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Here is the rock they plan to zap:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4485

And quite a few more images here since I last looked:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/

Here is the rock they plan to zap:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4485

And quite a few more images here since I last looked:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/

And as for the mars rover thing, I wish they'd spend the money on finding cures for disease, or a stable food supply. That sort of thing.

Well it's not an either/or proposition. It's important to do both.

And as a matter of fact, NASA does play a role in fighting disease and famine.

And as for the mars rover thing, I wish they'd spend the money on finding cures for disease, or a stable food supply. That sort of thing.

Well it's not an either/or proposition. It's important to do both.

And as a matter of fact, NASA does play a role in fighting disease and famine.

I've already moderated in this thread, but this comment was just so egregiously stupid I had to comment.

Every year since 1976 NASA has published a list of technologies derived from NASA related endeavors, including Mercury, Apollo, Shuttle, MIR, the Mars rovers and others. In fact, as part of a congressional mandate from 1958, NASA is responsible for making efforts to disseminate NASA-developed technology to the general public. You can look at any back issue of the publication (entitled Spinoff) here: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/

Here is a list of a couple highlights from the previous mars rovers: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/pdf/Mar_web.pdf

I sincerely hope you take some time and read through as many publications as you can to educate yourself, because you are seriously dangerously ignorant.

I've already moderated in this thread, but this comment was just so egregiously stupid I had to comment.

Every year since 1976 NASA has published a list of technologies derived from NASA related endeavors, including Mercury, Apollo, Shuttle, MIR, the Mars rovers and others. In fact, as part of a congressional mandate from 1958, NASA is responsible for making efforts to disseminate NASA-developed technology to the general public. You can look at any back issue of the publication (entitled Spinoff) here: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/

Here is a list of a couple highlights from the previous mars rovers: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/pdf/Mar_web.pdf

I sincerely hope you take some time and read through as many publications as you can to educate yourself, because you are seriously dangerously ignorant.

Here you go:

Original:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676031main_pia16051-figure_2_brightened-portalfull.jpg

Red banced:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16051.jpg

FTFY.

Here you go:

Original:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676031main_pia16051-figure_2_brightened-portalfull.jpg

Red banced:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16051.jpg

FTFY.

That's the Spirit. ;)

Not to pick on you, but I'd say that you are perhaps working yourself into a tizzy over nothing. The difference between the photos of Mars from the 70's and what we are getting from the rovers now is hardly the result of NASA "lying...with photoshopped [sic] pictures." It's the result of better technology providing a more accurate representation of what we would actually see if we were there (or in the case of the white-balanced image in TFA, what we would see if that landscape were on earth, which can be useful for certain kinds of scientific investigation).

There is indeed a very, very fine line between simply processing a digital image and "Photoshopping" a digital image, but I would argue that these images are on the processing side of that line, rather than the "Photoshopped" side of the line. Consider this: my Canon Powershot -- admittedly, a much, much simpler device than Curiosity's cameras, I imagine -- doesn't produce RAW images; it processes every RAW image into a JPG. That introduces aberrations (JPG uses lossy compression after all, among other inaccuracies). Is that an "unscientific...photo alteration?"

Also, a lot of the photos we see from Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity are digitally stitched mosaics. For example, if you look at this photo, you can clearly see the boundaries of many of the individual photos. Are you going to get uptight because this wasn't a single photo, but rather was digitally "altered?"

If this kind of processing irks you, then I humbly suggest that you take your own digital camera and do some experimentation. Go indoors and shoot a handful of photos at different times of the day, with and without indoor lighting. Do the colors match what you see with your eyes? What if you display the images on a different monitor? If you have the ability to shoot photos in RAW and JPG formats, compare them both with what you see. Now play with some of the settings on your camera. My Powershot has settings for natural (sunlight) lighting, incandescent lighting, florescent lighting, tungsten lighting, etc. These software filters adjust the white balance to the kind of lights that are being used inside your house because the CCD in a camera doesn't react to all frequencies of light in the same way your eye does. In fact, most digital cameras include an IR-cut filter over the CCD because the CCD is much more sensitive to IR light than your eyes. Is that hardware filter "altering" the photo? Your eye won't detect those frequencies of light, but it's really there, and the filter is removing it from the photo.

Yeah, but...

