|
|
| NASA/JPL/Cornell University |
The picture shows a crater floor strewn with a curious type of soil and small, smooth rocks. The leader of the camera team, James Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy, called his reaction to the picture one of "shock and awe."
The image is the first of twelve pictures that will be sent back from the rover's two mast-mounted, panoramic cameras, or Pancams, in the next few days, forming what will be a 360-degree panorama of the landing site in the Gusev Crater. The first color picture was taken over 30 minutes, starting at 2:30 in the afternoon, Mars time, during the rover's second day on the planet. The rover lander bounced down onto the Martian surface at 11:35 p.m. EST Saturday, Jan. 3.
Speaking at a Jan. 6 news briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the mission is being directed, Bell said the picture is 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."
Steven Squyres, the Cornell professor who is heading the rover science team, paid tribute to Bell as "the Ansel Adams of the space age, the guy with the cool cameras."
Squyres told reporters at the news briefing that the high-definition picture shows a distribution of rocks that "are remarkably different from anything we have seen on Mars." The picture shows, he said, rocks with surfaces that are remarkably smooth. He speculated that the rocks have been broken up by a process akin to sand blasting, retaining the rocks' angularity but smoothing out their facets. He was unable to speculate about the composition of the rocks but noted that they have trails of debris behind them indicating that "we've landed in a fairly windy place."
It is still too early to say for sure if rocks have weathering rind from the Martian wind, he said. But, he noted, "We may not have to struggle to look at these rocks because Mars may have cleared them off for us."
Squyres described as "bizarre, really weird" the way in which the crater floor seems to have responded to the dragging of the rover's airbags, which deflated after the lander bounced down onto the surface after being released from its parachute. "I don't understand it," he said. Surface pebbles seem to have been squished into the soil around the lander, which appears like layers of cohesive material. "It looks like mud, but can't be mud. It looks like when it is scrunched, it folds up," said Squyres, who added, "This is something I have never seen before."
The science team is still trying to determine "exactly where we are" in the Gusev Crater, Squyres said. In particular, the team is debating how to interpret a cluster of hills to the east of the lander, as shown in the picture. It could be, he said, that there is "a broad topographic swell" in the crater, blocking out the distant hills so that only peaks are showing. The scientists ultimately will determine the rover's location on the planet by triangulating the positions of features seen on the distant horizon in different directions.
Bell described his reaction when he first saw the 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, "These are like having animals in a cage, and now this beast is out taking pictures in its native habitat."
From 10 feet away, Pancam has a resolution of 1 millimeter per pixel. The rover's mast can swing the cameras 360 degrees across the horizon and 90 degrees up or down. When the rover descends from its lander platform next week to begin exploring the crater, scientists will know its orientation each day by using data gained as the cameras search for and find the sun in the sky at a known time of day.
 |
| Cornell associate professor Jim Bell at Tuesday's news briefing at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. Behind him is an image taken by the Mars rover's panoramic camera, the Pancam, for which Bell led the development team. He called the image, the sharpest ever taken of another planet's surface, "absolutely spectacular." Robert Barker/Cornell University PhotoCopyright © Cornell University Click on the image for a high-resolution version (1800 x 1200 pixels, 1.3MB) |
Each image, reduced to nothing more than a stream of zeros and ones, will become part of a once- or twice-daily stream of information beamed to Earth, a journey that takes about 10 minutes now. The data is being retrieved by NASA's Deep Space Network, delivered to mission controllers at JPL 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 rover, there will be daily extensive planning by the Mars scientific team, led by Squyres. Cornell research specialists Elaina McCartney and Jon Proton will participate in these meetings and decide how to implement the plans for Pancam and the rover's five other instruments.
Processing pictures from 100 million miles away is no easy feat. 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 camera 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.
-30-