April 2, 2002

10:30 a.m. CST

The goal of the Mars Visualization Alliance is to provide to the public front-seat participation in Mars exploration, especially when the twin Mars rovers are sending images down in early 2004. Lessons learned and processes and collaborations developed in this effort should benefit other NASA missions as well, as well as the entire community of museums, science centers, planetaria, etc. Our approach is to engage you, the founding members of the Alliance, in planning and testing processes for making data (especially images) available to the museum community almost as soon as the scientists themselves see them. We need your expertise and experience to guide us in decisions we have to make. We hope this will be a collaborative effort among all of us, museums and NASA/JPL alike.

The two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) will be launched in May and June of 2003. They arrive early and late January 2004. They will be active on the Martian surface for about three months apiece. For more info, see http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov.

Their goal is to “follow the water,” looking for the rocks and mineralogy that suggest that water might have been present on the surface, particularly long enough for life to have had the chance to develop.

The MER rovers are large and can go a kilometer/day in comparison to the Pathfinder rover, which was smaller and went 100 meters in 90 days. The Sojourner rover was small, about the size of a microwave oven, while the MERs are coffee-table size. The rovers move several centimeters/ minute. They are only daytime travelers. They will be able to go over the horizon, to see what’s on the side of a hill or around a bend. Sojourner needed to stay in radio communications position with its lander; the MERs do not.

The lander operates like a shipping crate and has no cameras onboard.

The science payload is described at http://athena.cornell.edu/

There are a number of cameras, located in stereo pairs on the rovers. There are stereo navigation cameras that will provide most of the images but at a lower resolution. They are on the mast at eye level and will help with daily navigation.

The stereo panoramic camera, the highest resolution camera, is on the mast and will probably get one big panorama every several days.

Stereo hazard avoidance cameras look down at the ground from just above the wheels with a 45-degree field of view. There is a pair in the front and a pair in the rear of the rover.

A micro imager, located on an extended arm, will make sand grains look like boulders. It’s the only one that’s not stereo. The extended arm also holds the RAT (rock abrasion tool), which can sweep dust or even rock surface to remove the oxide layer and show the underlying structure. The RAT will be used on an occasional basis only.

There are spectrometers, including the Mossbauer spectrometer that will allow for very careful spectrometry. There is also a regular infrared spectrometer on each of the rovers.

The rovers also have dust magnets, provided by the Danish. The red ferrous oxide dust will collect around these magnets and cameras will take pictures of the dust collection. Dust is a concern for continued solar power production and that it doesn’t clog the equipment.

Bill Nye is involved in a student sundial experiment on the rovers. Every time that they calibrate the cameras the sundial is continuously involved.

Rover models will be produced, and word will go out to museums for those that would like to deal directly with the same vendor (we hope the possibility of a large number of orders would bring the cost down for all). Several different sizes and options will be available. There should be something ready in late spring or summer.

Field tests will be conducted on the rovers. The rovers will be taken to undisclosed, remote, desert areas to give mission personnel an opportunity to simulate what will be happening on Mars. It will also give the museums an opportunity to test imaging and data connections. The first field test is in August, and there may be a second one in January. There is also a plan to test a finished product panorama during one of these field tests.

The entire scientific community was invited to participate in making suggestions for Mars landing sites. Options have been narrowed down from about 180 possible sites to about the top four possible landing sites. These site choices have been based on a zone plus or minus 15 degrees around the equator of Mars. The sites are also being selected as to which are most interesting scientifically. There is also a safety consideration. Safety is determined using the MOLA (Mars orbiting laser altimeter) that provides information on site slope and elevation. The Mars Global Surveyor camera is helping provide safety information by determining landing site ellipse shape information (an ellipse is where the spacecraft will land within 99% probability). The final landing site decision may be made later this year.

Mars Odyssey is returning mineralology and other surface results. It tells us about thermal inertia. Studies of how cold it gets at night and temperature changes will help determine how long the rovers will survive. Thermal inertia also can indirectly inform us about rock abundance, how rocky the site is for a safe landing.

Two topics for the museums to consider for us include internet delivery and high-definition or standard format, depending on what you want. We feel that we are going to have a major problem meeting internet demand, so during the mission there is going to be a dedicated server separate from the science server so that museums will have access to information. The server will provide the same information that the science team receives as the data comes down from Mars. There will be no additional delay from the time the data goes to the science team and when it goes to the museum dedicated server. There is minimal processing necessary. When a request is made from the server, it can be formatted in TIF or JPG. Details regarding spectroscopic data on the server have not been worked out yet. The server has been given the name MUSE (Museum Server and Environment.) It may be that some of the video would be better delivered via satellite than internet, again according to the museums’ druthers.

The real time images will be about 1K by 1K. There will also be mosaics that will be about five images high and 14 images across. The color will be calibrated for the images assuming that all the filters are in working order during the mission. The data is archived at JPL for the Planetary Data System (http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/) JPL will also mosaic individual images together for panoramas that are about 5 tiers high and 15 to 20 frames wide. It would be about 10 sols (Martian days) worth of data.

Standard geo-spatial referencing is problematic because each instrument has its own reference system. This leads to registration issues between the instruments. It is because research groups have all developed their own software, etc.

What the museums want in terms of images may differ somewhat from what the science community wants, so as we go along we need to hear what sorts of modifications the museums would recommend.

We’d love to work with museums who want professional development for their staff; in other words, access to scientists and engineers as we build and test the MERs, launch them, and then await their arrival at Mars and operate them on the surface. There may be live-shot opportunities for you. When the science team is selected (soon) there will be 70 to 100 participating scientists across the country. Their first meeting will be in June. The Mars E/PO folks will “sign them up” for various public engagement activities and identify who the content experts are, as well as who are the great speakers and who we can develop along those lines.

There is going to be a naming contest for the two rovers. A Request for Proposal (RFP) will go out to solicit corporate or other sponsorship to run the contest. It will be open to K-12 students starting in September of this year and continuing through the fall. Name submissions for the rover pairs will be returned in January. NASA will make the final decision sometime prior to launch.

Documentary footage is being shot as often as possible for all of the different stages of the mission. HD is being shot as often as possible. All of this will be available to museums. The field tests probably will not be on NASA TV as there won’t be much content. JPL could possibly link the museums into 2 to 3-day tests that will happen at JPL before the field tests.

The American Museum of Natural History and other museums are very interested in the high definition video if a way can be found to process it or encode it into MPEG2 format.

Action Items

The museums would like to have a calendar of events to assist in long term planning for events/programs. (S. Lievense)

The museums want a list of what video footage has been shot already and what is available to them. Most, if not all want the HD converted to an MPG format. (C. Johnson)

Museums are interested in low-cost products like a large floor map of Mars or globes that could be useful to create space within the museums when events take place. They would be used as a logical platform to add on the next bit of information to museum programs. (SSV)

A composite Martian map may be useful to many museums. (SSV)

A sequence of images may be valuable to accommodate landing site selection process programs for the museums. (SSV)

Most of the museums voiced an interest in panoramas and the panorama test. Panoramas are interesting to them because some of the facilities have theaters that can display them and they are very popular with the public. (SSV)

Some museums, Museum of Science for example, have very popular live presentations and are interested in contacting dynamic scientists for live shows. (C. Johnson, C. Gennaro)

Aurelio Tintio/JPL will investigate putting Mars images into GIS (geographic information systems) formats.