Like you, I too would like to see what it would look like if I was actually standing on Mars. However, the APOD website describes what is probably the same photo as in the Wired article (Surprise! I didn't RTFA yet), which contains this blurb: "Images from Mars false-colored in this way are called white balanced and [are] useful for planetary scientists to identify rocks and landforms similar to Earth." So while you and I might appreciate the novelty of seeing what Mars would actually look like to a human observer on-site, there is a valid reason for white-balancing the photo as well.

(Which is a completely wasted opportunity.)

In fairness, they are forsaking their advertising Opportunity out of the Spirit of Curiousity, I suspect ;)

(Which is a completely wasted opportunity.)

In fairness, they are forsaking their advertising Opportunity out of the Spirit of Curiousity, I suspect ;)

(Which is a completely wasted opportunity.)

In fairness, they are forsaking their advertising Opportunity out of the Spirit of Curiousity, I suspect ;)

There is a light brown colored drum shape at the far upper left of the image. It appears to be a damaged component of the rover... http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676004main_pia16051-fullportal_full.jpg

You mean like this? http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431

And if you are interested in more raw images you can see them here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=3 (link is to day 3 but you can see others as well).

Gee, I wonder if such an image could be available on NASA's web site. Nah, that's unthinkable.

Oh, wait, here it is: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431

Here you go:

Original:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16051.jpg

White balanced:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676031main_pia16051-figure_2_brightened-portalfull.jpg

Here you go:

Original:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16051.jpg

White balanced:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676031main_pia16051-figure_2_brightened-portalfull.jpg

On the rover are color calibration targets (here is the one for the rover's arm's instruments). We know exactly what the colors of those targets are supposed to look like, when imaged by the cameras on the rover, under normal Earth-like lighting conditions. By looking at how those targets appear in the images we get back under Mars lighting conditions, we can do two things:

1) Learn a lot about the lighting conditions on Mars.
2) Correct the appearance of images we get back to correct for that Mars lighting.

Yyyyeah...they're not "altering" the photo. What they're doing is balancing the color so that people can know what they are seeing. The reason for this is that the Martian atmosphere has radically different color properties from that of our own. What this means is that visible observations cannot be made reliably: for example, a red rock on mars may not actually be red as we understand the color, and so conclusions geoloists make based on a color may be erroneous, because they are basing those conclusions on colors observed under earth's sky.

If anyone's interested, another scene is shown with and without white balance here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120815.html

As much as I love the awesome idea of moving a chunk of terrain between planets, I'm going to shoot for an informative mod and answer the question.

There is a sundial mounted on Curiosity, with a few colored stripes on it. Those stripes' colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) were recorded under Earth's lighting, Now that those same stripes are on Mars, their apparent color change in new pictures is the result of Mars' different lighting. By comparing the stripes' pictures, an approprite transformation can be determined, then applied to other pictures to compensate for the change in lighting.

We are sure because we're assuming that those stripes' actual colors haven't changed significantly during flight or landing.

Here is a page on the MSL's site where you can see both versions of the photo:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431

One is white-balanced and one colored. The white-balanced version represents what the scene would look like to human eyes under an Earth sky. The colored represents what the scene would look like to human eyes on Mars.

The point of using white-balanced photos is that geologists are used to looking at rocks on Earth. So when a geologist wants to judge rock characteristics using color, it helps to white-balance it so the color is similar to what it would be if looking at those rocks on Earth.

__

"Additionally, R&D and exploration are related to economic development."

By R&D and exploration, do you mean sending 40+ probes, rovers, satellites to Mars and all we have to show for it are HD images?

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/programmissions/missions/log/

"with R&D comes economic development which will help out their social problems."

Yes, if we only we could find a couple microbes on Mars, imagine the kinds of breakthroughs society can make and benefit from. So diverting billions of dollars from companies which make power stations, microprocessors, software, medical devices, and medicines to send another Mars mission and retrieve more HD Mars pictures make absolute economic sense.

Does anyone know A)where Curiosity was born B)Curiosity's childhood pet C)Curiosity's mother's maiden name?

A) JPL Spacecraft Assembly Facility, Pasadena
B) Childhood pet: (@jpltweetup)
C) Mother's maiden name: Ma

We have color photos from mars - they were just using black and white for testing and saving bandwidth. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/gallery-indexEvents.html

Low resolution thumbnail picture composite only, not full resolution, and they omitted the parts that show most of Curiosity itself (so not really full, as I would define it). For some reason I also thought it wasn't a 360-degree one, but on closer examination it looks like it is, and now that I look at the one linked in TFA, it also omits several parts of the image. There is a full color high-res image here (direct link [warning: the image is very large, over 11MB]: here), although it too has frames missing.

