Thanks, very nice. I thought I had seen a dust devil on the delta before. Perhaps it will become possible to determine if there is a time of day when conditions are favorable.

The panorama before history ...

The Latest View of Mars from Perseverance Rover Mission Sol 57

Click the image below to see the 7 minute video made from MastcamZ L images...



denoise / repair / grade / upscale

I am puzzled by the greenish material on the surface of the stone in the middle of that picture.
copper oxyde? this would be a very pure ore

That image is pretty heavily processed so I don't know if you can trust the hues.

The only reason why 'fracturing' might be the possible process was of similar-like effects in the view; that may not be wind-erosional related.

John

" I thought I had seen a dust devil on the delta before."
A dust devil was captured on the delta during the descent - check that EDL thread.
Phil

That image doesn't qualify for validation of true color hues.
I don't even see greenish hues.
Have you checked your monitor RGB settings (calibration)?

Thanks, that was it: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=251440
https://twitter.com/stim3on/status/1379575241970683908?s=20

M20 00057 MZL denoise, repair, grade, rescale

Yes, I think that is another one Ryan had noticed in his thread:

https://twitter.com/rover_18/status/1384046421834272772
https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/EzUAoEWUYAAF74E.mp4 (Twitter does seem to like linking to single posts ?)

Panorama taken with Mastcam-Z Left on sol 57 at 10:50am LMST.
It's worth exploring it on this gigapan link!



Edit: a version with the sky extended.

Thanks a lot Sean for this very nice work of yours... and for this lovely scenery.
Yes indeed, MSL gives us a lot of work for image processing, but it worths it when we see your results.
I'll do my iown 'interpretation' when I have some time to spare.
Thanks again so much

Moxie works!
The first time that an ISRU technology was tested on another planet!
6 grams of oxygen within one hour.
Enough for 1/6 human.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen from Red Planet

Thorsten

I think we have a start of a huge MastcamZ @110mm panoramic. The result will be dizzy !

Here a tiny fragment of this panoramic, taken on Sol 57.



Part "two", Sol 59 :

Sol 63 SuperCam:
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Nice. This makes it much easier to analyse this SuperCam series of the outlier.

RMI/SuperCam mosaic taken on sol 63, and into context with a Mastcam-Z Left view:

Some scale for perspective:

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The vertical ledge is about 15 meters, or 50 feet in height. The 'astronaut' is 6 feet tall. (image credit to neo56 in the post above.)

These dimensions are derived from the scale used on the Perseverance landing site map at https://mars.nasa.gov/maps/location/?mission=M20 :

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Thin afternoon clouds are seen close to the Sun in those Sol 64 NavCam images. Enjoy
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A drive in sol 65, as seen in this R-Hazcam image (site: 3 / drive: 2150)
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Yes indeed - see the new route map. Maybe 8 or 10 m southeast. his is a very rough partial circular panorama, good enough to find the location.
Phil
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To get a wider view of the airfield perhaps?

Latest Ingenuity image

So after seeing this image, tell me the move wasn't simply to get a more stunning backdrop for images of the helicopter.

The Sol-65 Navcam post-drive pan.



Polar

Very nice! Thanks... and here is a circular version. This juxtaposition shows very nicely the difference in radial scale between the polar projection and what I call 'circular'. They start from the same place but get projected differently.
Phil
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Another drive: Sol 66, SSE.
L-Navcam (Site 3 Drive 2208) Nice looking workspace for the RA.
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I'm going back to earlier Sol's to do some of the more the interesting Navcam pan's. Here is the Pan from Sol-44 with Ingenuity. I spent some time on this one because it is special.


Polar

A rough pan for sol 66 after another short drive to the southeast. This goes outside my map so i will revert to a small scale map for a bit while I plan coverage again (mapping in real time is a bit tricky).
Phil
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The Sol-66 post-drive Navcam Pan.



Polar

So much to look at !

