Spirit & Opportunity *7* - ...continuing...

djellison · 2004-09-15 15:40:21

Well - the chance of there being a devil or two while Spirit roves around Gusev is almost certain.

The chance that there's a camera pointing at it, and taking a photograph, while it goes past - is fairly small. Pathfinder caught one - it was a fairly lucky call.

They have done several structured navcam sequences to try and spot them, but no luck as of yet.

Doug

Palomar · 2004-09-15 15:52:45

The chance that there's a camera pointing at it, and taking a photograph, while it goes past - is fairly small. Pathfinder caught one - it was a fairly lucky call.

*They should have outfitted the MERs with dust devil sensors and the ability to drop everything at a moment's notice to snap photos. :;): And tracking capability...

--Cindy :laugh:

P.S.: Your point is well taken, though. Yes...

Shaun Barrett · 2004-09-15 19:11:03

Thanks, Rik!
Can't find the movie of the seas evaporating. Probably because I don't understand your directions as to its whereabouts - I'm afraid I don't speak computerese!
(What does '.gif' mean, incidentally? )

[If it depends on 'cutting and pasting', I could be in trouble there too. I've never been shown how to do cutting and pasting and I've never been able to figure it out. I know it must be simple - everybody seems to do it(! ) - but I don't even know where to look for the scissors!! And I don't know anyone I'd feel comfortable asking, either.
Shameful, isn't it? I guess this is what illiterates must feel like when they admit they can't read! ]

Aside from all my appalling ignorance, it looks like some people at the board you linked us to are in agreement with the proposition that any 'lake' at Opportunity's landing site must necessarily have been part of a very large body of water, if present-day topography is anything to go by. As you pointed out, there seems to be some disagreement about the extent of that body of water, and its volume, but it must have been big!
I noted some frustration, also, that there hasn't been more discussion from NASA of the implications of all that water. It's good to know I'm not alone in this regard.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-15 20:06:43

I believe that the planets orbit have actually grown larger as they have started to revolve slower. If so then Mars being closure to the sun may answer when it could have had liquid water and for how long it has taken to get to the present orbital distance would give us a way of estimating how long.

atomoid · 2004-09-16 22:45:08

Cindy and Doug, Thanks for reprising the dust devil search question again, i have also kept my eye open for tell-tale dust devil signatures in the MER images, and i think im sure i have at least glanced at every MER image that has crossed lyle.org's servers from landings to present. i think one of the horizon shots must have caught one on camera by now... i wonder if the MER team has been parsing these images in search of dust devils or if they merely did the simple scenarios as Doug mentions and then went on to other more productive things... there was also some discussion in http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1438]last spring's dust devil thread about the MER rover team's efforts to find them. Here's that striking picture of the pathfinder dust devil.

however, i never did see any "normal color" image of it (anyone know where to find one?), perhaps the problem in trying to find these dust devils by visually parsing through all the mars images is that it might be so dim and unoticeable without the aid of false color differentiating that it would be routinely overlooked as mere noise on the horizon...?

Ultimately, they woudl have shown us one if they found it, and since they were apparently looking for them, they would probably have found it if there were one to find, although actually they probably havent devoted very much time given all the activities the rovers have undertaken, i guess the difference with the pathfinder was that it stayed there for so long without much else to do but take pictures of sojourner. but with MER theres always something new at your feet to spend your time on. it makes me think that the Vikings must have had the greatest chance to catch dust devils on camera since they pretty much stayed in the same place for 4 or 5 years time to finally catch one by accident, so why no viking dust devils?? hmm...

Rxke · 2004-09-17 01:55:30

Shaun, me bad, probably...

it's copy and paste, the right term...

in that discussion, all the way down, the admin posted a link but it's not 'clickable' (if you click it, it doesn't bring you to that place.)
Now... Ages since i used Windows, but i think if you put your mouse on the left side of link and press left (or right? thry both) button and then, keep holding it and going to right, the link gets "highlighted" (coloured) then press control-c. that copies the highlighted stuff into aome kind of little memory...

then in your adressbar, where you see: http://www]http://www etcetc... you erase the text there, put your cursor there by clicking... and press control-v
the link should be in your adressbar then. then just press enter.