Low resolution thumbnail picture composite only, not full resolution, and they omitted the parts that show most of Curiosity itself (so not really full, as I would define it). For some reason I also thought it wasn't a 360-degree one, but on closer examination it looks like it is, and now that I look at the one linked in TFA, it also omits several parts of the image. There is a full color high-res image here (direct link [warning: the image is very large, over 11MB]: here), although it too has frames missing.

1. Grey is 1/3 the size of RGB colour. Most MSL operations are limited by bandwidth, so a 1/3 saving in storage and transmission is worth a lot;
2. Colour on Mars isn't terribly variable (dominated by orange - duh :-)), so a lot can be discerned from greyscale without needing colour, once you understand what's "normal" (i.e. calibrate it with a few colour pictures);
3. In most cases the CCD for astronomical observations is set up as a monochromatic one for maximum sensitivity, then you rotate filters in front of it to do each of the colour bands, if colour is what you want (or infrared);
4. MSL is unusual compared to previous missions because it does have a Bayer filter in front of the CCDs of a number of the cameras, so you get colour automatically (e.g., the Mastcams and the hand-lens imager). You'll still get highest-resolution results by shooting 3 separate exposures of grey, but it's hard to beat the convenience, so that's what they did this time;
5. Some of the cameras on MSL are greyscale because you just don't need colour for what they are supposed to do (e.g., the hazard cameras and I think the navigation cameras). They aren't primarily for taking pretty pictures, but for driving.

They got the greyscale pictures down first because those were faster to transmit with the limited bandwidth. Even the colour ones are only the thumbnails at this point, and the full resolution probably won't be down for a week or so. When they ramp up the communications speed the colour will probably be more common, but it's still going to be the case of "we already took a picture of that scene in colour a while ago, so we only need grey this time".

A reporter asked a similar question to what you did in one of the news conferences. Mike Malin (the principal investigator for most of the cameras) actually had a pretty good explanation of why they do things mostly in grey, but acknowledged at the same time that colour was easier for people to understand, so they're doing those too.

The first colour panorama is here.

1. Grey is 1/3 the size of RGB colour. Most MSL operations are limited by bandwidth, so a 1/3 saving in storage and transmission is worth a lot;
2. Colour on Mars isn't terribly variable (dominated by orange - duh :-)), so a lot can be discerned from greyscale without needing colour, once you understand what's "normal" (i.e. calibrate it with a few colour pictures);
3. In most cases the CCD for astronomical observations is set up as a monochromatic one for maximum sensitivity, then you rotate filters in front of it to do each of the colour bands, if colour is what you want (or infrared);
4. MSL is unusual compared to previous missions because it does have a Bayer filter in front of the CCDs of a number of the cameras, so you get colour automatically (e.g., the Mastcams and the hand-lens imager). You'll still get highest-resolution results by shooting 3 separate exposures of grey, but it's hard to beat the convenience, so that's what they did this time;
5. Some of the cameras on MSL are greyscale because you just don't need colour for what they are supposed to do (e.g., the hazard cameras and I think the navigation cameras). They aren't primarily for taking pretty pictures, but for driving.

They got the greyscale pictures down first because those were faster to transmit with the limited bandwidth. Even the colour ones are only the thumbnails at this point, and the full resolution probably won't be down for a week or so. When they ramp up the communications speed the colour will probably be more common, but it's still going to be the case of "we already took a picture of that scene in colour a while ago, so we only need grey this time".

A reporter asked a similar question to what you did in one of the news conferences. Mike Malin (the principal investigator for most of the cameras) actually had a pretty good explanation of why they do things mostly in grey, but acknowledged at the same time that colour was easier for people to understand, so they're doing those too.

The first colour panorama is here.

