Phoenix sol 15 update

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2008/06/11 09:19 CDT

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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.

by James Canvin

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