Exciting stuff from scientists working with the NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission from the University of Arizona in Tucson. They sent commands to unstow its robotic arm and take more images of its landing site early today. The Phoenix lander sent back new sharp color images from Mars late yesterday. Phoenix imaging scientists made a color mosaic of images taken by the lander’s Surface Stereo Imager on landing day, May 25, and the first two full “sols”, or Martian days, after landing. The panorama, now about one-third complete, shows a fish-eye perspective from the camera, a view from the lander itself all the way to the horizon. Phoenix adjusts its color vision with “Caltargets,” calibrated color targets on disks mounted on the landing deck. Its color vision isn’t quite like human color vision, but close.
“These images are very exciting to the science team,” said the Surface Stereo Imager co-investigator Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University. “We see the polygons we’re looking for, and we’re very excited to fill in the context with more site pan images that go beyond the workspace.” Images to complete the panorama are planned today and tomorrow, Sols 3 and 4, Lemmon said. “We appear to have landed where we have access to digging down a polygon trough the long way, digging across the trough, and digging into the center of polygon. We’ve dedicated this polygon as the first national park system on Mars — a “keep out” zone until we figure out how best to use this natural Martian resource,” Lemmon said.
Phoenix will use its robotic arm to dig first in another area seen in the panorama, an area outside the preserved polygon. Robotic arm manager Bob Bonitz of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, explained how the arm is to be unstowed today. “It’s a series of seven moves, beginning with rotating the wrist to release the forearm from its launch restraint. Another series of moves releases the elbow from its launch restraints and moves the elbow from underneath the biobarrier.”
