Dirty Skies

Archive for July, 2006

According to this Opportunity rover update posted yesterday, the vehicle has once again experienced a “cleaning event” with regards to it’s solar panels/power system. Also notice that the rover activities for Sol 891 include a panoramic camera mosaic (that answers that question). The rover is currently parked about 25 meters from Beagle Crater.

I was browsing the latest posted raw images from the Mars rover Opportunity and I couldn’t help but notice a sequence of Panoramic Camera images overlapped at the edges. I stitched together 5 of of these images (Left Panoramic Camera : Filter 2 (753nm near-infrared) : Non-linearized : Full frame EDR acquired on Sol 891) to create the panorama below.

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Raw image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

If you’ve read any of the recent posts here you’ll know I’m a huge fan of the “gee whiz” factor when it comes to astronomical/space related images, so for kicks and giggles I created a colorized version as well. This is in NO WAY an accurate representation of true color. It is simply my “gee whiz” approximation.

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Raw image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

I’d love to tell you exactly where the rover is and the direction these images represent but the “Where Are the Rovers Now?” page is about 13 Sols (Martian days) behind the current position. I believe Opportunity is somewhere near Beagle Crater on it’s way to Victoria Crater. Perhaps in a future update I will be able to add the geographic details regarding these images. Here was the location as of Sol 878.

Image credit: OSU Mapping and GIS Laboratory

On Sunday NASA (quietly?) posted video of the launch of STS-121 Discovery taken from cameras mounted on the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs). These videos are in Windows Media Player 9 format. For those of you on Macs (like me) I recommend the Flip4Mac WMV plugin for Quicktime — it’s free and works well.

In the first short video clip (1.31 MB) you see the SRB separation and the shuttle pulling away… magnificent! It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie.

screenshot

In this second much longer clip (156 MB) you ride the booster from launch all the way until splashdown in the ocean!!! The whole clip runs about 11 minutes. JUST FREAKING RIDICULOUSLY BREATHTAKING!!! It doesn’t get much better than this (OK so I’m a dork).

animated screenshot

So RUN — don’t walk — over to the NASA – Space Shuttle page and check them out! They’ve also got some sweet video coverage of the last space walk.