Images acquired by the Mars Orbiter Camera during extended mission cycles 9
and 10 (October 2001 and November 2001) of the latest, revised MER landing
site ellipses provided to me by Matt Golombek have been collected and placed
on a publicly-accessible web site for use by the Mars community in analyses
and studies related to landing site selection and certification. The URL
is:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/guest/
This page can be reached by going to our main site, http://www.msss.com/ and
clicking on the box "See the Latest Pictures from Mars: Mars Global Surveyor
MOC", then clicking on the box entitled "More From MOC: JUL 1997 - NOV 2001
Mars Global Surveyor MOC -- Archives", and then clicking on the box "2003
Landing Sites & Guest Observer Data, 2000-2002."
The images are included in a single UNIX tar file. They are in compressed
Planetary Data System image format (PDS-IMQ). To view these images, they
must first be downloaded to a UNIX computer, read out of the tar file, and
then processed using the PDS 'readmoc.exe' program available from the PDS.
The images can then viewed in any program capable of handling raw PDS
image-formatted data (PDS-IMG). An ancillary data file in ASCII format is
included in the tar file, as is an overlay of the footprints of the images
on a mosaic of the maps provided to me by Golombek.
Although in PDS format, these images are NOT validated, but I am considering
them "released" to the community...anyone is free to do anything they want
with them. We will, of course, include validated versions of these images
in our normal PDS delivery.
I am sending a copy of this e-letter to Matt Golombek and Tim Parker, Mars
Exploration Program Landing Site Scientists, in the expectation that they
will have the primary responsibility of informing the Mars landing site
community of the availability of these data, and of processing the images
for Program-level efforts.
Sincerely,
Michael C. Malin
Principal Investigator
Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter Camera
