Here's a Sol 22 image of the new trenching area at the extreme right edge of the work area. I brightened the shadow to show the whole trench.

Phil

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Nice, I was just looking at the pictures.

I noticed they dumped a scoop full at the far end of the trench rather than somewhere else, any one have any thoughts on why ?

Further shots on this (additional the RGB)

http://www.greuti.ch/phoenix/of_SS022EFF_12CA8_RABC.jpg
http://www.greuti.ch/phoenix/of_SS022EFF89...7_12CAEL1M1.jpg

My color version of the new trench. Merged two red filter images that each seemed to show less compression artifacts in sunlit/shadow portions of the image, respectively.

No sign of the white stuff at the same depth as on the edge of the polygon. Interesting.
Maybe one more centimeter down?

To me, it looks like the tool has scraped across a flat hard surface...

Interesting large cracks in the surface to the right of the trench; it looks like a thick surface crust breaking up into large chunks as the scoop passes nearby. Anyone know if there's telemetry from the arm indicating how much effort was needed at different points of the scoop manoeuvre? And it does appear to be the more deeply shadowed area where this happens. Fascinating stuff!

Quick look...

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If you haven't seen it yet, check out the raw images page from Mark Lemmon.
Next to the Sol links, they've included a little description for the day's activities.
Some of it makes very amusing reading.
Well done Mark!

Sol 000 Land
Sol 001 Start looking around
Sol 002 Runout
Sol 003 Look around more, unstow RA
Sol 004 Finish unstow RA
Sol 005 Document Queen of Hearts
Sol 006 Image RA touch, TEGA prep, workspace
Sol 007 Dig! (well, test sample)
Sol 008 Document TEGA, OM prep; image workspace
Sol 009 Document sample site
Sol 010 Runout
Sol 011 Sample for TEGA
Sol 012 Bury TEGA
Sol 013 Find missing spring to go with found spring
Sol 014 Get ready to bury MECA
Sol 015 Sprinkle gently on MECA
Sol 016 MRO/PHX coordinated observations
Sol 017 Deliver to MECA
Sol 018 Strip mine Dodo
Sol 019 More digging, dislodge interesting fragment
Sol 020 Continue dodo trenching, wantonly destroy fragment
Sol 021 Atmosphere sol
Sol 022 Open up Wonderland for exploration

This appears to be the best-defined trench yet, probably because they haven't hit the substrate yet. But the trench floor is clearly heterogeneous, with well-defined regions that are either a lighter shade or a darker shade of the ubiquitous Martian hue. Obvious speculations include grain size or compositional differences between the two types of soil. I wonder if the scoop would be agile enough to sample the lighter and darker regions separately...

Hard to tell if the smooth sections are a hard material scraped smooth or a soft material smoothed flat.
But it looks pretty clear that there is no white material...yet.

Updated in post #76

I haven't got the telemetry, but it's there. Every 200msecs during operation the arm reports telemetry of which only a part is:

• Motor current
• Motor voltage
• Joint angles

And so the amount of joint work, and thus joint torque, can be worked out for any part of the digging operation. Actually, telemetry is returned because according to the RA team it is "... most useful for scientific analysis during digging and soil-mechanic experiments. The motor currents, along with the reconstructed arm trajectories will yield information regarding the degree of difficulty of digging in the various soils encountered..."

This data will be archived in the PDS.

Greetings
On this picture I can see the first layer which probably is green or denitely have a diferent colour .



The same was posible to see in the first digging area but it is my opinion that the first layer is green and is wery thin .
In the Meca images was also seen some green sand particles .

I'm not convinced that's actually green. We'll have to wait for calibrated images, but my guess now would be it's an artifact of the raw images and that it's actually more grayish in color than the rest of the soil.

yes agree that it looks grayish now to .

Mark's SSI team produced a wonderful image of the new trench where they seamlessly removed the lander shadow. If I didn't know where the shadow edge was exactly, the image could have fooled me as being completely in sunlight. There's just a subtle hint of diffuse sky illumination in the shadowed area, reminiscent of soviet Venera surface shots.

Interesting; the floor of the trench is quite is flat yet the rubble piles have many "rocks" of various sizes in them. So either those are not rocks but clumps of material, or the "rocks" are only in the very upper layer?

