Phoenix on Mars

sol 47 soil sample from under rock:

Oh wow! a sample of soil taken from under a rock. Now why would anyone suspect the, um, soil chemistry to be different under a rock on Mars?

Bravo Phoenix team!

Oooook.

sol 46 3D L12RABC detail:

One for the rock guys.

Assuming this image is not some Mars play on light:

What processes makes spherical rocks and then slices the top off parallel to the ground?

sol 47 8AM - 4PM L2 ( blue ) changes to the "icy soil" in trench Snow White:

What a dogs breakfast.

I adjusted the contrast / brightness in the 4PM image so that the relative contrast between the dark soil and the bright areas was similar to the 8AM exposure. The overall lighting of course changed drastically -- but if you concentrate on the white stuff I think you can see that it is indeed "dimmer" at 4PM than 8 AM.

The areas that increased in brightness may have done so because of the change in illumination. But having said that it is impossible ( for me anyway ) to rule out a dimming because of lighting changes.

I still prefer the sol 45 RAC comparison between 2PM and 10PM. Both images were taken when the bottom of the trench was in shadow so the extreme lighting factor is eliminated.

And here is the sol 47 L1R1 ( red ) view of the trench at 8:15AM.

Where's Waldo?

Say, when are the scoop guys going to knock that very round rock on the left side of the trench into the trench for a closer examination?

Hey Horton,

That round rock does look curious. The rock looks lighter in color than surrounding matterials (it may be the lighting).

If this is not an optical illusion what made it round like that?

Fluvial action can round rocks. Chemical deposition can form round concretions. Ice can form round objects. Meteorites can be roundish, volcanic bombs might be roundish.

It would be nice to see just how round it really is. Rocks have to be rolled around in water and gravel/sand for at least several weeks to become extremely rounded. Most rounded rocks became that way by tumbling in streams and rivers for many years.

Reply 283:
I hope they take pictures of these scoop areas later at the same time of day so the lighting can be more constant. That glare makes it difficult for me to compare.
I agree with you that there does appear to be dimming. Maybe its a compacted ice glazed material right after the scoop. As time goes by the ice material sublimates at the surface and becomes more fuzzier/dustier, and hence less reflective.

You can see something similiar to that with Earth damp dirt. If you were to scoop the right kind of Earth dirt or clayey dirt you would see a "smearing" on the scoop hole. The smearing is highly relective/shiny and may look like water or ice. This shiny smear usually goes away as the moisture within disappears or when it looses cohesiveness and erodes or crumbles.

Sigh.

The rock guys aren't so smart after all. I thought from the picture in reply 281 that the scoop had pulled a rock out of position and sampled the soil under the rock.

Yay!

However, a closer examination of a before / after animation shows that the rock was moved only slightly and mostly rotated -- so the soil sample is not from under a rock.

Boo!

It looks like this may simply be the start of another trench.

Have shovel. Will travel: Phoenix

For anyone interested, I did a little study of the contents of the latest scoopful of Super Oxydol soil ( Garan-teed to clean all them dirty Mars bugs from 'yer britches ) here.

Just the same o' same o'

Making way for a new hyperspace bypass on Mars.

Oh, the humanity! Oh, the humanity!

I dare you to look at the sol 47-48 3D of new scoop of soil and spoil pile closely and not come away a babbling idiot.

Er, I have been threatening a holiday away from Mars for a few days now.

It's time. It's time.

So, according to this press release, the contact with the rock "Alice" was accidental while extracting the TCP.

This is highly unlikely.

• The scoop near Alice in reply 281 is full of soil.


• The scoop contains no soil while the TCP is in use


• There is deliberate digging behind Alice.

Alice is not near the area where the TCP probe was placed and the scoop operators should have it's operation down to mm by now.

The mushroom principle is now in full force in this mission.

I wonder if the "scoop guys" like being "blaned" for this event?

But, strangely, I am curiously elated by this development.

In the same release Peter Smith said:

The preliminary signatures we are seeing are intriguing. Before we release results, we want to verify that our interpretations are correct by conducting laboratory tests.

What can that possibly mean?

Time to pack my bags and get out of Nool.

I hope to be back in 3-4 weeks for the big press conference.

Bye.

Hi Hort

Have a good one. You more than deserve it. Hope that there will be good news when you return.

Winston

Hort, If you are checking, re your reply #288

I think someone, who knew that the policy was not to do anything that would directly indicate that they were checking out possibilities of organics under or near rocks, engineered the "accident". It remains to be seen if they will analyse the soil in the scoop.

Winston

Darn it, i hate it when horton leaves, as i have to struggle with the newness of the phoenix image making. no one can recreate what horton can, or see the things that he can. I am currently struggling to just get image j to notice the image registration add ons, turboreg.

what in the heck is poking out of this rock?

Also, two long things are coming out of the that. Looks like a, er, martian lilly.

Mr. Mann,

Take two aspirins and call me in the morning. Get some rest.

