...on the Mars Odyssey orbiter:

I attended a lecture last Friday on the orbiter mission, at Pasadena City College. It was given by .....? Gibbs, the project manager. Good lecture (despite some whacko Q&A). One thing about it caught my attention.

I had not been able to figure out what sort of data the MARIE instrument would be able to produce. The specs are pretty vague. The results previously posted are only graphs.

However, at the lecture they showed an actual global false-color map showing MARIE results. There really wasn't much resolution to it, nor were there real numbers (it displayed some sort of relative intensity index). Still, I think that as time goes on, we can expect much more detail.

The other interesting point about the MARIE data they showed was that it suggested that the radiation intensity was twice as severe at the highlands than it was at the lowlands. Still, quite lethal at the lowlands, but they had no immediate explanation why that thin atmosphere would block as much rad as it apparantly does.