TY - JOUR
T1 - The mars science laboratory curiosity rover mastcam instruments
T2 - Preflight and in-flight calibration, validation, and data archiving
AU - Bell, James
AU - Godber, A.
AU - McNair, S.
AU - Caplinger, M. A.
AU - Maki, J. N.
AU - Lemmon, M. T.
AU - Van Beek, J.
AU - Malin, M. C.
AU - Wellington, D.
AU - Kinch, K. M.
AU - Madsen, M. B.
AU - Hardgrove, Craig
AU - Ravine, M. A.
AU - Jensen, E.
AU - Harker, D.
AU - Anderson, R. B.
AU - Herkenhoff, K. E.
AU - Morris, R. V.
AU - Cisneros, E.
AU - Deen, R. G.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are indebted to the incredibly talented men and women of NASA, JPL/Caltech, and many other govern ment labs and companies who helped to design, build, and deliver Curiosity to Mars and thus to enable the success of the Mastcam investigation. We also acknowledge the broader Mastcam, MAHLI, and MARDI Development and Operations team at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., for their skill, perseverance, and outstanding attention to quality and detail in the preflight testing and sol-to-sol opera tions of the cameras on Mars. We thank Peter Smith, Rebecca Greenberger, Ken Edmundson, and Janet Richie for patient and thoughtful reviews and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. We acknowledge ASU student helpers Matt Jungers, Julie Mitchell, and Hannah Kerner for assistance with Mastcam calibration pipeline development and data processing. This work was funded by grants and contracts from NASA, JPL/Caltech, and MSSS. The data used here are listed in the references, tables, appendices, and/or the NASA Planetary Data System Imaging Node at, for example, http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/ msl/MSLMST_0001/CALIB/ and http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/ msl/MSLMST_0001/SOFTWARE/.
Funding Information:
We are indebted to the incredibly talented men and women of NASA, JPL/Caltech, and many other government labs and companies who helped to design, build, and deliver Curiosity to Mars and thus to enable the success of the Mastcam investigation. We also acknowledge the broader Mastcam, MAHLI, and MARDI Development and Operations team at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., for their skill, perseverance, and outstanding attention to quality and detail in the preflight testing and sol-to-sol operations of the cameras on Mars. We thank Peter Smith, Rebecca Greenberger, Ken Edmundson, and Janet Richie for patient and thoughtful reviews and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. We acknowledge ASU student helpers Matt Jungers, Julie Mitchell, and Hannah Kerner for assistance with Mastcam calibration pipeline development and data processing. This work was funded by grants and contracts from NASA, JPL/Caltech, and MSSS. The data used here are listed in the references, tables, appendices, and/or the NASA Planetary Data System Imaging Node at, for example, http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/ msl/MSLMST_0001/CALIB/ and http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/ msl/MSLMST_0001/SOFTWARE/.
Publisher Copyright:
©2017. The Authors.
PY - 2017/7
Y1 - 2017/7
N2 - The NASA Curiosity rover Mast Camera (Mastcam) system is a pair of fixed-focal length, multispectral, color CCD imagers mounted ~2 m above the surface on the rover’s remote sensing mast, along with associated electronics and an onboard calibration target. The left Mastcam (M-34) has a 34 mm focal length, an instantaneous field of view (IFOV) of 0.22 mrad, and a FOV of 20° × 15° over the full 1648 × 1200 pixel span of its Kodak KAI-2020 CCD. The right Mastcam (M-100) has a 100 mm focal length, an IFOV of 0.074 mrad, and a FOV of 6.8° × 5.1° using the same detector. The cameras are separated by 24.2 cm on the mast, allowing stereo images to be obtained at the resolution of the M-34 camera. Each camera has an eight-position filter wheel, enabling it to take Bayer pattern red, green, and blue (RGB) “true color” images, multispectral images in nine additional bands spanning ~400–1100 nm, and images of the Sun in two colors through neutral density-coated filters. An associated Digital Electronics Assembly provides command and data interfaces to the rover, 8 Gb of image storage per camera, 11 bit to 8 bit companding, JPEG compression, and acquisition of high-definition video. Here we describe the preflight and in-flight calibration of Mastcam images, the ways that they are being archived in the NASA Planetary Data System, and the ways that calibration refinements are being developed as the investigation progresses on Mars. We also provide some examples of data sets and analyses that help to validate the accuracy and precision of the calibration. Plain Language Summary We describe the calibration and archiving of the images being obtained from the Mastcam multispectral, stereoscopic imaging system on board the NASA Curiosity Mars rover. Calibration is critical to detailed scientific analysis of instrumental data, and in this paper we not only describe the details of the calibration process and the steps in our resulting data calibration pipeline but also present some examples of the kinds of scientific analyses and discoveries that this calibration has enabled.
AB - The NASA Curiosity rover Mast Camera (Mastcam) system is a pair of fixed-focal length, multispectral, color CCD imagers mounted ~2 m above the surface on the rover’s remote sensing mast, along with associated electronics and an onboard calibration target. The left Mastcam (M-34) has a 34 mm focal length, an instantaneous field of view (IFOV) of 0.22 mrad, and a FOV of 20° × 15° over the full 1648 × 1200 pixel span of its Kodak KAI-2020 CCD. The right Mastcam (M-100) has a 100 mm focal length, an IFOV of 0.074 mrad, and a FOV of 6.8° × 5.1° using the same detector. The cameras are separated by 24.2 cm on the mast, allowing stereo images to be obtained at the resolution of the M-34 camera. Each camera has an eight-position filter wheel, enabling it to take Bayer pattern red, green, and blue (RGB) “true color” images, multispectral images in nine additional bands spanning ~400–1100 nm, and images of the Sun in two colors through neutral density-coated filters. An associated Digital Electronics Assembly provides command and data interfaces to the rover, 8 Gb of image storage per camera, 11 bit to 8 bit companding, JPEG compression, and acquisition of high-definition video. Here we describe the preflight and in-flight calibration of Mastcam images, the ways that they are being archived in the NASA Planetary Data System, and the ways that calibration refinements are being developed as the investigation progresses on Mars. We also provide some examples of data sets and analyses that help to validate the accuracy and precision of the calibration. Plain Language Summary We describe the calibration and archiving of the images being obtained from the Mastcam multispectral, stereoscopic imaging system on board the NASA Curiosity Mars rover. Calibration is critical to detailed scientific analysis of instrumental data, and in this paper we not only describe the details of the calibration process and the steps in our resulting data calibration pipeline but also present some examples of the kinds of scientific analyses and discoveries that this calibration has enabled.
KW - Archiving
KW - Earth and Space Science
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85042331929&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85042331929&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/2016EA000219
DO - 10.1002/2016EA000219
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85042331929
SN - 2333-5084
VL - 4
SP - 396
EP - 452
JO - Earth and Space Science
JF - Earth and Space Science
IS - 7
ER -