Spirit & Opportunity *5* - Let's start with new NASA conference!

cassioli · 2004-04-09 02:18:53

Main Spirit's mission is over:

[http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … A094R1.jpg](zoom)

Ok, let's go on!

Luca

cassioli · 2004-04-09 02:21:35

Why the hell do they delete the real sky and replace it with "flat red"?!?

[http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … A094R1.jpg](look at zoom to see that the sky has been deleted; you don't need to download the full 3+ MB image, just the upper part).

Luca

cassioli · 2004-04-09 02:39:43

I found a [http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/]great site for Spirit/Opportunity color images!! :band:
(It's not Keith Laney's one).

Luca

Stu · 2004-04-09 10:07:58

For me, one of the most striking MER pics yet...

[http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/galler … B074R1.jpg]http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery....4R1.jpg

You can trace Opportunity's tracks back to Eagle Crater, and see The Outcrop within the crater... multiple small "craterlets" scattered over the plain... countless gentle ripples and dune crests on the plain's surface... fascinating details in the outcrops within Anatolia... what appear to be shallow rilles or channels meandering here, there and everywhere...and on the horizon, the farside of Endurance Crater, Opportunity's destination, with tantalising details visible...

Have to admit, I love this place

But when are we going to get a colour panorama?!! :hm:

RobS · 2004-04-09 10:55:20

Did you all notice this:

"Arvidson said the plains of Meridiani Planum are sparse with rock targets because the region sits atop 984 feet (300 meters) of fine grain material deposited over long periods of time. Unlike the impacts in of Spirit's Gusev Crater, which showered the area with rocky ejecta, Meridiani Planum craters don't appear to be deep enough to have punctured through the fine grain layer, he added."

The quote is found in

[http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ro … 40408.html]http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ro … 40408.html

Ray Arvidson, a geologist at Washington University in St Louis (and a Mars geologist since about 1970, I should add!), is the guy in charge of the Opportunity team.

Three hundred meters of fine grained material indicated by an examination of the images of crater rims; they lack boulders. Bigger craters punch deeper, so that's how they know there's 300 meters of fine-grained stuff. That means deposition by running water or maybe wind, but water is much more effective and on Earth carries a lot more sediment than wind.

That's DEEP water, most likely, and water for a LONG time (1 million+ years). Incredible to contemplate.

-- RobS

atomoid · 2004-04-09 19:23:28

yeah, at least a thousand feet of sediments... perhaps much more... but its hard to say if the bulk of it was depositied slowly over the eons (think lots of potential for life) or if most of it was lain down in a few catastrophic events, im not sure if there are a lot of geological signs of catsrophic events near Meridiani as far as im aware of... but then again catastrophic events would carry a lot of boulders so it would probably look more like gusev, so perhaps it is necessarily a very slow deposition... anyone have a different view on this?

the article also states:
"In addition to the scheduled end of the extended mission in mid-September, Mars will be in solar conjunction around September 13, a period when the sun lies between Earth and the red planet. That positioning will block communications with both rovers for at least a week to 10 days, mission scientists said."
couldnt they periodically just relay the data through some other mission that isnt near earth but is still close enough to get a signal such as Ulysses (that has a solar polar orbit i think) or maybe the signal, even if relayed through oddyssey isnt strong enough for anything but earth-based radio arrays to pick up...?

atomoid · 2004-04-09 19:26:08

I found a [http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/]great site for Spirit/Opportunity color images!! :band:
(It's not Keith Laney's one).
Luca

thx, very good site indeed, it makes me wonder how much other really cool stuff is hidden on the lyle.org servers!?! why dont they just have an index of all of them at [http://www.lyle.org]www.lyle.org -they used to have a link to the [http://www.lyle.org/mars/]mars image databank, but all i get at the [http://www.lyle.org/]root URL now is just an apache page, imglad i saved the link (not that i wouldnt find it in this forum though). maybe their bandwidth is getting choked and theyre trying to back off on the number of users (i use lyle.org every day becuse of their browse scheme, i hardly ever use NASA anymore).

the best [http://www.marsunearthed.com/OMIndex/Ma … sIndex.htm]3D anaglyph site i've found

