Sunday, January 30, 2005

The latest on DISR images

Leo Enright of Irish TV and Bruce Moomaw of Spacedaily.com on Oliver Morton's Martian Blog are reporting on images taken by DISR from below 500 meters in altitude. These images were not taken as full triplets, but as individual HRI frames taken every 8 seconds. Given the loss of channel A and a descent rate of 5 m/sec, this would mean about 3 or 4 image. Anyways, it sounds like these images have been on the ground so it will be interesting to see what they show (especially the one after the spotlight was turned on). Not quite sure what these images will show, whether we would see individual pebbles or see the nearby bright material, but it is good to know they are on the ground.

Speak of ground, that same blog page is reporting that the bright spots that appear in the ground frames may not be image artifacts but maybe real. What could these be? My favorite explaination is that Huygens landed near a small runoff stream and the bright spots are stuff in the stream.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I heard from mer.rlproject.com that some spots were either droplets of methane on the outside of the camera or condensation of water vapor on the inside. I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the same spots you are though.

-pioneer

1/31/2005 09:01:00 AM  
Blogger Jason Perry said...

I think those comments are related to the droplets seen at higher altitude, like in this triplet:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/images/jpeg2/triplet.202.jpg

1/31/2005 01:41:00 PM  

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