Very cool focusing gif ahecht! It really makes the machinery "come alive". Great to have new UMSF members like you

James: "You Deliver".

The Peter Pan - sol 18
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Wow, look at the valley wall, nice. This won't be the highest resolution yet is it ?

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Today's televised briefing has been moved to the Media Channel, with a replay at 4pm central (I think I heard that right) on the Public Channel.

Is the media channel available for streaming over the web?

Sure is. Pick your poison:

RealPlayer
Windows Media

When will they learn not to wear black shirts if they are going to have a black backdrop? And how can people take them seriously when they're talking about "Humpty Dumpty National Park"? That said, excellect results, especially the microscope images and the dust movie.

Interesting picture. My first thought is that the surface of hills and the Green Valley is not so scrapped (except to craters) or some tectonic accident or rugged but with smooth curves. It is like that zone was excessively powdered with volcan ashes or dusts and soft water erosion by the ice melting process.

Have they discussed the underside lander images at a press conference as of yet? Now I see a brief discussion 53 minutes into the briefing, during the question session. Have they shown the "Holy Cow" image at a briefing so far?

Note - this might be moved to the RAC underside thread if appropriate.

Peter Smith can't stop himself from calling ALL the white stuff "ice".

No kidding! He practically declared that it was ice at the beginning and got me all excited, until he added that "there's still some debate."

*shakes fist at Peter Smith*

I noted his interesting alternative digging strategy if the ice proves too hard to go much further down - strip all the soil off a wide area and study the ice-top topography. (Trash the national park I think he said.) I wonder how long that contingency plan has existed?

Peter said he'd going to " lay waste " to the National Park, that made me smile. Peter was grinning and smiling when he said that too. He wants to see the ice, lots of it too.......

He (Peter) wondered if the ice (as he calls it) is a thin layer that can be broken through or a thick layer that can't. But what is clear is --- horizontal or vertical --- they will dig, dig ,dig.

I did this for the Planetary Society Blog but I'll post it here as well.

Beautiful hills through the Martian haze.

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James

About the dirt particles in the great arm camera animation posted before, and based on the hi-res images of the trenches being opened, I was tempted to think perhaps the arm is scraping the hard substrate below the soil (being politically correct and not calling it ice just in case ) That would make some dirt particles to jump upwards and towards the direction the arm is scraping, and some of them could stick to the camera lens?

Sort of reminds me scraping a irregular concrete surface lightly covered in powdery earth with a shovel, if you know what I mean?

Peter Pan in full res. using the "SSI LEFT-1 RED" pics (b/w; 830 KB): http://www.greuti.ch/phoenix/sol18_peterpan.jpg

Looks like right hand there are five hills to spot.

Thanks Tman, fantastic image!
Sometimes black and white image is better than color. This is that case.

It's is here ?
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Lots of 'bright' splotches across the surface. Ice exposures?
Sorry, I'm taking the plunge: Not salt, not duricrust,...ice.

My contribution to the picture party...

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(Updated image in post #208)

Fiddlesticks. Salts! salty-salty salt-salts!

Don't you think that's what Tyrone would have looked like had Spirit dug into it with a scoop, rather than wheels? The "splotches" seem to me to have a definite powdery appearance. So, a prediction: TEGA will find little or no water in the sample, but some quantity of mineral salts.

Given that my last prediction was a 30 or 40 degree tilt after landing, that probably means that the sample's got more ice in it than the Wilkins Ice Shelf.

Yes sometimes. If you want conserve details, especially in the distance, is black and white unbeatable.

Who is trying to stitch the whole Peter Pan (horizon) mosaic too

AGREE : here is a Phoenix poster for the UMSF Forum friends !
and to Mark Lemmon for his wonderful SSI camera !
Enjoy !
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The Peter Pan - sol 19
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10x Phil-o-vision on the R1 horizon pan to sol 19.

The Peter Pan - sol 19 (part 2)
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Watch out! You'll land on Peter Smith's head!

At least he calls everything white around the lander ice. As far as distant objects go, we know that plain ol' rock can be quite bright, the Victoria Beacon being the most famous example.

