Phoenix on Mars

Edg

I think what you are seeing is a processing artifact. As I explained in reply #170 I reduced the shadows by 50% in photoshop to see inside the shodows. This left the "shadow line" which is not real but is an artifact.

I think that chemistry is happening at the bottom of the trench but the "shadow" line has nothing to do with it.

Sorry for perhaps misleading you and others but the intent was to show that the sublimation of the ice was real which I think I demonstrated before anyone else on this blog and perhaps before the Official information on the same images came out.

I think that subsequent images are showing that there is a dynamic process going on. Ice is sublimating and frost is being formed on dark surfaces. There also seems to be cases where there is some wetting of the soil. In addition clumps of soil particles are drying out which indicates that the tega oven process my not b e able to find components of the soil which were there at the time of sampling.

Winston

Hey Winston, Glad someone is looking at the landscape...

I'm fairly sure that the soil on the side of the rock in reply 179 was blown there by the exhaust from the lander rockets.

Here is a 3D wiggle animation of another interesting nearby rock:

I promised myself not to do spend too much time on the SSI images, but now that a few full resolution images of the landscape are coming down I couldn't resist spending a few minutes crawling on the nearby ground.

Sigh. There still seems to be a registration issue with some of the multiple filter SSI images. I had to align the RGB of only a 1/2 resolution image of this area. I will not post the disappointing results.

Before the winter snows fly, I hope there are some full filter views of some of the interesting rocks nearby.

What the heck, here is a 3D of the reply 82 area with the left image colorized by a 1/2 resolution RABC image ( after resizing and registration of the ABC filters. )

LWS:re173

Could they make an expriment on Earth,

with similar pieces of water ice and CO2 atmosphere at Martian pressure and temp,

to show the similar dynamics of sublimation?

That would be convincing.

e s

Hi extrasense

I see you've been busy recently and making some very perceptive observations on the ice / co2/ sublimation mystery. Nice!!

I've seen a number of papers where researchers reported (usually in a preliminary fashion) on work in Martian simulation chambers using presumed martian environmental conditions, to show the presence of pure water or liquid brines under those conditions. A number of these experiments have been criticized by the purists on the basis that that the design was not adequate to support the conclusions or similar grounds.

I have references but my filing system is so messed up that it is proving very difficult to find them.

For instance, I've been looking for some images from Opportunity which have been hypothesized to have been of water ice but I can't find them so far. The images of the "rock" looked very much like the phoenix images with the same smooth shape, smoothened round holes, etc. Perhaps You or Hort or aicall might remember and bring up an image.

Winston

Er, Winston, I don't remember any Oppy discussions about icy rocks. However, I do remember the unusual white stuff thrown out from some Oppy RATs that I called "RAT splats" or "RAT toss" . Here is an example:

I even did a infrared comparision from RAD data and came up with this chart which showed that the splats were brighter in the infrared than anything else in the image.

The silence was deafening.

Ice? Probably not -- but it was maddening that no attention was ever paid to these anomalies.

Here is I think my last reference to this one of many observations totally ignored by the "big guys"...

LWS re:185

What would be interesting to see, low long a cramble of water ice would survive - under the phoenix site condition.

It is not going to melt in the -30C.
It is not going to sublimate at 8 millibar.
So it must get eaten from the surface, due to low air humidity, or by reacting with air CO2. How fast? What about the claim that Mars air humidity is 100% ?

Best,

es

the temperature of the ground may be higher than the temperature of the atmosphere

sol 30 pan of deck after WCL soil dump:

Other sol 30 images here, including some 2X RABC images. I will post the SSI color images when the filters are not aligned. What's with that anyway?

Here are 2 colourations of images of the ground near phoenix. The first one is from sol 28. The second one is from sol 30. In both there are hints of small ice blocks on the surface, frost at the surface, dust removed from the surface by phoenix's thrusters, subtle hints of very small berries and the usual small filamentous and ovoid bodies. These are much more evident in the lower left of the sol 30 image where they cover a small raised mound and proliferate around it. You will need a magnifying glass or a digital software magnifier to see these.

Winston

Winston, you have to be careful putting together the Phoenix color images.

For some reason there is sometimes a misalignment of the filter images. I can't image any explanation that doesn't involve the lander actually moving. Maybe Phoenix is settling into the ice as is sublimates under the rover???

Here is my version of your sol 28 in reply 190 after a translation registration of the A,B,C filters.

This is a 1/2 size image and the full size images have even worse registration problems.

For example this sol 30 image the green filter is off by 3 pixels and the bule filter is off by 7 pixels.

These are 2X images so the offset is doubled ( ie 6 and 14 pixels )

Hi Hort

Thanks for the tip. Which imageJ plugins do you use for aligning the images?

