This video is my friend’s Google Tech talk about cell phones in space! IRG connected one to the MIT SPHERES platform in a study of control and what additional CPU power could provide.
Ross Beyer will hopefully be doing the next NASA @ Google Tech Talk.
The Google community silently released a few new features for their Mars mode in Google Earth. MER-B, Opportunity, now has an updated traverse path thanks to a fellow at the Unmanned Spaceflight forum along with a new base map that Ross created. However I’m really excited about a new CTX Global Map that is available. Below is a screen shot:
From this high view you can see that that CTX hasn’t imaged all of Mars. This is expected. CTX isn’t trying to image all of Mars, it is simply the context imager for HiRISE. Meaning that CTX tends to roll tape only when HiRISE is. Never the less, the imagery is still beautiful and, in my opinion, shows more detail that the default base layer from an HRSC composite.
This mosaic was created by simply downloading all CTX data from NASA’s PDS servers and then calibrating and map projected the imagery with USGS’s ISIS software. The composite was then made with in house software from our team at NASA Ames Research Center. This is a Vision Workbench combination plus our Plate Filesystem. It is the same software we used to do a global MOC-NA and HiRISE mosaic for Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope. Unfortunately, I believe those servers have bit the dust. Regardless, if you have free time, I encourage you to check out the CTX Mosaic and Opportunity traverse in Google Earth. Click the planet, select “Mars”, and then in the bottom left select “CTX Mosaic” under “Global Maps”.
Here’s my presentation PDF. This is the first draft. I’m probably going to change this presentation a little bit more in the future.
Don’t accept my presentation as the only truth. If you are interested in using the super computer or have questions, please refer to the NAS website.
Let me secretly show you a cool project I just finished. During the later missions of Apollo during the 70′s, NASA came to understand that their funding would be cut back. In attempt to extract as much science as possible from the last few missions to the Moon they increased the astronauts’ time on the surface, gave them a car, and added a science bay to the orbiting spacecraft. Inside that science bay (called SIM) were two repurposed spy cameras. One was the Apollo Metric Camera, whose 1400 images from Apollo 15 are seen projected above. Recently ASU has been digitally scanning this imagery. This has allowed me and my colleagues to be able to create a 3D model of a large section of the near side of the Moon and to create a beautifully stitched mosaic.
Besides these being pretty pictures, I’m proud to say that all of this work was created by open source software that NASA has produced and that is also currently available on GitHub. Vision Workbench and Stereo Pipeline are the two projects that have made this all possible. The process is computationally expensive and is not recreate-able at home, but a university or company with access to a cluster could easily recreate our results. So what does the process look like?
This long process above is not entirely documented yet and some tools have not yet been released in the binary version of Stereo Pipeline. Still, for the ambitious the tools are already there. Better yet, we’ll keep working on those tools to improve them as IRG is chock-full of ideas for new algorithms and places to apply these tools.