1. Grey is 1/3 the size of RGB colour. Most MSL operations are limited by bandwidth, so a 1/3 saving in storage and transmission is worth a lot;
2. Colour on Mars isn't terribly variable (dominated by orange - duh :-)), so a lot can be discerned from greyscale without needing colour, once you understand what's "normal" (i.e. calibrate it with a few colour pictures);
3. In most cases the CCD for astronomical observations is set up as a monochromatic one for maximum sensitivity, then you rotate filters in front of it to do each of the colour bands, if colour is what you want (or infrared);
4. MSL is unusual compared to previous missions because it does have a Bayer filter in front of the CCDs of a number of the cameras, so you get colour automatically (e.g., the Mastcams and the hand-lens imager). You'll still get highest-resolution results by shooting 3 separate exposures of grey, but it's hard to beat the convenience, so that's what they did this time;
5. Some of the cameras on MSL are greyscale because you just don't need colour for what they are supposed to do (e.g., the hazard cameras and I think the navigation cameras). They aren't primarily for taking pretty pictures, but for driving.

They got the greyscale pictures down first because those were faster to transmit with the limited bandwidth. Even the colour ones are only the thumbnails at this point, and the full resolution probably won't be down for a week or so. When they ramp up the communications speed the colour will probably be more common, but it's still going to be the case of "we already took a picture of that scene in colour a while ago, so we only need grey this time".

A reporter asked a similar question to what you did in one of the news conferences. Mike Malin (the principal investigator for most of the cameras) actually had a pretty good explanation of why they do things mostly in grey, but acknowledged at the same time that colour was easier for people to understand, so they're doing those too.

The first colour panorama is here.

The bandwidth is slow (lower bit rates are more reliable), and both Mars and Earth are rotating. Constant broadcast of microwave signal takes a lot of juice, and you don't have a dedicated satellite for the rover in Mars orbit. Your puny encryption technology would be laughable at best, a waste of effort. You can barely ensure the signal is intact, any possible hindrance would be a catastrophe -- Oops, a cosmic ray changed the encryption code, now your drone is useless! Ha! You can see all the images in their raw archive.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/

I prefer to stitch superior panoramas via placing the individual frames in 3D space in relation to my point of view... I find it odd that all Humans don't have such basic visualization tools. What's wrong? Three dimensions too much for your puny minds to grasp and manipulate?

You may have such capability eventually on Mars soon enough, but for now these are still relatively small baby steps. At this rate you're acceptance into the Galactic Concillium will take longer than your star system's life span! You've got the perfect setup: A lush well protected world with a huge easy to reach moon; Mars, a planet perfect for testing your ability to overcome lack of magnetic shielding -- You even got A BROWN DWARF (to better teach the lessons of gravitation), and its surrounded with A MOON FULL OF METHANE FUEL?! If you don't succeed, you'll have no one but yourselves to blame. To any other race this would all be too enticing to ignore, yet you obsess over Reality TV?!?! Are your own lives so pathetic you need to watch someone else's? It's telling indeed that the Mars One project can only be funded by harnessing your love for "Reality TV"... The problem is that humans will allocate 15 billion to the Reality TV Event "World's Best Exercisers" every four years, but only 2.5b on technology that paves the way for the assured survival of your kind.

Of course you'll have OTA TV broadcast from Mars eventually -- Your damn race is addicted to it!

You have the perfect setup to survive the evolutionary dead end and leap for the stars, it's a shame you choose to keep all of your eggs in one basket, Earth. To quote one of your black comedies: "Get your ass to Mars!"

They have already downloaded a number of color photos you can find online, including a color panorama. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/

If it's like previous pumice rafts, it's more like a large area of debris than a big island. Here's a random photo showing a boat plowing a path through one made up of smaller pieces. Not really the kind of thing you can walk around on, though the description of this one having an edge like an ice-shelf makes it sound like it may have larger rocks in it. Here is a NASA satellite photo of a 2006 occurrence with a more obvious origin (it's adjacent to an erupting volcano).

Nasa's web site is the first place I look. There's a treasure trove of beautiful high resolution photos, movies, data. The photo you're looking for is there. I linked the panoramic shot in a comment farther down.

Here is the Raw Archive of Engineering Camera's and improved EDL sequence with Yaketty Sax for soundtrack ;)

This rover actually does have color cameras on it. The primary navigation cameras are B&W, but there are two color 2-mpixel cameras used for sending back photos. NASA has some information on that. Not sure why the linked image here is in B&W. Perhaps they sometimes take B&W photos to save bandwidth? The MarsEarth link is 29 kbit, basically '90s modem speed.

