Hi all,

On a daily basis we receive new Odyssey's images, yet from the Mars Express there appears to be one image about every 14 days or so.

Will this average increase anytime soon?

I've seen some great Odyssey's pics, and also some wonderful pictures from the Mars ESA probe Express.

But I heard there are new problems with the ESA Express now, they are afraid to take a risk.

The deployment of a radar system on Europe's Mars Express probe which is to look for water and ice under the Red Planet has been delayed until later this year.

The newest delay is linked to concerns that the antenna might swing back with a greater range of motion than expected after opening, hitting the spacecraft. The latest Concerns from the ESA is that the antenna might swing back and hit delicate components on the spacecraft led the radar's science team to call for a halt to deployment.

They have got some great data and wonderful pictures already so i hope everything continues to do well, too bad about the latest problem

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I thought the MARSIS is intended for subsurface studies only, unless the MARSIS antenna is used also to send images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC)

Yes, the MARSIS problems should have nothing to do with the lack of released imagery from the HRSC (just the opposite, in fact, since there's more capability left over to downlink and process the HRSC data). I'm not sure why MT mentioned the MARSIS problems here except that it's an issue with Mars Express.

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My mistake ,
I assumed they would be using the MARSIS instrumentation to take their next pictures.
However after reading 'ToSeek's' link it is clear that the deployemnt would only be used for information on the subsurface, and picturing below the martian soil.

Unless of course this was part of thier plan, and the latest problem has caused a hitch in their timetable. For examples not all of the images taken by the Express have been taken by a normal type of camera image, there was the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) used in photos and the OMEGA instrument which goes at the Visible and Infrared mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer was used to take pictures, and there is a plasma and energetic neutral atoms analyser.

I think I was wrong about the MARSIS instrumentation but maybe this latest problem has caused a problem with their timetable of Mars photos.

http://www.esa.int/export/externals/images/slide12.jpg

OMEGA image of Martian South pole

Did you catch the latest image



http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...-HellasRim.jpg

have you got your 3-D specs ?

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...-HellasRim.jpg

Hmmm... I can think of a few possible reasons:

- ESAs policy for releasing unprocessed data may be different from NASA, it is a different organization after all, with different needs and such... NASA really have been spoiling us with all these nice pictures lately. :wink:
- There may be some agreements in place for some of the ones involved with the project to have a certain time to view/use the data before it is available to outsiders. Some projects have such agreements, after all...
- perhaps the data is not in a format that makes for easy scripted conversion so that people must do it manually, all released images from Mars Express seems to be computer generated based on the data instead of just being normal images.

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The images from Mars Express are obviously highly processed - they look more like paintings than photographs, almost.

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Yeah, I've got my 3-D spec. And now I'm intrigued...

What's up with all those round-sided, flat-topped mesas? Lava domes?

Was there a description to go along with them?

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

There is here.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.