pixtime

I just finished taking another look at the 1700+ "raw" images over at the Mars Explorer Rover Gallery. These are the unprocessed images we've received from Spirit in the first 17 sols and there are some really interesting photos. The most interesting to me are a couple of more recent pictures that I hadn't seen in the press briefings or at Planetary Photojournal. It's also cool to see the raw images before they've been converted to their component colors and combined to form the true-color images that make the press releases.

Adirondack: this image looks like it might be the right camera view from the same moment as this Adirondak view taken from the left camera. I assume that the left camera was taking photos through the red (or infra-red) green and blue filters to produce the true-color image but I'm not sure which filter(s) this right camera image was taken through. Any imaging experts out there know how to tell?

Tracks: As the rover moves over different kinds of terrain, it's going to have various impacts on the rock and soil. You can see in the upper right of this image that the rover hit some "fluffy" material and sunk a bit deeper. It's probably one of those depressions that escaped the wrath of the dust devils and so held onto or even ammased more dust than the surrounding areas. This dust must be really fine stuff to be sticking together like that. Wild stuff.

Adirondack close-up: This close-up of Adirondack shows how polished the rock is. The broad flat surfaces will be an ideal first target for the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) which will grind a 5 cm in diameter circle down into the rock about half a centimeter.

These six pictures, taken by the front hazard cameras, 1l, 1r, 2l, 2r, 3l, 3r, when loaded in tabs and then tabbed through quickly can give you a cool, almost stereo view animation of Spririt approaching Adirondack.

I'll try to do a post about once a week that highlights some of the photos that aren't making the big websites if that's something you all are interested in. Let me know what you think in the comments or via email.

update: This slashdot strory points to a really amazing MER picture resource. A must bookmark for any MER fans out there. He takes the raw images and combines them to create color and stereo anaglyphs. Awesome! Kickass!

Posted by asa at January 22, 2004 01:07 AM