Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Ames Mer Microscopic Imager Toolkit, Randy Sargent, Matt Deans, Clay Kunz, Ken Herkenhoff

Randy Sargent

The Mars Exploration Rovers, spirit and opportunity, have spent several successful months on Mars, returning gigabytes of images and spectral data to scientists on Earth. One of the instruments on the MER rovers, the Athena microscopic imager (MI), is a fixed focus, megapixel camera providing a ±3mm depth of field and a 31×31 mm field of view at a working distance of 63 mm from the lens to the object being imaged. In order to maximize the science return from this instrument, we developed the Ames MI toolkit and supported its use during the primary mission. The MI toolkit is …