RobS · 2004-04-09 21:15:42

Regarding the thousand feet of fine grained sediments: Meridiani is a highland area, several kilometers above the planetary datum, and Noachian (heavily cratered and old). So I think the sediments tell us that the crust of Mars is not just a heavily cratered lunar-like surface with some water erosion on top as decoration. Rather, the entire crust formed in the context of cratering, volcanism, wind-borne sediment transport, and water erosion, complete with snow and/or rain. In other words, under the thousand feel of lacustrine sediments we don't have undisturbed lunar-like regolith; rather, if we could drill it we would probably find layer after layer of volcanic ash, crater ejecta, basalt lava flows, water-borne sedimentary rocks, and wind-blown dune deposits, in a constant alteration as the crust built up. The four-kilometer cliffs of the Marineris canyons will be the place to test this. If I were NASA, I would make it a high priority to develop a robotic solar powered aircraft or balloon to photograph the cliffs horizontally at a very high resolution. We'll see the whole parade, all the way up, I think, complete with dozens of smaller and larger equivalents of Meridiani Salt Lake.

If this is right, Mars will have hundreds or thousands of potential microfossil localities. Gusev's probably one, but under a hundred meters of more recent basaltic lava.

-- RobS

Shaun Barrett · 2004-04-10 01:37:45

Hi RobS!
I am a little puzzled by your comment about Meridiani being "a highland area, several kilometres above the planetary datum".
I believe the MOLA elevation at the Opportunity landing ellipse centre is -1.44 km.
Am I missing something here or misinterpreting your comment somehow?
???

cassioli · 2004-04-10 03:38:22

I found a [http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/]great site for Spirit/Opportunity color images!! :band:
(It's not Keith Laney's one).
Luca
thx, very good site indeed, it makes me wonder how much other really cool stuff is hidden on the lyle.org servers!?!

Nice question!

(i use lyle.org every day becuse of their browse scheme, i hardly ever use NASA anymore).

So do I, since several weeks. :;):

Luca

cassioli · 2004-04-10 06:14:15

This anim is little enough, so I can put it here:

Opportunity trench, Sol 73.
In real-time, the trench was completed in 27 minutes!

But there is also a [http://jumpjack.altervista.org/immagini … 3-maxi.gif]full-res 5MB (!!!) version available.

Luca

~Eternal~ · 2004-04-11 20:01:50

The Rover appears... to be doing something inapproiate O-o.

cassioli · 2004-04-12 04:01:59

Guys, I found a great image:

(From [http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/]Markoff's site).

Now we know what that dark area is made of!
Blueberries!!!

If it's true, this image also shows that they have some sources: you can see them near the "bonnevill crater" text. There are some craters from where the dark tracks depart, maybe due to the wind bringing away the blueberries from the sources.

It would be interesting if, after reaching Columbia Hills, we could get South, to the VERY dark area... But probably it is definitely too far: reaching Columbia will be already a difficult task to accomplish.

Luca

atomoid · 2004-04-12 20:36:37

Now we know what that dark area is made of!
Blueberries!!!
...There are some craters from where the dark tracks depart, maybe due to the wind bringing away the blueberries from the sources.

Great picture! It would seem that the dark stuff is indeed Blueberries, but i dont think the blueberries are actually getting moved around. My impression is that instead, they just happen to be getting exhumed in this particular pattern: As the winds blow in a certain pattern around the terrain feratures, the area of most wind gets exhumed leaving apparent "windtails" of blueberries leeward of the terrain features.

Complicating this whole issue is how strange the Sand/Dust transport process is on Mars, as you can see in
[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1N1345 … 1.JPG.html]images like this. Here i would expect features to get filled in by dust/sand drifts, but it seem that the operating principle is to exhume divets and bdrock features like "home plate" which lies at the bottom of a small divet of sand. i'd expect homeplate to tend to get buried but it isnt, some process keeps it clear. it makes me wonder how long this feature has been like this, maybe not much accumulation occurs and mostly whats going on is exhumation so that the topography, aside from the little white dust drifts, is pretty much the topography it was hundreds of millions of years ago and only a small removal of several feet has occurred by wind action leaving the heavy blueberries and sand grains at the top and taking away all the bedrock (which erodes as a fine light powder and quickly blows away), leaving this pattern of dark tracks.

