Information about the MSSS Viking Image Archive

The images found here are most of those of with resolution 400 meters/pixel or better and emission angle (angle between the surface normal at the center of the image and the vector to the spacecraft) of less than 45 degrees; these images are those deemed useful to support targeting of the Mars Observer Camera. At present there are about 33,500 images available here. About 5,000 that should be in this set are missing due to processing errors when the archive was being constructed.

At some point in the future, we hope to make the full-resolution images available at several levels of processing; at present, only the browse images at 8x less resolution than the originals are available.

Notes on image pedigree: the images were originally obtained by MSSS on many hundred 6250-bpi tapes. These tapes were transferred to 8mm Exabyte cartridges, and ultimately to a 65-GB magneto-optical disk jukebox. These subsampled versions have been processed with software developed at MSSS; noise removal and reseau correction have been applied, the images were then shrunk via averaging by a factor of 8, and the results were auto-ends stretched. Some of the images may not have been correctly processed; more correct versions are being produced on CDROM by the Planetary Data System. Please contact the author for more information.