Now would be a really great time for a super-res panorama of the cratered hills on the farside of Endeavour...(hint hint!)

OT: Just some scale to consider in the way we can view Mars these days

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Thanks science!!!

Fantastic!

Phil

You missed one:

Paolo

Now that they have the energy for the necessary heating, I would like to see a dawn low-light image of the crater interior, to complement the dusk images.

> You missed one:

Duly noted

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We have the power but currently we have very little flash available. Effects of not having our friend ODY for some time.

Paolo

Just a little experiment...combining the MI of Grasberg1 post-brushing and the color-filter Pancam view.
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Evoking one of Stu's "not claiming scientific accuracy or anything' disclaimers.

Ooh, that looks sore. If it starts bleeding, I'd get it looked at...

Seriously tho, really like that! Tried to do that myself a few times but failed miserably, so good work!

Some info at Lenda's blog:Hopefully that's southward via the "inboard" side of CY...

And I guess this would be the official anniversary moment:

.

Thanks, CR. I really just gabble on about what's happening, and hope some people read it!

Colourised view of the ground at Oppy's feet/wheels... fascinating to just scroll and pan around the area, taking in the different forms, structures and shapes...

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Mahhh... it is just some gravel. Good only to spin some donuts... ;-) Seriously, have you guys found anything on Mars that is uninteresting?

Paolo

Honestly, the planet doesn't matter. I could spend a similar length of time staring at a small patch of beach at Llandudno.

You're fired!

Phil

I have mixed feelings about his comment, Phil. I think you should cut Nigel some slack. I mean, only a geologist at heart could make such a generic statement about sediment.

Just a joke...

Phil

Gosh! Does the apparent size of the Sun really vary that much? (I assume those are at one Earth year intervals.) Calls for a movie if you ask me.

Using Wikipedia's numbers for Mars' aphelion and perihelion distances, mean solar diameter, and trig, I calculate apparent solar diameters ranging from 19.20 arc minutes to 23.15 arc minutes, a spread of 20%. We Earthlings just aren't used to phenomena resulting from such an elliptical orbit.

So I guess we've answered that question: no, there is not any type of MER image that we find uninteresting

(Attached is a view facing north and about 45 degrees up, with the sun images from sols 2816-2914.)

Very cool sun collage! An animation showing the sun reaching farther and farther north until solstice, then back up south, would be extremely cool (but lots of work, of course!).

That would be cool, someday. The above mosaic is just the "low hanging fruit" as it were.

Some info about sharing of Odyssey passes with MSL in the new Planetary Society report:Or longer... Does anyone know any details about how sharing Odyssey might affect Oppy?

It shouldn't be too bad - they're 120 degrees apart, so passes are not close together for MERB and MSL leaving plenty of time for downlinking one vehicle before the next relay.

They are really just random grabs spread out from Sol 2 to the present.

Grasberg1

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Sol3001: Via Odyssey

Ah! Did you see what I did there?!

Well you luckily managed to sample aphelion and perihelion well enough to show the periodic variation. I'd really love to see a full 8 year movie. I was wondering whether such a movie would also show the variations in atmospheric opacity, or is that somehow normalised out in the imaging process?

I have assembled all of the pancam tau images (4779!) I could find.

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Paolo

Think "analemma"...

--Bill

Has a sunspot ever been seen in a pancam tau image? I remember in about 1976 seeing a large sunspot using my naked eye when the sun was close to the horizon. I wonder if that sunspot would have been visible in a pancam tau image?

I hope not. The IFOV (instantaneous field of view, the field of view of 1 pixel) is about 50" (arc seconds), the sun spot would need to be be quite big! Pancam Tau are taken usually around 1100-1200, so no atmospheric magnification.

Paolo

Hey, that's great! Thanks. But with sooooo many images the seasonal 'breathing' though quite apparent is almost imperceptibly slow.

I see so many little veins in Grasberg that Carly Simon could write a song about it.

OK, I will see what I can do.

Paolo

Thanks for that solar compilation, Paolo. There should be several transits visible, but I haven't inspected each of the 4779 frames yet!

Back to what Oppy's up to now, here's a pancam anaglyph showing the "mini-notch" to our NE:
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It looks like a fair bit of relief, which bodes well for relief at the real notch (Whim Creek).

Hey, wait a minute, don't you have a rover to drive?

I wish, my next shift is on 7/18! I had some spare time while waiting for one more simulation to complete, so I gathered the data and used whirlgif to generate the animation.

Paolo

This is an animation of 747 frames that are separated by a bit more than 1 Sol. The variation in size of the Sun is now clearly visible.

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Paolo

OK, more fun with the tau images. For each of the tau images I binarized the images (fixed threshold @127) and counted the white pixels, finally, from the area I computed teh diameter. The attached plot shows the variation of Sun diameter vs Sol. Pretty crude and it shows, but it gives an idea of the variation.

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Paolo

Thanks for all your hard work on that Paolo, it's much appreciated. Very interesting and informative too.

You are welcome. 5 min of scripting between MSL simulations ;-)

Paolo

That's extremely cool - a beautiful sinusoid from such a simple idea.

The obvious question: what happened at the aphelion around sol 1600? That minimum is anomalously higher than all the others. Something different about the exposures perhaps?

I assume some of the spikes reflect dust-clearing wind events. Are there 'windy seasons' at Meridiani?

edit: oops I thought Paolo's graph was dust-related. d'ohh!

The honest answer is: I don't know. It would not surprise me if the explanation involved dust accumulation on the PANCAM lens, I would need to take a look at the images. Also, keep in mind that I just applied a fixed threshold to all images, I did not attempt to compute the Sun area very well, it was a hack put together very, very quickly. Brellis: the way I computed the diameter is extremely crude and an error in a few pixels is very likely. This was obviously not meant to be a refined measurement, what I meant to show is that indeed you can see minor variations in the Sun diameter (and that there are no boring images from Mars).

Paolo

Forgot to answer this question. Yes, there are cleaning event seasons, sometimes followed by dusty seasons. IIRC they are end of the (Martian) summer. If you look at the Tau plots you should be able to see them.

Paolo

Very interesting graph. There is more information in this graph than seems at the first glance. For example, in principal, it is possible to calculate the Mars orbital eccentricity from the ratio of the largest to smallest diameter (let x be the ratio, e=(x-1)/(x+1) ). The value I'm getting is 0.063, which is 2/3 of the actual e=0.093. I suspect the discrepancy might be due to atmospheric effects of the apparent diameter.

Now that we have demonstrated that even the Pancam Tau can be interesting, how about all those Cal Target? Any ideas on what we can do with them (besides their intended use)?

Paolo

One possibility is to plot the average pixel value of a region on the top of each frame over the background (probably divided by the value of a part of the calibration target to correct for change in the ambient light). This way one gets a graph of the local "soil" brightness/darkness over the course of 8 years.

Well, there is "The Stain," on which a thread has grown to 31 pages over here:
http://www.marsroverblog.com/discuss-170792-the-stain.html