(I might be completely wrong, too long ago since i worked in windows...)

Hey, and never feel stupid about not knowing somthing re computers. They're supposed to be user-friendly but they're definitely not. I've been tinkering/playing/programming.. working w computers since the early 80's and have yet to meet a computer that never makes you go 'huh?'

(happy second-hand Mac user since mid 90's, but those have their quircks too, despite the 'it just works' philosophy they use...!)

Atomoid, Thanks for the "Sherlock Holmes" you did! :up:

djellison · 2004-09-17 03:41:26

I'll try and find the orig. raw pathfinder imagery and put together a still from it

(Edit, some hours later )

Found it The main dust devil image that we all know was imaged on Sol 11 as part of the Gallery Panorama.

It was imaged in http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … 405r.htm]R, http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … 422r.htm]G and http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … 441r.htm]B at approx 17 seconds between each image being taken.

Excuse the small image size, but, of course, pathfinders IMP has 256 x 256 CCD's

Quite how they got to this..

I'm not sure

Rxke · 2004-09-17 04:52:51

Great job!

How on Earth (or rather: Mars...) did you find the original picture back?
That truly is rooting in a haystack, looking for a needle...

I'm *very* impressed.

Palomar · 2004-09-17 05:04:30

Great job!
How on Earth (or rather: Mars...) did you find the original picture back?
That truly is rooting in a haystack, looking for a needle...
I'm *very* impressed.

*"Amen" to that, Rik! :up: :laugh:

--Cindy

::edit::

Atomoid: but with MER theres always something new at your feet to spend your time on. it makes me think that the Vikings must have had the greatest chance to catch dust devils on camera since they pretty much stayed in the same place for 4 or 5 years time to finally catch one by accident, so why no viking dust devils?? hmm...

*Good question. :hm:

Rxke · 2004-09-17 05:31:25

Viking had a very slow system for taking pictures. It used a vertical scan, so small line after small line. if something happened outside that very small boundary, Viking didn't register it. So moving objects were not really possible, I guess. There's a little anecote somewhere about the scientists taking a group photo of themselves with the Viking camera's, it took a *loooong* time. But once you were scanned, you could leave your place, so by the time Viking was done 'snapping,' most of the scientist had long left the building, but they still ended up in one picture!

Palomar · 2004-09-17 07:02:13

Viking had a very slow system for taking pictures. It used a vertical scan, so small line after small line. if something happened outside that very small boundary, Viking didn't register it. So moving objects were not really possible, I guess. There's a little anecote somewhere about the scientists taking a group photo of themselves with the Viking camera's, it took a *loooong* time. But once you were scanned, you could leave your place, so by the time Viking was done 'snapping,' most of the scientist had long left the building, but they still ended up in one picture!

*Wow, that's an interesting anecdote Rik.

--Cindy

Shaun Barrett · 2004-09-17 07:59:01

Many thanks, Rik!
I did what you suggested and it worked fine. I certainly appreciate your patience and kindness.
[I wonder why they chose 'control c' and 'control v'. The 'c' part presumably means 'copy' but the 'v' doesn't seem as intuitive, at least not to me.]

That movie is very interesting but it would be better if they slowed it down a little! I always imagined the initial extent of the water on Mars to be somewhat greater than that depicted in this sequence but, of course, it's anybody's guess at this stage in our exploration of Mars.
It was interesting also to see that the eastern section of Mariner Valley may have been one of the last places to dry up, with Argyre close behind, and Hellas Basin perhaps retaining water well after the rest of the seas were gone.
Thanks again!
:up:

Rxke · 2004-09-17 09:40:58

My pleasure, Shaun!

