YES : 5 wheels to the SSI and its wonderful team (Chris Shinohara, Mark Lemmon...) !
SSI derives, with new capabilities, from the Mars Pathfinder's successfull IMP camera.
Remember : the IMP was a great instrument. It provided nice 360° panoramas of the Martian surface, radiometric and atmospheric informations and brought back fantastic surface images showing the Sojourner microrover and science data of the Martian surface.
To celebrate SSI's success, let's lok back to IMP's "Insurance Pan" taken the 2nd Sol after landing in July 1997. This "Insurance Panorama" was taken just before the IMP was raised to its two-meter-high mast. This unique perspective captures (from left to right) in the close foreground : the hi-gain antenna, a color chart, low-gain antenna mast, solar panels, and the two ramps leading down to the surface, with the Sojourner microrover (at right) close to "Barnacle Bill" rock, and ready to roll to "Yogi" (the rounded boulder at far right)...
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Hi Olivier,

It's a great picture, from a great lander for a great landscape .

I am wondering why do you have apply a so hard anti-noise filter to the image, it look like a water painting .

Dear Ant103 Thanks ! Because the original data was so downgraded and compressed (see herewith the comparison of a "before/after"), that I had sometimes to reconstruct missing data, creating synth blue, green or even red filters and sometimes the images were noisy also due to transmission defaults. Also, please, keep in mind that the original images were TINY : 256 x 248 pixels only !
Enjoy the original pan (if I may say...) :
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Great work! SSI was originally built as a virtual clone of IMP. However, they later replaced the CCDs with the current ones, giving much better resolution (Pathfinder, with no orbiter support and totally dependent on DTE communication, couldn't have taken advantage of it - as you pointed out, even these little images are horribly compressed).

Feels very 'hunkered-down' as a result - and really accentuates quite how ridiculously rocky and lumpy that landscape was.


Does that go some way to explaining why the SSI pictured on the Phoenix website is so scratched and battered around the lens slots? I'd just assumed that it was some rigourously tested flight spare, and the camera that actually flew on Phoenix would be much better - but if it's the actual camera, and the result of major electronic surgery on an existing flight spare, it's more understandable...

Also, is it just me or are there screws missing? Extreme mass savings!

Still seems to work just fine, obviously...

Smiley face!

Nice eyelashes!
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That SSI isn't the Phoenix one. The phoenix one is easy to spot - it has a lump on top to accomodate two spare MER CCD's. That's more likely the spare for MPL etc.

Doug

Merci Olivier!
This is incredibely good rendering. I feel good to be there again

vikingmars, that is amazing! Cudos to you. Well done!