How did McCool hill fail to be noticed as the highest?

[willpittenger]

I noticed that McCool hill was found to be taller than Husband hill. (Read Spirit Discovers "New" Highest Peak in "Columbia Hills" for more.) However, I thought one of the following would would catch it before now.<br /><br />* MOLA on MGS<br />* I thought Spirit had a laser range finder on its mast<br />* Spirit has two cameras on its mast. Would the parallax been enough? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <hr style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em" />Will Pittenger<hr style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em" />Add this user box to your Wikipedia User Page to show your support for the SDC forums: <div style="margin-left:1em">{{User:Will Pittenger/User Boxes/Space.com Account}}</div> </div>

 

[spacechump]

Nope, no laser ranger finder.<br /><br />Sojourner had a laser grid system for navigation though. Maybe that's what you were thinking?

 

[JonClarke]

* MOLA's footprint is very large and probably can't resolve individual hills of this size very well.<br /><br />* The MERS's don't have a laser range finder (and it probably would not help significantly if it did)<br /><br />* The did not use thae paralax of the two different cameras, they seemed to have used the paralax of different images along a known baseline to work out the height.<br /><br />This stort of reminement of surveying over time is quite typical of surveying.<br /><br />Jon <br /><br /><i>edited for spelling</i> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Whether we become a multi-planet species with unlimited horizons, or are forever confined to Earth will be decided in the twenty-first century amid the vast plains, rugged canyons and lofty mountains of Mars</em>  Arthur Clarke</p> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

I would bet that the parallax of the two navcams or pancams would not be sufficient to be useful for that anyway.<br /><br />Heck, things like that keep cropping about hills here on Earth, and we can measure them a lot more easily. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>