Just chatted with Mark Lemmon -- he said that as of this morning he's declaring the Mission Success Pan to be complete (in terms of data acquisition). He said there's one or two things he'd like to go back and do, like get the part of Mars above MECA that was blocked by the arm, and maybe do some imaging with the arm in a position in the work volume like it was about to do some work, but the data bits are down for a full pan.

--Emily

Are there plans to cover the area hidden behind the meteorology mast? Maybe with the RAC? :-P

I guess most of the area under the lander could be similarly imaged...

Yep, a test version I made last night was only missing one image and I see that has now been taken and downlinked. Hooray!

James

Thanks for the info, Emily! Here's hoping I finally get to use that 8X10 frame I bought from Aaron Brothers, pretty soon

Can anyone enlighten me to which fairy tale this comes from ?

14E1-0: SSI 15F - Deadly Poppy Field

Thanks.

Any news on when they will image parts of the scene without any compression ?

Wizard of Oz

I think that one is a nod to the Wizard of Oz.

Disabling image compression is less of a benefit than full, but compressed frames would be. It would be similar bandwidth-wise, given a 4x compression ratio.

We now have an unobstructed view of the crater rim on the horizon to the west, which had been partly blocked by the arm:
http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/i/SS044EFF900...7_11E1EL1M1.jpg
(Of course that "obscuration" resulted in one of the signature images of Martian exploration! )

Crop & 3 x enlargement of hills at Azm 278 deg Sol 44.

Is that a small impact crater at the bottom just right of centre at the bottom of this crop?
Click to view attachment

Also, are they boulders on the hills, if so there are more larger pieces on the hills than on the tundra plains that Phoenix is situated on.

Does anyone know what these hills are? I assume crater rims?

Colour crop of same hills from Ant103 superb colour image. There is a huge amount of talent on UMSF.
Click to view attachment

Andrew Brown.

Phil Stooke identified them as feature "C" in the maps in this post. It looks like a crater from orbit.

Still got quite a bit of work to do on this. (My software was never designed to do deck pans, I've never attempted an MER one). But the rest of the view is too good to keep to myself, so here is the latest test version:



EDIT: Replaced with a better version

James

Wow!


Your's in polar view.
Click to view attachment

Nice one Tesheiner. I was hoping somebody would do one.

I didn't have time before work this morning to do anything other than hit the upload button.

Cheers,

James

Great view guys ! However, here it comes:
Stupid question of the day for the imaging gurus:
How difficult is it to make a rotatable polar view ?
I like the perspective of polar view images, but I find it impossible to grasp the entirety of the horizon without rotating the laptop or my head to pain-enduring positions. I've seen VR movies of normal 360 deg. panoramas posted in UMSF from time to time, and they were gorgeous Can the same be done with polar view panoramas ?

PS. I know about rotating the panorama in image viewers, but this does not quite do the trick.

You mean something like this?

A quick Java applet made with Processing

Move the mouse to rotate and click to toggle modes between full pan and zoomed in.

Fantastic, this is exactly what I was talking about !
Jekbradbury, a million thank you !

I am humbled by the enormous amount of ingenuity in this forum. I am officially spoiled

Awesome work, guys! Can't wait to see the next version of the panorama, James

Great panoramic James . Very impatient to see the final version .

This is the part of the panorama that I'm gonna crop for that 8X10...

The only qualm I have with the mosaic is that a part of the robotic arm scoop can be seen next to the solar panel to its right (shown in that white bracket). I can Photoshop it out myself...but I'll just wait to see what other changes you make to the Pan in subsequent versions

'I'll just wait to see what other changes you make to the Pan in subsequent versions '

Here is what I could fill in from earlier photography which can be pasted over the Canvin version of the color pan. Alas, the earlier pan also had the arm blocking part of the view. I made a rough color match of the earlier grayscale images without any attempt to recolor rocks, etc. I hope the plans to re shoot those parts needed to provide a clear panorama bear fruit!

DonClick to view attachment

Photohopped the robotic arm scoop out in this pic

Yes I noticed that. Remember that these are all quickly thrown together test versions I'll cut out some bits of arm (there are others) for the final version. They have retaken the bit with that has the arm in (see post 60), but I'm inclined to leave it in my version.

Can I say an enormous thank you to everyone in this thread who has posted work of the utmost professionalism, that even NASA themselves are going to find extremely difficult to usurp.

You guys bridge the gap between Science & Art very effectively & put certain 'artists' to shame who think unmade beds or a flashing light is art. The work you guys do is worth vastly more & are part of the long term investment of our species.

It would be great James Canvin for two versions of your remarkable pan. One with the arm in place & one with no arm, showing the complete Martian Landscape in Scandia Colles without any obstructions.

Also the Sky @ Night was repeated at lunchtime today & yes your work was on display at Mission Control.

This is most certainly an interesting site, both scientifically & visually. I for one will study the pans intently.

BTW where in the UK are you from James? It is a great website you have there James.

I have put in requests for midnight sun observations, perhaps a timelapse movie of the sun swooping low over the northern horizon, the first ever such observation from another planet, also due east, west & south observations on another sol but at the same time, to get a differing illumination on the landscape. Also is not Holy Cow supposed to be imaged with illumination from the midnight sun at some point?

James, I wonder what you could produce from said observations? No doubt, would be mind blowing.

Andrew Brown.

Thank you very much Fred for your answer & to Phil Stooke for taking the time & trouble to pinning down what we are looking at.

That crater appears to have an interesting polygonal floor. To me it looks more like a Pingo than an impact crater, though it's size appears too large for a pingo, unless they can grow much larger under the 37.8 % gravity?

