Doug Ellison

18 months ago - I did two things.  I found the HiRISE DEM’s and I figured out how to use them.  However, time and hardware move on and I thought the 3rd martian birthday of Spirit and Opportunity was a good excuse to revisit the techniques involved and try and improve where I could, on that work of 2008.  Whilst I don’t think the end results are much improved, they are a bit different.  I’ve made it a little hazier to mark the moderate dust storm that helped to blow out the 3 birthday candles. An intro credit page to avoid it being badly credited and described if it’s repeated elsewhere has been bolted onto the beginning, and a map has been bolted onto the end.  A sound track courtesy of creative commons music.  And most importantly, Spirit in her current predicament, up to the wheel-hubs in dusty sandy hate inducing Mars soil.

This then is my Columbia Hills, 2.0. My 130 second tribute to the teams that worked to produce data that documents our exploration. There is a 1920 x 1080 version, but it comes in at about 400 Meg.  If you want a copy, tell me how to get it to you without killing the UMSF server.

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Sce-EHTRs

Vimeo : http://www.vimeo.com/6705161

HD : 1280 x 720 86 Mb : Download

SD : 640 x 360 17 Mb : Download

Of course, the brilliant thing about data being made available for anyone to have a go at, is that no matter how you think about using it - someone else has got a different idea.  Purely by chance, Dr Mark Powell published a video a few days ago that takes both the HiRISE DEM, as well as near countless Navcam terrain wedges and merges them into one stunning interactive visualisation - see his work HERE.

That’s the thing with exploration, and the data it produces, you never know what you’re going to get next.

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The talk I gave at the OU for the Milton Keynes Science Festival is now on YouTube.

And, when one of the other speakers dropped out - I stepped in and gave the first half of my ‘Cosmic Casualty’ talk as well

Thanks to Jonti Horner for inviting me to speak at the event, and the OU production team for making me look like a pro with their great editing.

outreach

Courtesy of the USGS DEM generating guru’s, a few more HiRISE derived DEM’s have started making it onto their page. (see my story on animating the Columbia Hills for more info)

As part of the MSL landing site selection process, several new DEM’s have been published. These are huge files ( 2gig+ usually) but several of the new ones are giving be a bit of download trouble. One of the ones that has downloaded happily, is this one. Fortunately, it’s my favourite candidate landing site. Gale Crater would be a ‘drive to’ landing site. The safe landing ellipse contains the terrain seen in this DEM, and is interesting itself (it is thought to be a delta of some sort). In the middle of Gale Crater is a large mound, the start of which can be seen beyond the dark dunes at one end of this DEM.

• 720p H264 Quicktime - 65 meg
• Half Res H264 Quicktime - 19.9 meg
• iPhone/iPod Touch MP4 - 11.7 meg

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