I came across this close-up from sol 66 which caught my attention because of the relation between pebbles, sand ripples and pediment:



Finer pebbles are covering the wind formed ripple, probably due to subtraction of finer grain sections by wind erosion. But at some point the pebbles appear to have been transported by stronger winds as well to help form the ripple. Another, very speculative explanation may be that the fine pebbles formed in situ, by an accretion, condensation like process, from dust, but without water it is hard to conceive of such a process (tiny forces from frictional electrostatics ?).

In addition there are these darker dimples we have seen previously. They appear on both sides of the ripple but are harder to see on the shaded sight due to lighting. I think this site is still too close to the landing area to exclude blasting or fine debris during descent as explanations.

Then there are coarser pebbly fragments which seem to weather out of the pediment, or perhaps just have collected in the small depression together with fine dust. There is not a clear link between fine pebbles and coarser pebbles since they appear pretty strictly separated from each other. The small pebbles also tend to collect and be preserved in small, wind protected depression and pockets.

Do we know what kind of grain size and particle mass can be wind transported ? Since rather massive dunes have been observed to migrate, pebbles of this size do not seem out of the question with a heavier storm.

I guess I was most intrigued by the pebble covered ripple.

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We have a new update about the rover's next few months! Source: the "News Update on Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's Next Steps" NASA press conference, at around the 24 minute mark.

The Perseverance team has decided the location of their first scientific campaign. The red zone is the area they'll be exploring for the next "couple hundred" sols, and they hope to take perhaps 3 or 4 rock samples. They believe the rocks here represent the oldest material of the cratest floor, and expect to sample mudstones from the bottom of the lake which are of high preservation potential. They've identified a safe "corridor" they can drive through (sand dunes on one side, boulders on the other). Ingenuity will be coming along on the journey, with a new ops demo phase focused on supporting (but not intefering with) Perseverance's science mission. Two ways they mentioned were taking photos of interesting targets in areas inaccessible to the rover, and making DEMs that will aid the rover's traverse.

interesting linear feature trailing to the top of the hill to the northeast as seen sol68
Hard to say if a dust devil hoovered a clean track as it ascended up the peak or if it instead represents a fault line.crosseye view.
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Exciting news re the first science leg, to say nothing of the fact that Ingenuity will indeed be a participant in it! Once this begins we will begin a new thread for the journey.

The Sol-68 Navcam pan of the horizon.

Interesting possibility "Martian dust bunnies"
IIRC about a year ago, somebody published a paper on van der waals forces and the electro-static growth of dust bunnies...

It would be roughly analogous to flocculation in an aqueous solution - energy minimization because a clump has a lower surface to volume ratio - e.g. the reason cheerios clump together in milk, and the reason that ice cubes in an insulated cup form one-giant cube. In a steady state system where forward and backward phase changes are at equilibrium, the controlling factor is the surface area.

Tangent - Wow, hadn't really thought this through before, but with the low pressure on Mars, most of the phase changes will be solid-gas: sublimation and deposition. which is VERY dependent on surface area. Since CO2 is non-polar, a dry ice frost would provide a temporary non-polar van der waals "adhesive' to bring dust molecules together. H20 is polar, so that form of frost would be expected to form a hydration shell (even when frozen) which IIRC actually amplifies the charge of the underlying material

Absolutely amazing work, James.

Atomoid: "interesting linear feature trailing to the top of the hill to the northeast as seen sol68"
It looked exactly the same on sol 4. Here is a contrast-stretched version of that image -looks like a topographic feature to me. Possibly a fault.
Phil
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The more mundane explanation is that these are particles too heavy to saltate in the current environment but are able to creep. So they cover the trailing edge of the ripple and then progress slowly up, armoring and starving it.

Edit: A good example of this was Serpent dune scooped and imaged by Spirit. https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/press/spi.../20040319a.html

Sol 68 Navcam pan. I think this is the first picture ever showing the whole martian sky in color.

Thanks. A nice example showing how the pea shaped grains form a single layer of armor on top of the dune, and are not part of the interior. The article does not really talk about how the peas get to the top of the dune. Some transport leading to an even distribution is necessary if we discount the in-situ formation option (interesting to relate to dust bunnies; in fact, quite a bit of dust on earth originates from space as far as I recall). Any evidence of grains creeping up the slope does not appear to be preserved, however.