Please keep up the great & very important work everyone.

Andrew Brown.

My final version. Unless I do one with the arm removed, personally I'd rather see someone put the missing part of the arm in!

Full resolution, touched up and with artificial sky.



James

Hi James,

Do you have trouble with your website. I'm unable to view your panorama, and when I go to your blog, I see a page without CSS forming and no images. It's me or … ?
I really want to see your panoramic picture .

Here is a new version of my spinning polar pan applet:

Peter Pan Java Applet

Click to zoom

To those of you that have had problems accessing my site - just try again.

I'm on a cheap host and have had a lot of visitors in the last 48 hours. I think the problems really started when a direct link to the large jpg itself was on the front page of digg for a time yesterday. I'm just glad that it didn't coincide with the time it was on the front page of MSNBC, which brought over 25000 hits in just 5-6 hours on Saturday.

James

Well it made my computer think for a while but in the end it has managed to churn out a huge polar version of the Peter Pan.



(Smaller versions available as well )

Wonderful panorama, woohoo!

A few aesthetic comments:

- we really need that arm to extend out to the edge of the image, blotting out a bit of fake sky is no issue.

- I also definitely vote for the panorama to keep the arm. It is true that it obscures a tiny bit of the horizon, but let's face it: one bit of this landscape is pretty much like any other bit, so not much harm is done. The arm is very necessary to include in the pan, it is after all the main instrument of the mission!

- the area immediately around the arm needs to be brightened a tiny bit (obvious from the thumbnail). There's also another splotch near the middle that seems a bit too dark.

Woohoo again! - I just noticed you made mainstream internet media James:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/200...11/1195385.aspx

Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle is one of my favourite science blogs. Great to see the exposure for you and for UMSF and Emily as well.

Yeah, we talked about that on the Published Images thread. I'm very proud that it was actually the lead image on the front page of a major news site for most of Saturday.

And it was great exposure for all mentioned, I've had tens of thousands of hits and many positive comments.

Thanks for work, James. This image is now hangin' on my wall...

Once again, outstanding work, James!

I hope you don't mind me tweaking your colors very slightly:

James Canvin's polar projection overlaid on a false color HiRISE image:


Click to view attachment


Features at the 5 m distance ring from the lander mast have been coordinated.

It is interesting is that by comparing to wider range HiRISE false color views (Sol 3 and onwards, Post 47, link here), it indicates that most of what we are seeing (at least out to 20 m, which is close to the visible horizon in the mosaics) at the surface has been slightly altered by the lander blast. In most of the visible fore- and mid-ground, the "poofy dust" has been blasted.

-Mike

From the HiRISE images it appears that the local terrain around Phoenix has been significantly darkened. I was curious how to correct the view for a "pre-landing" (read pre-retro blast) view.

I used the IRB[=RGB] images hosted on Emily's blog (permalink) to calculate the darkening effect in the local area around Phoenix.

I selected two representative areas in the HiRISE images, one near the Phoenix spacecraft (inside the blast zone), the other beyond the obvious blast zone in the false color image. Both areas needed to be fairly uniform (and easy to find) in the images. They correspond to the central section of the smaller polygons.

Click to view attachment

Next, I used the selected zone Histogram function in Photoshop to find the average brightness values (on a 0-256 unit scale) of the pixels inside the representative zones for each channel image. Note that the differences in the I[R] and B[BG] channels are within the standard deviation of the values.

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachment

Figuring the difference as a function of the measured brightness, I *think* this is how to correct the view of the Phoenix mosaic to the pre-landing colors
These numbers are in reference to the HiRISE instrument detector response in the IRB channels, not to the Phoenix imaging camera!

Click to view attachment

To correct the Phoenix surface mosaic to pre-landing colors:

• Add 5% to the IR brightness
• Add 11% to the Red brightness
• Add 15% to the Blue-Green brightness

-Mike

Hi,

From the great James Canvin's Peter Pan, Ive added an full synthetic sky to show the sun in approximative place at 12:00 of the landing site, with its elevation at this season. And this is for showing the way martian sky could be. Hope you will like it, in particulary James .

Without clouds

Hires 6 Mo : http://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/up...lsky-v2-web.jpg

And with clouds

Hires 6 Mo : http://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/up...-clouds-web.jpg

Nice.

I don't understand the sun position though, wouldn't it be due south at 12:00?

James

Yes, but, honnestly, I've placed it by seeing shadows and reflection on the deck. But, is it strongly possible that I've made mistakes.

Hi guys, great images as always.

Can I help by posting these charts I've made on Reshift of the Phoenix Landing site on the Solstice on Sol 30?

Midsol Sol 30.
Click to view attachment

Midnight Sun Sol 30 / 31.
Click to view attachment

Andrew Brown.

Ah, OK, thanks Ant, looks good whatever time of day it is. (mid afternoon I think )

Don't worry about it I know mega-accurate images are important, and your Sun position might well be "off", but sometimes you just have to push "accurate" aside for the sake of a shamelessly dramatic and attractive image that captures the mood and spirt of a scene and evokes a sense of wonder. Your image does that.

Stu (uncrowned King of unnecessary lens flare and over-the-top lighting effects!! )

QTVR time

Thanks Stu

Doug : great QTVR. I don't know how to do it but I really appreciate it .

Doug, magnificent! That MET-mast realy comes to live.

Here is The Peter Pan projected to a Vertical Projection, suitable for overlay on top of HiRISE images or simply for a birds-eye view:

Click to view attachment

Nice.

Hmm, from that perspective Damocles might be a better name for the lander.