not just the back-shell, Steve G, but also the skycrane which departed with a big load of unsued fuel... wonder how that ended up?

Quick and dirty contrast enhanced equirectangular projections from the first images. Use FSP Viewer for example on Windows.

Youtube version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AJqoiLhdkk

Press conference starting now.

Hazcam images (thumbnails) projected rectilinearly with nominal rover level and centerline at center of image.
The diagonal FOV of these things is almost 180 deg! Lots of distortion but aiming to get a feel for horizon & may be useful for locating features.

Front Left image width: 240 deg. (boresight nominally 28 deg down, 10 deg left)
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Front Left image width: 300 deg. (boresight nominally 45 deg down, straight)
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Edit: MarT, nice, and you beat me to it

how MSL Curiosity's early Hazcam image (below) looked, albeit with color, hence later than the very first B&W images.
Seems like more dust on the lens than with Perseverance.

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I have heard through the grapevine that was partially for ITAR reasons. The engineers wanted to evaluate the heat shield performance and take measurements, but because these would have been public data it was deemed to fall within ITAR restrictions. So the combination of driving out of the way and not being able to take pictures to make the trip worthwhile is why we never got landing hardware photos like we got from MER.

Yeah, but I have corrections to make I went with 130° FOV according to this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7686239/

kenny -- that's insight ... i think

Hopefully, those rocks mean that some layers on the delta have been crumbly recently.

One of the things they're hoping for is to have rocks accessible that represent sediments that have been shielded from billions of years of radiation. Ideally, we could find lots of places where new rock has been exposed in the last blink on evolutionary time scales.

Landing site from the briefing.
"Tilt of 1-2 degrees"
"We think we're facing SE"
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Congratulations to JPL on what almost seemed almost routine Mars landing.
Going to bed with best possible landing map solution at this moment. Unofficially Percy landed somewhere in the middle of Canyon de Chelly quad to the southeast of the ellipse center. We will know exactly where soon.
Does anyone know when the first HiRise imaging pass is planned?

" kenny -- that's insight ... i think "

You're correct PDP8E -- my mistake. The dusty color image I posted is from the Insight static lander, not Curiosity.

Fwiw, in regards to previous post, the below appears to have been the first image sent from Curiosity, in an 8/5/2012 post by PDP8E

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Percy resting on the surface at the approximate landing location with delta rim on the horizon.

Closeup of the landing area

This is very cool https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/

Does this view extend to the rim?

I estimate the rim to be roughly 2.7 degrees high from Percy (500m at 10.5km), versus around 1.7 deg for the delta (60m at 2km). On the 1/16th scale thumbnails returned so far, those correspond to around 6 and 4 pixels, respectively. I measure the feature in RHAZ to be very roughly 4 pixels high. That's consistent with the delta height, but considering the uncertainties probably also with the rim. Since the south rim (maybe actually SW) seems to be visible in the FHAZ, it seems more likely that we're seeing the rim in RHAZ and that the delta is below it and hard to see.

Ken Farley confirmed that that is the quadrangle.
(In response to a question from Leo Enright asking if they might fancy nipping over to Channel Islands which looks like a bit of delta outcrop, rather than / before going to the main delta, IIRC.)

Thanks, compare it with the ESA map similar but sports contour lines and panoramic view though hasnt yet updated their pin location, but it turned out to be only about 400 meters off..

Here is an image made with HiRISE data and a color map of Jezero by Justin Cowart, using latest location & orientation info ...

Short answer, no. Here is a new view with crater rim included, but I needed to lower 3D rendering resolution to get everything in one view and
there is no accounting for the atmosphere's opacity.
Clearly, crater rim is way higher than the delta.

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Thanks for extending that render!

I'm sure folks noticed that the hazcams were provided as pngs:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/p...6_00_2I3J01.png

Wouldn't that be lovely if more public images were pngs...

MarT posted the reprojected (cylindrical) versions of the hazcam images. I combined them (in a very rough way, not controlling anything properly) and put the result in a circular format, and then oriented it to face roughly to the SE. Those sort of teardrop-shaped dust drifts resemble lots of features in HiRISE images at the landing site, but I can't match these to any specific drift yet. The horizon roidge in the front hazcam imahge looks to be the south rim of the crater. The mountain on the SE rim of Jezero appears not to be visible.

Phil

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As far as I can see, a "quick" divert to Channel Islands is unavoidable - if Sun and Stack are right (I do not have a strong view on this).

I would say the Channel Islands area is not likely, it's in the opposite direction to where they want to go. They might go towards it to get around the rough area but no need to go all the way.

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Phil

The question is: what do you really care about? Mafic floor material? Delta material? If your rover could die tomorrow, what would you pick? And where would you go?

So: if your mission is to collect delta material, why would you take a sharp left when it's (putatively) right in front of you? Sorry: this arose at a meeting last month and I'm still puzzled!

What time is the orbiter pass this evening ?

The delta deposits in Channel Islands appear to have a relatively shallow slope. If they do plan to go that way maybe they're thinking that the exposure would be good and easy to access.

