 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily LakdawallaPhoenix sol 15 updateJun. 11, 2008 | 19:19 PDT | Jun. 12 02:19 UTC
Emily is on vacation until June 16. In the meantime, James Canvin is providing updates on the status of Phoenix. James used to work as an extragalactic astronomer, but recently switched fields to terrestrial weather. In his spare time he works in between these two fields, following and processing data from planetary spacecraft, in particular the near-real-time raw data from the Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix.
 First off to day I'd like to Echo Emily's quick comment about the new raw data page by Mark Lemmon, the lead scientist for the color camera on Phoenix. This is a fantastic new resource for anyone interested in following the Phoenix mission, particularly for people like me who want to use these images to make panoramas, animations, etc. Thanks Mark! Early on in the mission, I spent quite a bit of time looking at the images from Phoenix and scratching my head trying to understand what was there and what I could do with it. I ended up writing a quick and dirty program that would extract extra ‘metadata' information from the files to help with this. This was superseded last week when the fantastic Midnight Mars Browser (MMB), written by Michel Howard, was given the same functionality. Using this, Emily produced her raw image page which allowed us to see thumbnail images alongside data including the filters used and the direction the camera was pointed. Mark has now extended Emily's work to include a description of each activity and how many images were taken in each sequence. This is what I was waiting for, it's like suddenly having the picture of a jigsaw puzzle your doing. It all makes sense now! It allows me to easily spot sequences of interest (for example the current mission success panorama "Peter Pan") and where bits fit relative to each other. I can then use the sequence ID which is in the filenames to automatically copy all the relevant files from where MMB had put them on my hard drive together in a new folder and get working on assembling them. No searching through hundreds of images trying to work out which ones I can use. What amazes me most is that all this refinement of the way we can access the raw images has occurred in just two weeks! It seems a lifetime ago I was puzzling over the first images. Just as an aside, for the Mars Exploration Rovers this information is found out using the Pancam Database run by none other than your other guest blogger for the week, Jim Bell. Without this, I'm not sure I would have had the patience to sort out the images for all the mosaics and panoramas I've worked on. Thanks Jim! So without further ado, here is a pan made up from various sequences, partly the runout sequences on sols 2 and 10 and partly the Peter Pan sequences. Without the data giving the direction the camera was pointing for each image I would have found it very difficult to put all these bits together.
Getting back to to sol (sol 15) the main activity was a test sprinkling Martian soil from the scoop. The sprinkling method uses vibration of the scoop by a motorized rasp to gently shake material out. The rasp is located on the back of the scoop and is designed primarily to scrape up samples of subsurface ice that it expected further undergound.
This was a great success and produced a layer of fine particles extending from a pile of about a tablespoon amount of soil on top of the MECA instrument. This technique will now be used to deliver a sample to the optical microscope in the next few sols and hopefully to the problematic TEGA instrument soon after that. Lets just hope we don't end up seeing Phoenix like in this excellent artwork looking on the lighter side of the problem.
|
||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||
Copyright © 1993 – 2008 The Planetary Society. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Society Updates
[ what is this? ]
[ what is this? ]