Mars vistas: How Earth will receive stunning, high-resolution views

James Bell, assistant professor of astronomy and the lead scientist for Pancam, speaks with members of his Pancam team (clockwise from his left): Miles Johnson '02, Heather Arneson '02, Chase Million '04, Alex Hayes '03 and research specialists John Proton and Jascha Sohl-Dickstein '01. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Send now for your high-definition travel brochure to Mars.

If all goes according to plan, next January the clearest, most-detailed Martian landscapes ever seen will be on view, thanks to a mast-mounted panoramic camera, called the Pancam, aboard the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

The image resolution -- equivalent to the view that would be seen on the Martian surface by a person with 20/20 vision -- will be three times higher than that recorded by the cameras on the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 or the Viking landers in the mid-1970s.

From 10 feet away, Pancam has a resolution of one millimeter per pixel. "It's Mars like you've never seen it before," said Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the Athena suite of scientific instruments on board Spirit and Opportunity.

Pancam's mast can swing the camera 360 degrees across the horizon and 90 degrees up or down. Scientists will know a rover's exact orientation each day on the Martian surface by using data gained as the camera searches for and finds the sun in the sky at a known time of day. And scientists will determine a rover's location on the planet by triangulating the positions of features seen on the distant horizon in different directions.

Athena team member James Bell, assistant professor of astronomy and the lead scientist for Pancam, said high resolution is important for conducting science on Mars. "We want to see fine details. Maybe there is layering in the rocks, or the rocks are formed from sediments instead of volcanoes. We need to see the rock grains, whether they are wind-formed or shaped by water," Bell said.

Also, Pancam is important for determining a rover's travel plans. Said Bell, "We need to see details of possible obstacles that may be way off in the distance."

When each twin-lens CCD (charge-coupled device) camera takes pictures, the electronic images will be sent to the rover's onboard computer for a number of onboard image processing steps, including compression, before the data are sent to Earth.

Each image, reduced to nothing more than a stream of zeros and ones, will then be part of a once- or twice-daily stream of information beamed to Earth at the speed of light. Ten minutes later, the data will be retrieved by NASA's Deep Space Network, delivered to mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and converted into raw images. From there, the images will be sent to the new Mars image processing facility at Cornell's Space Sciences Building, where researchers and students will hover over computers to produce scientifically useful pictures.

During the surface activity by the rovers, from January to May 2004, there will be daily extensive planning by the Mars scientific team, led by Squyres. Research specialists Elaina McCartney and Jon Proton will participate in these meetings and determine how to implement the plans for Pancam and each rover's five other instruments.

Processing pictures from 100 million miles away will be no easy feat. It has taken three years for Cornell faculty, staff and students to precisely calibrate the Pancam lenses, filters and detectors, and to write the software that tells the special camera what to do.

For instance, researchers Jonathan Joseph and Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, both Cornell alumni, have written and perfected software that will produce images of great clarity. One of Joseph's software routines patches the images together into larger pictures, called mosaics, and another brings out details within single images. Sohl-Dickstein's software will allow scientists to generate color pictures and conduct spectral analysis, which is important in understanding the planet's geology and composition.

Extensive work on the camera also was accomplished by graduates Miles Johnson '02, Heather Arneson '02 and Alex Hayes '03. Hayes, who started working on the Mars mission as a Cornell sophomore, built a mock-up of the panoramic camera that aided the delicate color calibration and calculation of the actual Mars camera's focal length and field of view. Johnson and Arneson spent eight months at JPL running Pancam under Mars-like conditions and collecting calibration data for the camera's 16 filters.

For the students and recent graduates on the Pancam team, the research has been both valuable experience and education. "I stood inside a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and performed testing on the real rovers," said Johnson. "It was a weird but an exciting feeling standing next to such a really complex piece of equipment that would soon be on Mars."