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Old 22-August-2008, 03:18 PM
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ESA: Mars Webcam: The VMC: An ordinary camera in an extraordinary place!

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22 August 2008 The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) is mounted on Mars Express, ESA's deep-space probe now orbiting the Red Planet. It originally provided simple, low-tech images of Beagle lander separation, and is now back in action as the 'Mars Webcam'. It's not a scientific instrument, but it does provide fantastic views of Mars - including crescent views of the planet not obtainable from Earth.
Best of VMC 2007

Recommended by BA Blog: Worlds’ most distant webcam goes live

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And the Mars Express folks want more eyeballs! They made this request:
Open invitation for image feedback:: You can assist the Mars Express team with additional processing of the raw image data files as well as interpretation: What do you see? What part of the Mars surface is being shown? Can you identify any geographical features? What regions of the atmosphere or atmospheric components do you see?
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Old 22-August-2008, 03:38 PM
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What? No color?

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Old 22-August-2008, 04:19 PM
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What? No color?

It's roll-your-own.*

ESA: Help us with the VMC

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Colour information
You are invited to process the binary image files to extract the colour versions. Every VMC image has colour information overlaid as a Bayer pattern grid on the image (see FAQ Question 3).
VMC Mars Webcam FAQ

Background is at ESA: The 'Mars Webcam': About the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC)

* Or hope the image hobbyists at Unmanned Spaceflight carry the load. They've got a topic: MEX VMC - Back on, and online!. Color images are there.
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Old 22-August-2008, 05:41 PM
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[quote=01101001;1307134]It's roll-your-own.*

ESA: Help us with the VMC

Cool! I´m going take a look at that later to give a try. Tks.
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Old 22-August-2008, 09:01 PM
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Cool pictures!
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Old 22-August-2008, 09:56 PM
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ugordan has already scripted up a means to produce the colour from the bayer pattern. I had a go manually, but the results are a bit crap I don't usually like to plug my own forum - but http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/i...opic=5415&st=0 is where he's posting.
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Old 23-August-2008, 09:27 AM
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Very nice!

"Umm.. we got this cam doin nothin', let's turn it on"
"But there's no budget to analyse the images!"
"Never mind that, we'll let the freaks on the 'net handle it!"
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Old 24-August-2008, 11:04 PM
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Cool.
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Old 25-March-2009, 07:22 PM
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Planetary Society Web Log: Mars Express VMC is back online!

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Great news arrived in my inbox this morning: after several months' hiatus around the period of Mars' solar conjunction, the Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express is back in business. VMC is an engineering camera on Mars Express whose purpose was to document the departure of the ill-fated Beagle 2, and following the Beagle 2 deployment it wasn't used for years. Last year, though, ESA fired it up again, because although it's probably safe to say it's the lowest-quality camera at Mars right now, it's the only one that regularly gets full-globe shots of the planet.
Mars Express VMC Webcam blog: Mars Webcam - back online! has pointers to other articles with recent images.
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