They don't just plan to collect delta material. They have a whole multi-kilometer traverse mapped out which will let them sample many things. Plus, it's not certain that the hills in the Channel Islands quad are delta remnants. They have been mapped as such but that's not a guarantee. I agree they might decide to go there but it is off the intended traverse.

Phil

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So apparently an image has been received that shows skycrane in action looking up from the rover. But not released yet.

The news was mentioned in a now-deleted tweet. But other people are now tweeting about it. E.g.,"minds are going to be blown."

It may be that so far mostly thumbnails have come down, and I can understand why JPL wants to wait until it has enough full-scale content to make a huge splash. But it's frustrating.

Press conference tomorrow, it's the best way to get gasps from the audience in the auditorium, such as it is. I still remember when the thumbnail version of the Curiosity EDL was played, and when the famous New Horizons photo was shown. Easy way to make PR buzz.

Jennifer Trosper did say we'd get some pics down tonight, hope she was talking about us public too...

[quote name='Phil Stooke' post='249809' date='Feb 18 2021, 10:09 PM']They don't just plan to collect delta material. They have a whole multi-kilometer traverse mapped out which will let them sample many things. Plus, it's not certain that the hills in the Channel Islands quad are delta remnants. They have been mapped as such but that's not a guarantee. I agree they might decide to go there but it is off the intended traverse.

Phil

/quote]

If the traverse to the Timanfaya quad is the most likely path, is that about 2 km from the landing site? Will the Ingenuity copter be used to scout the terrain first before the rover gets moving, or will it be deployed later after some critical mission objectives are completed?

Here's the fact sheet for the helicopter. Its primary objective is a technology demonstration and concept testing, not mission support for the rover.

https://mars.nasa.gov/files/mars2020/MarsHe...y_FactSheet.pdf

Here's a stereographic nadir-pointed projection of the hazcams. Or as Phil would say, a circular view. I used the same nominal hazcam positions/orientations as earlier post.
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(and MarT, I think we were both right; working from the same doc....horizontal FOV 136 deg/Vert 102/Diag 172. In any case, a significantly wider view than Curiosity's.)

The thinking is going to be different here from other missions. Since it has a mission to collect a suite of samples to be collected and sent off to Earth, you have to assume your rover's good for its warranty and do what you can to get your sample suite. So in this case the mindset is primarily "where can I get to and what can I collect before getting myself somewhere where the Sample Retrieval Rover can pick everything up?"

To speculate on the path a bit with my geology hat, I would guess that the "Channel Islands" bluffs are deemed to be too far out of the way relative to the value they would add to the sample suite. If they do go it's probably because someone made an extremely good argument that those bluffs have a much higher chance of biosignature preservation potential than the delta rocks that they'll see by driving west. Otherwise I think we'll probably see Percy go NW, and sample the mafic and etched floor units along the way. (Both of these are a pretty high return priority, the mafic floor unit because it's a tiepoint for geomorphological surface dating, and the etched floor unit because it'll provide information on lake chemistry.) If there is a detour, it'll probably be to that crater to its north. Then they're really close to connecting up with a pre-planned traverse. It's worth noting that the JPL traverse map that Phil posted was developed for an operations training program, not a hard-and-fast plan. I suspect they'll probably stick somewhat closely to that route since it reduces duplicated work on feasibility. But I do expect there were be all types of changes made as the orbital data that traverse was developed around gets ground-truthed.

Jennifer made it clear that they want to « get rid of » the copter ASAP because it limits the use of some instruments. She said twice that they’ll look for the best place around and drive to it. At least my understanding during the conference...

Also limits auto-nav driving as the cover protecting the copter reduces the ground clearance.

A first local contour map at moderate scale, with Sol0 position shown.
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It's really great to have the high-resolution source material easily accessible right at the start from USGS. This first map here is from lower-resolution CTX and MOLA-based products produced alongside them.

Lovely map ; but I have to ask the question . Does anyone know of a map covering around the rover's current location with finer scale contours? Or any other maps that may cover the potential path of the rover with contours of any scale but the finer the better 👍

TIA

Paul

FLR_0000_0666952977_663ECM_N0010044AUT_04096_00_2I3J01.png
Look at the size of that filename.

Here is what you’ve got when you don’t set up Google Earth on the right planet

(to amplify PaulH51) Does anyone have a traversibility map for Jezro? I know they've popped up at meetings, but can't find one just now.

Now we know where more exactly where Perseverance landed, it is time for new maps. I just hope Phil will create mapping thread soon.
I'm using coordinates from JPL's interactive Mars2020 map (reading long: 77,450811, lat: 18,44675 from the map).
First the "clear version" map, with only HiRise image for background.

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Elevation map...

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Geologic/HiRise blend...

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..and detailed 1m contour map of the landing site environs. Still working on future traverse map.

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Fantastic! Thanks Kymani76.

P

They're saying the Sol 1 (February 19) press conference will be at 18:00 GMT / UTC.
So in about 5 hours from the time of this post...

Next Perseverance Press Conference due 19 Feb

We can expect some spectacular images...