My take about the ctrl-v: it's because of computer history, I think..
That copy 'n paste thingy is relatively new in computerland... Newer than being able to do a printout of data...
And... guess what key combination triggers printing? Heh, right... So ctrl-p was already taken.. But why ctrl-v? I guess because v is next to c on a keyboard, so you can type faster?
In the olden times, each program came with its own combinations, phew... so ctrl-p could mean paste in a wordprocessor, printing in an accounting program, and probably power-down or 'purge memory' in some other program. Switching programs could be painful, if you were used to a certain set of shortcuts... "All I wanted to do was a printout, and now all my data has gone, I wonder why?"

Oh, BTW: .gif: graphics interchange format (or something *very* similar sounding...) Just a type of commonly used pictures you find on the web... best for graphics,logo's etc, with not big a palette of colors, for 'real' pictures (derived from photographs, you use .jpeg files, the other popular format (Joint Picture Expert Group....)
There are hundreds of other, (some arguably better) formats, like .png, TIFF, PICT, RAW, etc etc etc, but those two are the widest in use.

djellison · 2004-09-17 10:59:11

Well - I googled until I could find WHEN the image of the dust devil was taken -

http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v3 … 98/359.htm told me it was Sol 11 whilst taking the gallery pan.

SO - off to the PDS where I know every Pathfinder image is online

http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/]http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/

Into the Imaging section - into resources and into the Pathfinder section

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Admin/r … s_mpf.html

MPFL-M-IMP-2-EDR-V1.0 is what I want - and Sol 11 would be in the first section of these three - http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … -edr-v1.0/

Browse - with Mars as the target and you get a list of all imaging sequences

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … ...dex.htm

As you can see - there's several tiers and channels of Galllery Pan. Obviously with so much sky in the view - it would be tier 5 (top tier) - so I opened up all three channels pages - and found the image that matched the profile of the published scarey-colours image

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … ...033.htm

(14th image along)

And there we go.

Easy if you know what sequence it was taken in ( gallery pan ) and where to look

Doug

Rxke · 2004-09-17 11:19:03

Aaah... The power of Google.

Still an impressive achievement, though...

Rxke · 2004-09-17 13:18:33

With Opportunity out of the crater (judging from the pictures... Or am I compuhleetehly wrong?)

... what are the plans for the future? They still going for the aeroshell?Haven't read too much about this, lately...

atomoid · 2004-09-17 20:02:46

as far as I know, opportunity is still just sittin there waiting for conjunction to pass, the panos they released i think are are old data from before it went into the crater, i guess theyre just putting *something* out there to keep us entertained whiel we wait...?

http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ra … ompact]the latest video "update" said Opprtunity rebooted because it "overflew!" a buffer

atomoid · 2004-09-17 20:37:43

thaks Doug for your excellent research on the MPL dust devil "eyeball" image. i love these forums... Its also interesting to note that the ~35 second gap between the first and last RGB exposures woudl appear to reveal the speed and motion of the dust devil, so it might not be a true profile of its cylinder (do we have any windspeed data from that sol?).

But now im confused:
From looking at the PDS data, it looks like you used these images:
http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … 5r.htm]RED http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … .htm]GREEN http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … r.htm]BLUE

In all of these images you can see a small smudge exactly where the dust devil is (as well as one above it near the middle of the image), apparently (read below) this smudge is NOT ACTUALLY PART OF THE DUST DEVIL! just coincidence?

The same exact smudge appears in the same exact place but in different views which suggests its actually just an out-of-focus dust speck on the camera lens. If you go along in any of these pages and select the next inage (hit the right nav arrow) youll see the same smudge, the dust devil couldnt be in exactly the same area of the photo, although the successive exposures here are about 6 minutes apart, thats just too much coincidence...

it could be that the darkest thing in the dust devil photo isnt the dust devil but is just a dust speck, notice that the dust devil appears to have a wide base to it, this base is just the lens speck, and only the column just to the left of the dark speck is the dust devil but it doesnt show up much at all in the sol 11 MPL images referenced except for the http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mpfl-m- … r.htm]BLUE one (which also happens to be the noisiest image of the lot), you can see it there very very very dim...