Fred

Can't veiw cross eyed frank? too bad.

I'll work on a better image later, but there is some oddness, and there is something in the center of the hole.

Whats with the rocks, like the one to the left of the lilly rock, that has the One large hole, like something exploded out the end?

mann, I sympathize with your struggle with the imagej plugin turboreg.

After loading the images to be registered,

I would suggest that you proceed by:

image / stacks / convert images to stack
image / type / 16 bit
image / scale... / 2
duplicate the first image in the stack
plugin / turboreg and
select the translation
select Quality Accurate
click on the target image and
move the cursor to an area with lots
of high contrast detail and few shadows
click on the Batch button and
go have a coffee

When the 32 bit Registration stack has been created you should then check the registration by animating the stack by using

image / stacks / start animation

zoom into the an interesting area and look for any systematic movements. Ignore the JPGies jumping around.

If you are happy with the registration then you may proceed to the actual image processing.

One thing you might try is:

image / stacks / Z Project...

and create an average intensity projection.

If it looks OK, do a final image / adjust / brightness and contrast... to suit your artistic tastes and then and only then convert the image back to 8 bits and save.

Hope this helps.

I figured out today why the Phoenix team may be doing the "twitchy eye" filter combinations:

They are routinely combining the images into a "super resolution" image.

The procedure I just outlined is as close as we can get to their super-resolution images -- and well worth the time invested.

By the way, you can automate the procedure up to the actual registration with:

plugins / macros / record

Go through the above procedure

and then name and save the macro.

( I call mine ImageRegistration )

When you start imagej you can select

plugin / macro / install

and install the macro you recorded.

Works like a charm for routine stuff.

Horton, Enjoy your time off!
Your image processing recipe is something that a soup nazi would lose sleep over.
Thank you for the excellent front seat view for once in a lifetime view of Mars!

Mann, there are some interesting dimpled areas in your image, and that thing that seems to be sticking out of the rock. Wind and ice may play a role here. Any areas that experience more shade or less wind will likely appear different than surrounding areas that experience less shade from the suns heat and more wind.

I say this because there appears to be an icy subsurface in this area which would likely interact more with observed surface features than what we have seen at other Martian lander locations (Opportunity, Spirit, Viking, etc.)

There is an interesting "crater" in the lower left of your binocular image that might be easily explained as a small meteroite crater. I'm not so sure though....what if it's something else?

Thank you horton, i printed out your instructions, and will use them, but.. right now i am having trouble LOADING tHE DARN plugin and making it work in Image j.
GEEZ, i'm just a regular guy,however, I'm a bit more stubborn than most, so i'll keep working on it.
I've been using REGI STAX, in the meantime.

It does poke out in 3d rpage, and has more things poking out of it.

The crater you refer to is a Rock, that has a gaping hole in one end. I'm trying to make some decent color images of the features, but the registration is abear.

Hi Mann

INteresting images. Also hope you will let me know how you think the phoenix images compare with the rovers' in terms of reproducibility. i.e one could always expect certain colours in a rover image with standard processing but with the phoenix ones, even with proper registration, the colours are not ever similar and, with the same processing, give rise to washed out greyish green images, dark brown ones and everything else in between.

Tell me if you get the same results as no one else (besides Hort) commented when I asked earlier.

Below are two images which I thought of making a new topic. But I'll just leave them here.

On sol 19, in the snow white trench (I think) the scoop uncovered a weird looking "thingie" in the shadows which I show below. The thingie was presumably broken up by later thinking and disappeared. The disappearance was attributed to sublimation and the thingie was identified as a piece of water ice.

On sol 48 while digging a new trench near to the spot where it took the TECP measurements the scoop removed another "thingie" that greatly resembles the first one and dumped it on the surface at the side of the pile of soil that was excavated.

Below is the sol 48 thingie in a x1.5 anaglyph. NOte that it fairly closely resembles the sol 19 one.

I've never been totally confident that the sol 19 thingie was purely ice. The shape and conformation suggested that even if it was predominantly ice, it might be a bit more than that.

It would be interesting if they do not cover this new thingie and observe it over the next few days to see what happens with it. Will it sublime, leaving nothingness again?

Winston

Oops

Wrong image above for the sol thingie. It should be this one

Winston

Winston, i read Emily's blog about Us "common folk" trying to make pretty pictures with the jpg's. She talked abit about the hardware, and software and the "scientific" uses of the images.
WE... are not ment to get to far with editing these images. Lets just do what we can.

I think you posted the wrong image, as i know the thingie you are talking about, i saw it, in the small hole behind the rock i believe, but as of yet not made any color.

Mann

Thanks for your response above. Hort says the same thing. Will follow your advice. It is still possible that we might yet scoop them since we are looking at totally different things, in general.

The correct image is at reply 298.

Here's a sol 49 colouration (colours totally wrong) of the thingie. You can see the resemblance to the sol 19 thingie better in this one.

The thingie does not look as if it changed much between sol 47 and 49.

Winston