Cool- this turns Vastitas Borealis into southern Arizona, with rugged peaks and vertically stretched boulders looking like saguaro cacti.

John.

You mean peter59 pan, don't you ?

I guess you mean the one on the FAR side, don't you?

(Updated image in post #208)

Here's my take on the southwest horizon, with a large vertical exageration. RGB filter images were merged with higher resolution Red filter pictures.

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Even if I understand vertical exageration, can you point out the ratio vertical/horizontal? Even if very neat, I cannot make up my mind about the reality.
Thanks

OOOPS ! Sorry for the typo : here it is again !
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...wasn't ever gonna bust on you about it! Beautiful; thank you!!!

Lovely panorama.

Those low hills give that horizon such mysery! Such an unexpected sight on such a flat region

About 10x vertical exaggeration.

Finally got back home after three weeks travelling - i could check up on Phoenix but not do much with it. But here we go. First, I took James's vertically stretched pan, and merged it with Doug's much earlier low res one to fill a few gaps - bit of a fudge job but the best I could do quickly. Then I made it into a circular 'polar' projection, north at the top. Here it is:

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Next I'll do a comparison of that with Tim Parker's map. It helps to show which features are on the horizon. Some are obvious, some not.

Phil

Here's why it's better. Draw a diagonal from top left to bottom right of the whole image and divide it in the golden ratio. You're right in the back of the scoop! Now add a vertical and a horizontal through that point (both similarly divided of course). The lower left rectangle neatly contains the solar panel. Next draw the diagonal of this rectangle and extend the line of the robot arm to meet it. There you have (more or less) a right angle close to bottom centre of the view - the two lander components, passive and active, (yin/yang?) counterposed in the most dramatic possible configuration. That's why this version, and Astro0's, works so well.

EDIT: You have to click on the APOD picture to get the whole composition - and to discover that it's James's mosaic.

I've put a little browse and search interface that might be of use for the Phoenix Raw images dataset. It's only using the metadata up to sol 9. Don't have the most recent csv file.

It's something I'm interested in developing. It's very basic right now and on a VERY old server and machine, so it's slow. But works.

There is lots more to do and not much time to do it in but I just wanted to give you guys a look and get some feedback.

You can just create a query to submit based on the image features and it sorts the dataset with respect to that query. Nothing much.

http://tinyurl.com/6zkh9e

Edit: I know there are some kinks to be straightened, espeicially relating to the 'More Like This' Feature. It's in work .

I really hope this is ICE. From Sol 20.

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"Flat and featureless" eh..?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/...a/13611vid.html

Goes to show that Phoenix standing almost level is pure luck and not a function of perfectly flat terrain.

Well, partially luck, and partially the landing legs that were designed to collapse is such a way as to keep the lander level despite uneven terrain.

Ah, yes, I didn't think of that. Is there info on the specific amounts of collapse of each leg?

Well, from a purely empirical point of view, the legs could not have been pushed back up much at all since the tops of the legs are not projecting through the holes on the science deck that I assume are there for just that purpose? I noticed they took some images of those holes early on in the mission; presumably to check for exactly that.

Airbag

There are some interesting but mysterious images up from Sol 21; look for "Full Frame Caterpillar Dodo-Goldilocks 3 Change Monitoring", e.g.:

http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/i/SS021ESF898...5_12BB0L5M1.jpg

Now what makes them interesting is that they are marked as being taken with the solar filters, and are very narrow, and then the names of course. So, perhaps by using the solar filter, these are very long exposures of a particular part of the trench, and then (to monitor changes) either the camera would move very slowly, or, more likely, only a few scan lines would be read in from the stationary CCD. In either case, the vertical direction of the image should correspond to changes with time of the brightness (melting ice?) of a fixed spot on the ground. Well, that is my theory, anyway! However, I can't make head or tail of the images...they look like mostly noise to me.

Any takers?

Airbag

Yes, there was a wee bit of a mix up sol 15. Activity IDs, which are used to connect observations to data products, were mis-assigned. Things that were supposed to be separate observations got lumped. There'll be a note on the page at some point... But you may safely assume that none of the images that look like noise were supposed to be the trench or the telltale.