OSU Mappers at COSI
3D Anaglyph Portraits and Mars “Blueberry” Treasure Hunt
Engage Family Friday Night Audience June 30, 2006

On the night of Friday, June 30, scientists and students from the OSU Mapping & GIS Laboratory brought Mars mapping to COSI Family Friday Night. As part of a public outreach effort funded by NASA, Leslie Smith, Dr. Kaichang Di, and Shaojun He demonstrated stereo imaging and led students through a Mars mapping “blueberry” treasure hunt.

The “blueberry” treasure hunt send family teams across the “Mars” surface, around craters and hills, looking for the “blueberries” that showed scientists definitively that water did once exist on Mars. As team member, outfitted with Navcams, Pancams, and Hazcams, threaded their way across the surface, they uncovered rocks. If the underside was blue, they had “found” water and earned a prize. The grand prize winner, from the Cincinnati area, earned a full-color poster of Mars to take back to his classroom. Other rocks turned out to have operational directions, hints, and mission “mishaps” that kept the teams moving across the planet.

Mars mapping is accomplished at the Lab through the science of photogrammetry, which is based on stereo images). A fun use of stereo imagery is the creation of 3-dimensional images. Here we made anaglyphs, or 3-D images created from left (in red) and right (in blue) images. Special glasses with 1 red and 1 blue lens are needed to see the 3-D effect.

Anaglyphs are created from two separate photographs of the same scene, taken on the same plane, but from different positions just as our two eyes are on the same plane (the face) but are separated by about 2 inches. These 2 photographs, or digital images, are called stereo pairs. The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mast carries 4 pairs of stereo cameras, the pancam (full multispectrum) along with the navcam and the front and rear hazcams (black and white). We have set up two cameras to approximate the pancam, and taken photos of visiting families. Families can then watch our scientists process the photos to create a composite anaglyph. The 3-D effect can be seen only by looking through special glasses

The Mapping & GIS Lab at OSU, lead by Dr. Ron Li, Participating Scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, has the responsibility of locating the exact location of each rover at all times. In addition, they use the geoinformational sciences of photogrammetry and GIS to create extremely detailed maps of the planet surface. This information is posted daily to a special website used by mission scientists to determine each day’s instructions to the rovers.

At the June Family Friday Night, Leslie Smith, project administrator for this NASA education and public out reach project, was joined by Dr. Kaichang Di, the co-investigator of the parent research project on Mars localization (exactly where IS the rover?) and Mars mapping (How far HAS the rover traveled? How far away ARE those mountains?) project and by Shaojun He, a graduate student working in the research lab who came to the United States just a week before the event. His expertise with cameras and computers made the anaglyph making a real success.

June 30, 2006 COSI Family Friday Night Illustrations:

Seeing yourself in 3D anaglyphs – visitor from Virginia and her cousin get shown how 3-D stereo image anaglyphs are made and viewed through special colored glasses by OSU graduate student Shaojun He.



Anaglyph: 3-D view of the Harrell family racing across the Martian plain.


Getting prepared for roving across Mars in search of signs of water means loading up with the right cameras. Here team leader loads up with hazcams (hazard-avoidance cameras) and navcams (navigation cameras) before heading out to the landing zone.


Successful finding of “blueberries”, or evidence of water on Mars (represented by the blue tile), earns rewards for the family teams
 --- a big dip out of the treasure chest!



Hazcams helps find evidence of water on Mars  --  Successful family team finds “blueberries”  and gets its rewards.
For more information contact:
Leslie Smith, project administrator, Mapping & GIS Laboratory, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science, The Ohio State University. E-mail: smith.2942@osu.edu; Telephone: 614-292-4303; web http://shoreline.eng.ohio-state.edu.