A hard day today. We spent the morning in the hotel. Hans-Rudolph setting up his Omniview and time of flight cameras, some of the other PRoVisG team members processing images they took yesterday. Meanwhile, the Astrium team was trying to sort out the network and doing some rover maintenance tasks. Things like covering the laptop keyboards with cling film and tape to keep the abrasive volcanic dust out, for example. The laptops look quite unusual (you may spot them in the pictures below). During the afternoon, the PanCam team took some multispectral images and calibrated the PanCams. Hans-Rudolph, from the CSEM, told me the Omniview and Time of Flight cameras were working but not yet calibrated. Let's go back to the multispectral images. The idea is to have images of a certain place or object in different bands of the light spectrum. The wavelength of light reflected by an object/feature varies depending on its what it is made of. Once the object has been imaged in several different bands we know what light it is reflecting. Each material and composition of materials has a unique 'signature'. The signature from each part of am image can be compared with reference signatures of known mineral types to determine the composition of materials.
If you are unable to view the pictures below, go to this PicasaWeb link
The afternoon was not so successful for Bridget. On the drive back to the van using the Mole, the Bridget control laptop fell, breaking the screen. But worse still is that the exhaust from the Mole's motor burnt some of Bridget's control cables. This is a critical moment for Bridget, and for the field trials themselves. Let's hope we can get her running again, and that we can transfer all the drivers from Bridget's control laptop to another one. As a result of focussing on this critical issue, we had no time to test the network. We'll have to do it tomorrow. At night, we had a meeting with all the PRoVisG team members including the Consortium Leader, Gerhard Paar from Joanneum Research in Austria who had just arrived. We planned out a schedule of imaging and had a look at the different experiments that needed to be done. Setting priorities is important and we will need to be flexible - things always happen to disrupt the schedule - we need to be ready for anything. Read the blog for the day - Blog 14/09/11 |