RobS · 2004-04-12 23:38:35

Shaun Barrett: You may be right that Meridiani is below datum. It is part of the cratered highlands but maybe the highlands there aren't very high. I haven't seen the MOLA data.

Regarding blueberries near Bonneville Crater: isn't Bonneville inside Gusev, 180 degrees around the planet from opportunity?

-- RobS

atomoid · 2004-04-13 00:12:04

Shaun Barrett: You may be right that Meridiani is below datum. It is part of the cratered highlands but maybe the highlands there aren't very high. I haven't seen the MOLA data.
Regarding blueberries near Bonneville Crater: isn't Bonneville inside Gusev, 180 degrees around the planet from opportunity?
-- RobS

oh! er um uh... yeah! your right, not many blueberries there! er... i was thinking of um yeah... Meridiani! thats it...<cringe>
:unclesam:
Then what the heck is the dark area at Gusev composed of? The area Spirit has seen looks pretty "un-dark" from the ground, not consistent with anything notable... I remember the [http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars … GQD_1.html]Mars Express image of this area was decidedly "green" (olivine?), from looking at [http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/collection … mosaic.jpg]Crotty's mosaic image of the area, you can see such dark areas are quite patchy and abundant. its hard to say whether its exposed layers spilling out this dark stuff or some other mystery going on... the fact that the daark stuff seems to be associated with craters, hilltops and such makes me think its layer-asssociated but what layers? hilltops and craters arent generally associated with the same layers... also the fact that it doenst happen everywhere in the same area is puzzling too...
then i thought this might just be areas where the local winds are removing dust from the rocks leaving the dark basalt surface exposed instead of the light red dust coat... you can [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … R1_br2.jpg]see this in images like this, where the dark color of the rocks stands out pretty well, espaecially in the distance, and close up you can see the dust vs. basalt surface differences... maybe thats all it is...

the question i have now is: Why do so many of the rocks have only a partial coat of dust? id expect the dust to stick to all of the surfaces of the rock if its blowing around, are the rock textures of the dusty/clean areas different to explain this? you can see similar areas of different rocks with the same orientation and height above the ground, and even similar areas of the same rock, have quite drastically different dust coatings... some other factor must be at work here... maybe it has something to do with dew/frost formation and moist dust bonding tighter to the rock surface? if so the areas air currents in the dark areas must be affecting the local relative humidity (unless there is moisture creeping out of the ground here, did they ever get a definitive answer on the brine in the soil?).

Stephen · 2004-04-13 03:20:22

Cassioli wrote:

Why the hell do they delete the real sky and replace it with "flat red"?!?

If you view the larger version of the image the skyline does seem to have what in the movie business would be called a "matte-line".

But that said, you are aware, Cassioli, that the image is not a true colour one anyway but an "enhanced false-color" version in which the "colors have been exaggerated to enhance the differences between cleaner and dustier rocks, and lighter and darker soils". (I'm quoting from the image's [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 0408a.html]associate blurb on the JPL rover site.)

My guess is that JPL not much care what the sky looked like. It was the ground and its rocks they were more interested in. (And maybe the enhancing process also did things to the Martian sky which made the image less photogenic or less comprehensible.)

=====
Stephen

cassioli · 2004-04-13 05:01:40

Regarding blueberries near Bonneville Crater: isn't Bonneville inside Gusev, 180 degrees around the planet from opportunity?
-- RobS

Yes. Unfotrunately I couldn't find orbital color image of opportunity's site.

Luca

cassioli · 2004-04-13 05:08:12

[...] (And maybe the enhancing process also did things to the Martian sky which made the image less photogenic or less comprehensible.)

