Here is ESA's Beagle-2 Landing SIte. ETA is Dec 19, early AM. . This is 73 Lb stationary lander with a digging arm and 12 ovens to bake samples. It should soft- impact from orbit on Christmas Day.

Many overlays of this site are avilable through a Keyhole Marketing Page . Just look at the right margin for the mars promo. ESA site above has a link to this same Keyhole page!

Here's an update from ESA concerning the Beagle 2. Media reports today stated that NASA could not detect any signal from the Beagle 2 after two failed attempts to establish contact were made by ESA. Seems like Mars might be out of reach to us for now, with a 55% failure rate maybe there is 'A Fatal Attraction in Space'

Thanks for the update! Depressing! Maybe ESA operations should move into a high-res area. Placemark is Darmstadt Germany (Use earth mode on EV) where ops center is located. View here is as good as view from Beagle-2. Soon US Mars Rovers will arrive and will confirm or deny Stewsky's fatal attraction!

The overlay in the .eta shows the newly named "Apollo 1 Hills": White Hill, Grissom Hill, and Chaffee Hill near the Spirit Rover's landing site.
The hills are named for the members of the first Apollo mission
which ended in tradegy on January 27, 1967 when a fire destroyed the capsule on the launch pad.



left to right
Roger B. Chaffee
Edward H. White
Virgil I. Grissom

The attached .kml file will take you to Endurance Crater which is currently being explored by the Mars Rover named 'Opportunity'. The placemark is set to roughly the same position as the picture below:



Spectacular higher resolution images of Endurance Crater can be found here
and here. The Mars Rover web site is here

Opportunity Rover's journey to Endurance Crater started when the rover and it's lander parachuted in after a long trip from Earth. After bouncing twice the lander came to rest in a small crater to ne named Eagle Crater. Here is the rover first rolling off the lander.



Rover's first scientific discovery was the existance of nodules containing the mineral hematite. Hematite requires water to form so it indicates that water must have been present on Mars in the ancient past. Here is the first look at some of the pebbles and curious nodules found known as 'blueberries' discovered in Eagle Crater by Opportunity.




More blueberries can be seen weathering out of the rocks in this image of the rocks at the edge of Eagle Crater.


A larger image is found here




The .kml file also contains 9 overlays, each showing the area surrounding Endurance Crater in successively higher resolutions. Click on the overlay to bring up additional information or a link to the image souce.

Overlays:

1) 'opp map' - showing the Opportunity landing site target

2) MOC (Mars Orbital Camera) context image at 250 m/pixel

3) MOC image showing the final location of Opportunity

4) MOC detail image - include Eagle crater at 1.5 m/pixel

5) Opportunity detail area - a detail map from Opportunity's decent which also includes Endurance crater

6) Endurance Crater - shows the path of the Opportunity Rover overlayed with detailed imagery taken by the rover.

7) Rover in Eagle crater - a high res image taken by MOC after Opportunity landed which shows the lander and rover.

8) Rover in Eagle crater - - a high res image taken by the rover overlayed onto Endurance crater. It includes a self portrait of the rover.

9) Rover in Eagle crater - zoom - a larger version of overlay 8 since Earthviewer limits the zoom. This shows detail as small as .5 cm.

Great, great post!

Two of the images, 'MOC detail image' and 'MOC context image' do not seem right. Instead of a coherent, rectangular raster I get a diagonal image consistent with an "off by one" error in decoding the image size. Does this one work for other Keyhole 2 Pro users?

Irrespective of this, it is a most interesting and informative set of Placemarks. Thank you!

This appears to be a bug with the OpenGL version of KH2 regarding handling of grey-scale jpgs. Filed, should be fixed soon.

The final image, Number 9, is extraordinary.

When you think for a moment about how this was made, it is clear--a sense of the terrain and two projective perspective transformations give this top-down view of a scene imaged from a mast in the middle of the dark area.

I like it very much indeed. I wonder how many parts of the world have hidden slit-scan imagers providing real-time images just like this.,

I guess this about as 'extra-ordinary' as it gets. Using it's stereo vision and ability to move around, a robot on Mars is reconstructing a 3D landscape and we watch in real time.

I would have liked to have placed one additional overlay. This is a composite from the microscopic imager with about 50 um resolution. In order to place this on Mars, the zoom would be really have to be 'extraordinary'. Any chance Keyhole could remove the zoom limit in a future version? Here is the full res image

Here is a large .kml overlay file containing overlays of many of the images from the Mars Orbiter's 'Picture of the Day' site. Be careful when you download it not to check the entire folder. (Or try it to find out what happens). Better to open the folder and look at one or two overlays at a time.

The 'Picture of the Day' pages are associated with 2 overlays in the .kml file, a high resolution overlay image and a larger lower resolution 'context' image taken at the same time as the high res image. The overlay description field has links back to the Picture of the day page (sample) as well as links to the image information page for each image at the MOC Gallery. context link high resolution link

A word of warning, most of the overlays are still only approximately located and will require some manual positioning to match the background and topography.

The MOC gallery contains over 150,000 images at resolutions of 1.5 to 5 meters/pixel. The high res images are generally long strips of image. They are quite large images, typically 1K by 6K pixels. They are part of a large dataset still being collected by the spacecraft.

Spacecraft


High Res Camera


5 cameras



The .kml file was generated using a perl script which first read the MOC index file, and then found the image link in the Gallery Image Index. Many of the newest and older pics of the day do not have a matching image in the gallery and are missing overlays.