geminiann03012 — Announcement
Gemini South Mid-Infrared Imager T-ReCS Glimpses Dry Ice Frost on Mars
17 June 2003: On the second night of its first commissioning run on the Gemini South Telescope, the facility mid-infrared imager/spectrograph T-ReCS was used to obtain an image of Mars using a spectral filter centered at a wavelength of 12.8 microns. The image was made at 7h27m UTC on 2003 June 4. Bright areas are relatively warm, and dark areas may be cooler. In the "raw" image on the left, the bright region corresponds to the sub-solar point; there is a brightness gradient roughly symmetrical about the sub-solar point, actually skewed a bit towards mid-afternoon due to thermal inertia. The middle image shows a specially processed (unsharp-mask) version of the T-ReCS data that accentuates finer details. The right image is a composite of visible data from the Mars Global Surveyor (National Geographic Society, MOLA Science Team, MSSS, JPL, NASA) taken from the Mars Now webpage and shows Mars at approximately the same orientation …