I was thinking the same. It's quite a view!
I was thrilled seeing the Sun that low in the images in James' work earlier.

I'm a fan of this, but it relies on the assumption of azimuthal homogeneity when the Sun is directly overhead.

The Perseverance sequence in question was previously run on sols 16 and 64 and one might expect it to be common during cloudy season. I know the Navcam color is challenging, but how did the sky end up green?

I don't know. I did a bit of level adjustments (just a bit). But I really can't tell when something is green, because I have dichromacy, so when it's about greens, I can't really see them.
You know, when I think the colors are off, I do a color sample of a pixel, I have the RGB profile. I forgot to do it on this one.

Edit : picture replaced with a better one (I guess).

CONGRATULATIONS Damia : you did a world premiere indeed with this remarkable work of yours showing us a real martian sky hemisphere !

Stitching Navcam panoramas is really fun, that's great to have color panoramas compared to Curiosity.
I added here a synthetic sky so that the panorama is compatible with VR apps like RoundMe.

Here is my attempt to combine multispectral images into one RGB image applying principal component analysis and some transformations in color space.
I used raw images that were taken on sol 69 by the left Mastcam-Z camera (filters 1 to 6, and RGB channels from filter 0).
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That looks great, highlighting the contrast between the sediments of outlier, the blocky rocks and the dunes.

Here is my attempt of PCA using the multispectral imaging of the other part of the delta, cropped to focus on and analyze a particular area which has dunes, blocks, talus, sediments and crater rim:

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I am using the right ZCAM bands (EBY), plus the right RGB (left panel). I am discarding the first and second principal components because they seem to pick up mostly variance of lighting which dominates in general. The center panel shows PCs 3,4 and 5 as RGB, and the right panel PCs 5,6 and 7. Even in the least important PCs the two layers of the sediments of the delta outcrop are distinct, as well as the two dunes in foreground, pointing perhaps at actual mineralogical differences. I tried some experiments with Subtract and Divide modes of band layers, but this would have to be done very carefully.

For tools, I am using gimp and qgis with grass which has a pca module since I have that handy, all free.

QUOTE (Andreas Plesch @ May 11 2021, 06:15 AM)

... I am discarding the first and second principal components because they seem to pick up mostly variance of lighting which dominates in general. ...

Yes, the first principal component is dominated by the variance of lighting. I consider this an advantage and use it in my pca images because it shows the objects and shapes of the Martian landscape and serves as a visual scaffold for the calculated colors.

It is somewhat more difficult to compute satisfactory pca images from the infrared channels of the right eye of Mastcam-Z. Especially near the edges of the photos, the variations between the filter flatfields are in some places stronger than the variations of the infrared spectrum of the Martian landscape itself. Therefore, I have used only the inner portion of the infrared photos here. The distant remnant (inselberg, outlier) of the delta deposit stands out with intense blue color. Interestingly, there is a color difference between foreground (A, with "bluish" stones) and middle ground (B, with "golden" stones), which is not so visible in the original RGB photo and in the pca image of the left camera eye. The parallax in the photos taken with the left and right Mastcam Z-eyes allows calculation of the distances from the rover to the visible boundaries of areas A and B on sol 69. What looks like a contiguous crater floor in the original RGB photo, actually has a hidden area between A and B of about 300 meters. Transferring the calculated distances into an orbiter photo, the different spectral colors get an explanation. Area A is the edge of the basaltic floor unit, and B is the lower etched unit in an erosional window.

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachment
Click to view attachmentThe two gray rays delimit the lateral field of view of the entire original photo, not of the inner part shown above.

By mistake, I put a wrong sol number in two filenames of my previous post, sorry for that. Correctly, it should be sol 69.

Here is a multispectral principal components image of sol 46, Mastcam-Z left eye, filters 0 (RGB) and 1 to 6.
The principal components 1, 5, and 6 were selected for this synthetic image.
Obviously, those shiny yellow pieces differ in chemical or mineralogical composition from the basaltic crater floor.

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