by MGS and noted the relatively low altitude below the average reference ground level for Mars;I think it must be between 0 to 4km below the average;then i just checked the southern cap which lies on a considerably higher ground(between 0 to 3km above the reference point);it looks like Phoenix had an extra 4km or so of atmosphere to slow down compared to MPL which we know crashed....any ideas /suggestions on this?

dont know whether it is the right place to comment about this,but any ideas as to the origin of hills on the horizon of the phoenix landing site..we're sitting at the edge of Alba patera;could these represent ash/volcanic deposits from Alba and as to The 'green valley',is this a fracture from the same Alba??

If I recall correctly, a "low" altitude that was one of the engineering constraints for the landing site selection. Wasn't it like min MOLA -2.5km or so? The extra atmosphere (length of flight and density) does add to the effectiveness of the parachute. But they knew the landing altitude for the MPL lander and the EDL there was designed accordingly - a possible cause being discussed is that the MPL 'thought' it had touched the ground when it was actually still 50m or so up, rather than the atmosphere being too thin (as was a problem for Beagle2 / Spirit / Opportunity)

Simulation movie - http://www.dougellison.com/?p=19 - not 100%, but I think it'll help put it into context

Beautifully done! That puts it into context very well. The only thing I might add would be to have a view from the right side of the current picture - perpendicular to the HIRISE image, that shows both the lander and the crater in the same shot. You could achieve that by "pulling back" from the viewpoint about halfway through your movie. I thought the changing focus effect was particularly good, when you pull focus on the lander and the background goes fuzzy.

Very nice Doug; really shows that the lander is very much in front of the crater and not "in" it. My personal preference would be to remove the somewhat jarring zoom out from the crater and back in again and just zoom right in on the lander instead.

Airbag

Very good animation who showing exactly the context .

The 'zoom out- zoom in' is actually the camera going from a 1deg fov to a 45 deg fov, whilst zooming in from 700km to <1km - it is a bit jarring, but it'll do

Doug

Or perhaps start with the wide angle view, then "zoom" to the "classic" view and continue from there with the closer zoom in etc. to the model? Well, it is your animation of course so who am I to say what is best!

Airbag

Stu, you have lived up to your title of Poet Laureate! The skull conceit is more than clever.

Doug, fabulous animation man -- really gives you an idea of the huge expanse that MRO/Hirise was challenged to cover.

Whoa... ...VERY cool animation, Doug, thanks!

Stu's poems are always on target, and I liked the skull metaphor as well. Waiting patiently for the collection in book form!