I've been a bit worried by the colours that I got in several images and could'nt figure out why in some images the colours looked totally awful while in others they looked OK as compared with the MER colour composites. I now see that you have the same problem.

Your explanation sounds very reasonable. But if Phoenix is slowly settling in the ice we may have to hope that she will get all the important analyses and images processed before she no longer remains operable. In addition such settling may provide further clues of the actual properties of the ice and the real, versus theoretical effects of the extreme environmental temperatures, relative humidities and pressures and the mass of ice below the ground on the development of frost, ice and water.

Winston

Hi HOrt

I forgot to mention above that your properly registered version of the sol 28 image above shows up a lot of interesting areas. The blue colour of some of the rocks and the fine dust looks almost exactly like the spirit images. The small spheroids look more like small berries now as compared with the just darker ones in mine.

Also, what I can't understand yet is why should the images from the 2 or 3 filters appear to be not blurred (or not blurred significantly) while the filter itself is is off by a few pixels. Should'nt settling affect the blurriness as well as the filters?

Winston

I use the imagej plugin turboreg.

I load the images to be registered, convert the images to a stack, change the type of the stack to 16 bit, scale the stack by 2, duplicate the first image in the stack and then start the plugin.

For simple misalignment of the filters I use the translation alignment, set the type to processing to accurate and then try an automatic batch alignment.

To check for proper alignment animate the registered stack by selecting stack animation options.

Sometimes -- especially with dark moving shadows, you may have to do a manual alignment.

After you have a registered stack convert it back to 16 bit and then use the color / convert stack to RGB to make the color picture. You can then resize the final image back to the original size -- but why bother?

Hope this helps.

Winston, smack, smack, smack -- three smacks with a wet noodle!

You can never ( well, hardly ever ) do inter-picture color comparisons using the color derived from NASA's JPG images -- especially between pictures made with entirely different sets of filters!

The best you can do is intra picture comparisons. IE, this rock is colored like that rock over there -- in the same picture.

IF the same scene is imaged with the same filters at the same local time with the same image format and then processed the same way, THEN it is not entirely unreasonable to do comparisons between the pictures.

I threw a hissy fit in one of my flickr comments because the SSI guys violated the same format rule on two pictures of the Snow White trench so that it was impossible for me to reasonably compare the trench on two separate sols -- even though everything else was the same!

Time to get back on the bus and go the the motel for a nice shower and a clean bed.

See you tomorrow on the road.

I got to wondering if the elevation and aziumth values in the JPG metadata reflected the misalignment of the filters -- and they apparently do!

The A, B , C filters in this image have elevation and azimuth values:

• -18.161, 122.59


• -18.1591,122.588


• -18.1587,122.589

SO, the SSI camera seems to know where it is pointed to 7 decimal places when the exposure is taken -- and so either it is commanded to misalign the filters -- or the command sequence is first point to some specific value ( like, say -18.16, 122.59 ) and then take a sequence of exposures, noting the actual pointing -- or perhaps the actual pointing is calculated from the images once they are downlinked???

So I wonder which it is: obfiscation or lander movement -- or some other effect? All of the above???

As an aside, the local times for the A, B, C exposures were 18:43:59, 18:44:49, 18:45:41 with exposures of 1.0455, 1.1628 and 3.0957 seconds.

I wonder what factors control the time between filter exposures? Is 50 seconds a minimum?

Lots of questions. Damn few answers.

Whats to gain from a slight misalignment of the rgb "ABC" images? Does this give more imformation at each pixil site?
I know that the ir sequences suffer the same fate, because i stack them in Photomatix, and they will not align.

For the exposure times, it appears that they are creating hdr for the colored images, wich i stack and get fairly good results.
I am currently trying everthing i can to stack to get the most from each set, however its dissapointing to know they are just clipped jpg's.

The software Nasa uses must be scary complicated, using lots of space.

Someday horton, we will see what nasa has done with their software, and their creations from both rovers and phoenix, but for now, please keep trying for us regular joes.

Just when I think NASA has exhausted all the possible image combinations...

from here.

This is a R1 image colored with a 1/2 size RGB image ( all registered of course ) and then super saturated to highlight the rock / soil differences.

The result has the full bodied sharpness of the full sized R1 image and 1/8th the filling calaries of a full color image. Yum!

There is an interesting "green" splotch on the bottom edge center right that seems to be "real". A glint from a crystal face in the Green exposure?

Er, about that "ring around the collar" on the "holy rock, batman"!

Er, anybody want more like R1s colored like this?

Forgot to point out that the green splotch was in the full sized 3D image.

Hi Hort

My second image in reply #190 was coloured the same way, from a half image but I did'nt supersaturate it.

Winston