Here is NASA's version

While I admire the desire to be really creative and shit and try to come up with a cool "new" interface, functionality still remains one of the key desirable attributes for a user interface. We can thank Apple and all the Apple wannabe copycats for useless, ridiculous new ways of doing things that are less accurate and more time consuming by design. Who said that dragging page after page of stacked thumbnails as if they were pages from a book is an improvement over a plain old list? Especially when the constraints are so narrow that you often end up "dragging" two at a time. Want an example? Here, go look for a specific picture on this site. Have fun. Oh it looks cute. It's not functional. You will waste time waving your mouse back and forth trying to get the picture you wanted. A UI is supposed to be something that helps you, not something you have to fight with.

Now I'm not saying this is how (formerly known as) Metro is going to work, I haven't used the beta, and I've only seen a couple screen-shots. But I understand that Microsoft is going for the "smart phone" look and feel, and that means lots of big colorful buttons you have to drag everywhere, and crap like this. And considering what they've done with "Ribbons" when they obfuscated their "Office" suite - and I'm talking about the 2007 version, I refuse to "upgrade" and see what else they managed to fuck up, I can't imagine this UI will be better. I remember an argument in the late 80's about how computers hadn't really lived up to their promise of greater productivity in the office. Well Microsoft, I guess we'll have to congratulate you for lowering the bar even more...

I'm going to try out NASA's meteor counter app. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/13dec_meteorcounter/

For those who may not be aware, GPS signals can be used to measure atmospheric properties. As GRACE (or any satellite with a modern GPS receiver) listens to a GPS satellite that's about to pass below the horizon, the GPS signal passes through the atmosphere. Thus the GPS signal is refracted and delayed in ways that can reveal the temperature, pressure, and refractivity of the atmosphere at different altitudes. These are known as GPS occultation measurements.

I've never used GPS occultation measurements, so I asked Gerhard Kruizinga about them at the weekly GRACE meeting. He pointed me to GFZ which has near-real time data (that page shows GPS occultation measurements taken today, but getting the data from GFZ probably requires filling out a quick form). Gerhard also mentioned that GPS occultation measurements from GRACE are regularly fed into the ECMWF atmosphere model, which is briefly described here.

Twenty-one years ago, the Deep Space 1 probe was controlled by an autonomous spacecraft control system called "Remote Agent". This was a Lisp program running aboard the spacecraft, 100,000,000 miles away from Earth. During the flight, they remotely debugged and fixed a race condition in the code that had not shown up during ground testing. This saved the day, and the Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year". One of the developers said, "Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem."

What do you think: Conservative, or Liberal Programming? (lol)
Formal Analysis of the Remote Agent Before and After Flight

Lisp was also used for the Mars Pathfinder mission, although in that case it was not running aboard the spacecraft.

The computer contains special memory to tolerate the extreme radiation environment from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles so the programs and data will remain and will not accidentally erase when the rover shuts down at night. On-board memory includes 256MB of DRAM and 2 GB of Flash Memory both with error detection and correction and 256kB of EEPROM

Think you'd be able to code everything the rover is ever meant to do, in a single unchanging program image, into just a few hundred kB?

In other cases, upgraded software provides new capabilities that weren't envisioned during the original design. Spirit and Opportunity, for instance, were given lots of new capabilities over their mission life: like the ability to autonomously navigate based on Simultaneous Locating And Mapping (SLAM) using the various cameras. These are capabilities that were just in development in academia when the rovers were originally programmed, but became proven during the MER mission. As a result of having that autonomous navigation capability, Spirit and Opportunity were able to travel much further distances than they would have if every single wheel revolution needed to be commanded from Earth.

I think it's pixies but I have no proof. You?

Try doing some reading.

Not only am I absolutely sure they've got more than one copy of critical data in flash, but they have two identical and redundant computers on board
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications

From http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/brains/

The rover has two "computer brains" one which is normally asleep. In case of problems the other computer brain can be awakened to take over control and continue the mission.

NASA have a map for that.

Three words.
Mars Semi Direct. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WppRQQld10&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=SP48ECECA63832ACC7
This is the first step to creating a return vehicle that can fuel itself from some stored Hydrogen and the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere.

Also, the ISS " produces – and dumps – enough methane waste gas each year to fill the Morpheus fuel tanks." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/exploration/morpheus/morpheus_test_stennis.html

Sorry, .gov webmasters .. the correct link is http://www.nasa.gov/roboticlander

There is another ( well actually there is a third one as well ) less publicized lander project at NASA, check out the flight videos at http://nasa.gov/roboticlander
Coincidentally, it just did a successful untethered test flight today, see http://twitter.com/nasamightyeagle