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The massive image, showing reddish-brown soil and largely gray round and angular rocks, with distant boulders and hills, was processed by researchers working both at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) here and in the Mars Lab in the Space Sciences building on the Ithaca campus of Cornell University. Team leader for the twin panoramic cameras, or Pancams, is Cornell associate professor of astronomy Jim Bell.
Presenting the panorama at a press conference today (Jan. 12) at JPL, Pancam team member and leading Mars expert Michael Malin said the panorama is composed of 225 images and is a seamless mosaic of 8 sections taken on days 3, 4 and 5 after the rover's bouncedown landing on Jan. 3. The "remarkable piece of photography," he said, was first processed at Cornell then transferred to JPL where it was assembled by Bell and his team. Malin, who has a long association with Cornell space projects, is founder and president of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, the company responsible for building and operating the camera on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in orbit around Mars, which is being used as a relay for much of the Pancam data sent to JPL.
The panorama, he said, is such "a humongous amount of data" that its number of pixels had to be reduced because it was jamming the download. Bell said in an interview following the briefing that the number of pixels had to be reduced by a factor of four so that when the final version is ultimately shown it will be twice the present resolution. But even in its present form, he said, the image is of such high resolution that it is possible to zoom in on details as small as tiny shards of rock.
John Grotzinger, professor of geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the rover science team, commenting on the quality of the Mars images, said, "We owe a lot to Jim Bell and his team." The resolution of the panorama, he said, is so high that it shows the drag marks in the soil left by the airbags as the rover and its lander bounced down on the surface. It also shows, he says, details as fine as pebbles vertically pressed into the soil by the airbags.
The panorama also highlights a curious patch of soil about 9 feet from the camera that Grotizinger called a "magic carpet," because the soil has been detached by the airbags and deposited in a curled-up structure about 4 inches long. The soil, he noted, "is showing some form of cohesive behavior that allows it occasionally to stick together." Referring to suggestions that the patch might be mud, indicating the presence of water, he said, "The Pancam image shows it doesn't have the mechanical properties of mud." In fact, he said, individual particles in the soil section are visible.
Since the rover's second or third day on Mars, the Pancam raw data has been sent from JPL to the Cornell Mars Lab (its official name is the Cornell University Mars Data Analysis Facility) via an automatic "pipeline." The team at Cornell, composed of researchers, graduates and undergraduates, combines the black-and-white images taken through a series of different-colored filters into color pictures. The team adjusts the images for differences in brightness and adjusts the color balances so that the pictures can be displayed in their true color. For example, the Pancams' red filter takes images in the infrared and so a correction has to be applied by the Mars Lab. The team also looks for missing information and other cosmetic problems.
Said Bell, "These are our people in the trenches using diagnostics and looking for any problems." The experience, he noted, is particularly significant for students "who are seeing these images of Mars before anyone else."
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