CU's 'cool camera' developer is in 'shock and awe' at Mars images

Cornell astronomer Jim Bell speaks to the media at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., following the release, last week, of the first panoramic images from Mars. Robert Barker/University Photography

By David Brand and Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Remarkable though the Mars landing of the rover Spirit was, it was the spectacular color images sent back from the planet, some in stereo, that really opened the eyes wide and caught the breath. They are the most detailed pictures of another planet ever obtained.

On Monday, Jan. 12, NASA released a 360-degree panorama of the landing site in Gusev crater, composed of 225 images in eight sectors, stitched together in a seamless mosaic. The pictures were taken by the Cornell-developed twin panoramic cameras, or Pancams, on top of the rover's mast. The leader of the camera team, Jim Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy, called his reaction to the first picture one of "shock and awe."

Steven Squyres, the Cornell astronomy professor who heads the rover science team, paid tribute to Bell as "the Ansel Adams of the space age, the guy with the cool cameras." And CNN TV's Miles O'Brien dubbed Bell "the Pancam man."

The panorama image reveals, in astonishing clarity, reddish-brown soil and largely gray round and angular rocks, with distant boulders and hills. The definition is so high that it is possible to zoom in on tiny shards of rock and even particles of soil.

The images were taken on sols (Martian days) 3, 4 and 5 after the rover's bounce-down landing on Jan. 3. The raw data received at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena was sent as black-and-white pictures to the Mars Lab (Cornell University Mars Data Analysis Facility) in the Space Sciences Building on the Ithaca campus. The Cornell team, composed of researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, combined the images, taken through a series of different-colored filters, into color pictures. The images were then stitched together by Bell and his team at JPL.

Bell described the first picture as being three to four times better than the resolution of previous images recorded by the cameras on the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 or the Viking Landers in the mid-1970s. He called the frames "absolutely spectacular."

Bell described his reaction when he first saw the first high-definition image. It was an emotional reaction, he said, "because I have held these cameras in my hands -- carefully, with gloves on." He said, "Until now, it has been like having an animal in a cage, but now this beast is out, taking incredible pictures in the native habitat it was designed to work in." He praised "the talented and heroic teamwork of people at Cornell and around the country who helped develop this camera -- its optics, filters, electronics."

Cornell members of the rover panoramic camera, or Pancam, team review data from Spirit at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They are, from left, program analyst Jonathan Joseph, mission planner Jon Proton, and Cornell graduates Miles Johnson, foreground, and Alex Hayes. Robert Barker/University Photography

The Pancam pictures also were used to indicate the temperature of the rocks around the landing site. One of the rover's five scientific instruments, the Mini-TES (for miniature thermal emission spectrometer) also captured a panorama of the landing site, but in the infrared. The Mini-TES data was reduced to dots, each one a spectrum converted into a temperature of the crater area, either fine-grain "soil" or a rock.

These dots were then laid over Pancam pictures of the same viewed area so that warm patches of sand glowed red and comparatively cooler rocks appeared deep blue. The data will help determine the types and amounts of many different kinds of minerals, particularly those that are formed by the action of water.

The third picture in the Pancam panorama, released Jan. 8, clearly showed, on the rover's rear solar panel, a Cornell-developed calibration tool that is also a small sundial. Bell described the tiny sundial -- a small aluminum square with a black, upright post in the center -- as a "photographer's color chart." It is an "important part of Pancam and critical in getting the colors right," he said. Bell, along with television personality and Cornell visiting professor Bill Nye (a 1977 Cornell engineering graduate), was instrumental in developing the sundial.

It took 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 cameras what to do.

Cornell researchers Jonathan Joseph and Jascha Sohl-Dickstein wrote and perfected the software that produced the first high-definition image. 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 allows the generation of color pictures and the performing of spectral analysis, which is important in understanding the planet's geology and composition.

Extensive work on the camera also was accomplished by Cornell graduates Miles Johnson, Heather Arneson and Alex Hayes. 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 filters.

Speaking at a news briefing at JPL on Monday, Jan. 12, John Grotzinger, professor of geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the rover science team, commented, "We owe a lot to Jim Bell and his team."