Airbag

Here is a 8Mb zip of every color image produced by Phoenix to date, absolutely uncalibrated and untouched, with filenames simply a concatenation of the three constituent files' names:

Phoenix Color Images

Didn't they identify olivine in the material sprinkeld onto the microscope? And the material can appear green (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine).

Here's a blog post by Kurt Schwehr describing how it was made. Ah, the magic of Photoshop.

The lander's shadow was likely removed by using a Selection Tool to selsct the shadowed area and selectively bumping the shadowed area to match the sunlit area.

Ah, the magic of PShop, indeed.

--Bill

Thanks! I wonder if the effort of breaking through the surface crust will show up in that data, and if (as it superfically appears to my uneducated eye) there's different structure in Wonderland than Dodo.

Please forgive me for asking an ignorant question...I haven't been tracking things closely. How far is the Peter Pan from being complete?

There is just a 3x2 section to complete the horizon pan, the actual horizon bit (3x1) was taken on sol 22 but I believe lost due to the anomaly. Four pointings of the near field were also taken and downlinked on sol 21. I suspect we'll get most of the remaining data with the 'most-data-rich-sol-ever' going on tosol as a result of the anomaly.

James

Can you dig it? Sol 24 trench widening.

Phil

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My best attempt at color using the L1 and L2 filter images of Wonderland tosol- there's an area that is extremely reflective in the blue channel but not in the red, I have no idea what it could be:

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No obvious thread for this, but here is a story describing the various Martian soil simulants being tried.

Blue ice? Hmmm... perhaps someone was here before us.

Remember it can be very hard to get hues right with these stretched jpegs - the regular soil is so dark in blue filters that a white patch can seem overwhelmingly bright in blue filters. Still, there's definitely a hue difference from left to right across that original trench. Perhaps we're getting very close to the substrate.

If you look at Phil's posted image, we've already obliterated that blue-channel bright part of the first trench! No doubt we'll find more as we continue...

Looks like a nice chunk of white stuff has been excavated into the lower pile of debris.

Color shot of the work area and scoop:



There definitely is some differently colored soil down there. At least more gray than the rest, possibly bluish-greenish after all.

Dan, I think you've mistaken a part of sunlit soil in Phil's image as white stuff.

Loving this new trench...!

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Q: just wondering... was this 'scratch' caused by the rasp?

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Agreed.

Perhaps you were on to something - from Lemmon's directory:

I spent over an hour attempting to fill in the 3 gaps in the stereo image released this morning, only to have Phoenix downlink a better version soon after. Anyway, here is the exercise in futility:

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I wonder why a greater percentage of images than usual are suffering from data loss in transit. Is this a Phoenix, Odyssey, MRO, or DSN problem?

Awesome!

It's probably the link between Phoenix and Odyssey. While there is a automatic re-transmission protocol (Go-back N per CCSDS Proximity standards), there was a implementation "feature" (error) where in some rare occassions some packets are dropped. Same happens between the MERs and Odyssey, since the UHF radio is the same. Drop-out can also happen between Orbiter and Earth if the signal-to-noise ratio drops below threshold (too much rain, wind, mispoint, eats all the margin) but this happens much less frequently.

Due to the Flash anomaly, they've added extra UHF passes. Perhaps some of these extra passes are less than optimal (low elevation etc.).

New pictures from sol 25





http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_7009.jpg

I've made a sol-by-sol comparison of the Dodo-Goldilocks area showing surface activities. Some of the images are fudged a bit, but it gives the idea.

Phil

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Agreed, moved posts to Water Ice Confirmed!

Using Phil's side-by-side comparison, here is the first and only definitive sol 5-20 über-animation (of doom).

Nice!

Phil

It is posible that the olivine is in this layer to .

I didn't hear that they *confirmed* olivine, just that some of the particles *looked like* and therefore very well could be olivine.

Sol 26 look:



Merged subframe at full color with full frame at 1/4 res color and single red full res frame. Lander shadow moved quite a bit causing discontinuities.

Sol 25 Wonderland trench under late afternoon (almost 6pm) light.
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Mods - move this if you want it somewhere else...

I took my circular version of the panorama, posted earlier, and laid it over Tim Parker's map at the best estimate location.

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Then I used sight lines to hills to see which features we see on the horizon. The common features are labelled below.

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