OK, this revises my understanding of just what details of this image are the actual dust devil, and if theyre this hard to see in the MER images then there might be dozens of them waiting to be fished out of the data we already have accrued... i guess well want to keep a keener eye on the blue part of the spectrum!

Shaun Barrett · 2004-09-18 02:46:06

So, dust devils are much harder to catch on film, on the ground, than one might expect from the profusion of dust devil tracks seen in orbital photos.
I suppose the logical conclusion from this is that erosion rates are so low on Mars at present (and in the past few thousand years) that very infrequent dust devil events are preserved for millenia (?)
In other words, probes like Viking could sit for centuries on the martian surface and be lucky to see even one dust devil.
???
Waddya reckon?

djellison · 2004-09-18 13:16:23

With Opportunity out of the crater (judging from the pictures... Or am I compuhleetehly wrong?)
... what are the plans for the future? They still going for the aeroshell?Haven't read too much about this, lately...

It's still right at the very bottom of the crater - just off to one side.

I believe the plan is for yet more investigation of the rocks in that area - and then to leave the crater and explore the plains again. The heatshield is a certain target for scientific and engineering purposes. Part of me is a bit dissapointed that they didnt visit the backshell and parachute - but I can understand why, as there's certainly a 'danger zone' around something with a flapping parachute near by.

Doug

Stu · 2004-09-18 14:46:25

Cindy...

Knowing how much you love dust devils, I found this picture and thought of you...

Enjoy! And imagine yourself there watching it for real...

http://www.digitalspaceart.com/marsvisi … ays_mv.jpg

Palomar · 2004-09-18 14:59:18

Cindy...
Knowing how much you love dust devils, I found this picture and thought of you...
Enjoy! And imagine yourself there watching it for real...
http://www.digitalspaceart.com/marsvisi … ays_mv.jpg

*Aw, that is awesome! :up: Lovely!

Very kind of you; thanks, Stu.

--Cindy

Rxke · 2004-09-19 16:18:38

I sooo hope Opp reaches the aeroshield: muchas importantes!

-it wil show weathering, depth, form... of an impact crater of which they know the *certain age and impactpower* which will potentially tell us *a lot* about Mars weather and will learn us better to 'read' existing craters etc...

-it will learn us about the aerobraking: effects on the shell etc.

Those rovers are great...

dicktice · 2004-09-19 16:50:57

It (the aeroshield) may even show some accumulated dust, which I mention with regard to Shaun's remark about dust devils' tracks lasting possibly millinea. My view, is that the dust has to be very fine in order to rise in such thin air, so I'd be surprised if the trails remain any longer than until the next planet-wide duststorm. That being the case, it would make dust-devils very common indeed, perhaps even a threat (as someone suggested elsewhere) to machinery at least, in addition to the greater threat of the duststorms themselves. (The odds of "catching one in the act," in a single random snapshot from a moving orbital camera, must therefore be pretty slim.) At any rate, I like the idea of dust devils being common on Mars, since that would offer yet another way, besides balloons, to carry out extended survey flights (remotely piloted from Phobos, say) once we reach Mars-space.

djellison · 2004-09-19 17:26:03

We dont need to go and look at the heatshield to see dust deposition

Infact - thats a bad place to look at it - it probably got caked in it on impact

You want to study atmospheric dust deposition - you study solar array output - and the sun dial.

Infact - just look at these

Sol 2

Sol 200

See how different they look - thats just dust deposition, and it's a LOT worse with Spirit.

But - there's plenty of reasons to visit the heatshield...

- Engineering - see how it stands up to entry and impact
- Science - it's dug a BLOODY GREAT HOLE Far bigger than the wheels could trench
- Cool Factor - just as cool as the empty nest images imho.

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