Special Projects

Sometimes an application comes along that is out of this world. This time we mean literally!

The Mars Phoenix Lander has generated a lot of excitement in both the scientific and public communities. The imagery coming back from the lander gives us a close-up look at the Martian northern region for the first time. Now with PhotoModeler Scanner these images can be processed to give us a 3D view of the surface.

One of the cameras on the Phoenix is stereo (that is, it has two lenses at a fixed and known distance and orientation). While we don't have full PhotoModeler calibrations of these cameras (and we are not directly involved in this project) we thought we'd set up approximate PhotoModeler Scanner projects using the information that is known from this Texas A&M site.

We do not have lens distortion information and the images are not idealized when processed but due to the high quality optics on the SSI camera, PhotoModeler Scanner is still capable of producing good dense point clouds.

The results of our first two tests are shown here. The first is from Sol 0 (the first martian day of the Phoenix Lander mission). It shows the lander's leg in bottom of the images. One interesting thing about this example is you can see the martian 'soil' has been depressed and pushed out by the lander's leg. This observation is possible because we can extract the 3D shape. This model has 80 thousand 3D points.

The second project is from Sol 7 and shows one of the early tests with the robot scoop. We can see the dent in the soil it has made.

Movie
Watch a video that shows the point clouds and surfaces with rotation and voice-over description. Either our high-res version, or on YouTube.

Other Sample
Our PhotoModeler distributor in Denmark, Jens Vedel, has a Mars scan example with the result shown with TurnTool (so you can interactively rotate and zoom the model). It is very interesting. Take a look.

Resources
Images from the Phoenix SSI Stereo Camera can be found at the University of Arizona Phoenix Mars Mission site and this raw archive. This Texas A&M site has a useful key for decoding Phoenix image file names. We used matched (by time) Left and Right images from the archive.