If they really "cleaned" the sky becuase "it was not good to see", they are REALLY stupid! :angry:
This is NOT a scientific behaviour!!! :realllymad:

Luca

Arccos · 2004-04-14 02:41:42

This problem is pointless. Guys, you are not looking at SCIENTIFIC pictures. You are looking at pictures released for publicity. Normal people don't care for a science, they just want to see nice images of Martian landscape.
All in all the raw images sky is affected by a mere noise - those pixels in the sky mean nothing. You can just erase them and you lose no valid information.
Also, as you can find, not ALL pics have been edited in this way and many of them have originally illuminated sky. The only question now is its color. Should it be blue or reddish? Hmm, the pictures made by amateurs look damn good. But I would rather believe experts from NASA. Not because they would be smarter, but simply because they perfectly know their own MER-onboard hardware...

atomoid · 2004-04-14 13:55:34

This problem is pointless. Guys, you are not looking at SCIENTIFIC pictures. You are looking at pictures released for publicity. Normal people don't care for a science, they just want to see nice images of Martian landscape.
All in all the raw images sky is affected by a mere noise - those pixels in the sky mean nothing. You can just erase them and you lose no valid information.
Also, as you can find, not ALL pics have been edited in this way and many of them have originally illuminated sky. The only question now is its color. Should it be blue or reddish? Hmm, the pictures made by amateurs look damn good. But I would rather believe experts from NASA. Not because they would be smarter, but simply because they perfectly know their own MER-onboard hardware...

yup, the rover snaps a RAW uncompressed picture, then it probably does some compression on it before sending it for transmitter bandwidth conservation. I am sure they have a compression setting that is "acceptable for scientific use" but what is that? it is most certainly not the exorbitant amount of compression as the ones they release on their so-called [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/]"Raw images" area of the NASA website, as these are not "Raw" images at all, but are highly compressed (on the order of Photoshop's JPEG compression = "3"), which is very lossy indeed and not very useful for scentific purposes. They do this to provide quick image download times for public use (and also to save their own bandwidth).

NASA has the lowly-compressed "originals" somewhere (the true "Raw" images), and the mission scientists are no doubt using them, but the public does'nt seem to have any access to them (anyone know where?). Some "releases" become available in the non-lossy TIFF format only when they are part of a press release and after they are highly processed.

RobS · 2004-04-14 14:56:53

The dark areas we see of Gusev crater from orbit are areas where the wind has blown lighter colored dust away. We see the contrast in surface pictures as well, with light dunes in some ares and rocky areas elsewhere. The orbital picture shows dark lines which are places dust devils have gone through and removed the dust. They also show depositional and erosional shadows down wind of craters.

The dark areas are not true color; the contrasts are enhanced. If one looks at Mars unenhanced it's hard to see anything because the contrast is low because there's dust everywhere. So don't try to compare orbital and surface pictures directly; it's misleading.

-- RobS

Josh Cryer · 2004-04-14 15:23:41

atomoid, I don't know about that. I beleive the "raw" images on the NASA site are in fact the exact same data being used by the science people. I recall distinctly that the data there will be essentially the same data being sent to the PDS in the coming months (this question came up during a news conference).

brthrjon · 2004-04-17 21:23:40

I just watched the press conference from 4/16 on cspan.

Pretty cool discussion of bounce and how it relates to meterorites that we actually have in our hands here on earth.

In one part, they discuss a satelite photo of the opportunity site and discuss a ray of ejecta from a distant crater. This implies that bounce may have come from that event.

If we can see the ejecta in a strait line, I wonder if we can assume that there was not a body of water of a certain depth when the crater was formed, as the ejecta would have been more spread out?

This then should help us date the deep water scenario.

GraemeSkinner · 2004-04-19 05:50:07

I don't know if these image links have been posted before (still trying to catch up on a weeks worth of emails/posts/study after book buying holiday to Hay-on-Wye ).
The stones/rocks in this image make me want to pick them up and feel the texture, some of them look very similar to ones you can find on the coast of Cumbria. [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2P1354 … 1.JPG.html]LINK
Here's a nice conspiracy pic [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1N1354 … 1.JPG.html]LINK 2 it's a set of giants footprints in the sand! *Only Joking*

It's amazing to think that they have sent back so many images to date (look at the quantity of images Spirit has sent back for SOl 101/102 alone).

Graeme

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