Mars-Express On Its Way

Nebukadnezar writes "Two weeks ago, Mars-Express tested its sensors and took some marvelous data and pics of the Earth-Moon system from a distance of about 8*10^6 km. Nice to see our neighborhood once in a while. BTW check out the spectrometer readings of Earth: water shows up very clearly. I wonder what this instrument will tell us about water on Mars..."

Comments

Water on Mars. . .

[astrobabe]

This instrument won't tell us anything about water on Mars in the way in which you're thinking. The spectra of Earth is it's atmospheric spectra. We already know about the atmospheric spectra of Mars from ground based observations and other space missions and we know that the bulk of the water we infer to be there from surface geology is NOT trapped in the atmosphere. At this point in order to find water we need a better gamma ray spectrometer (not optical and IR), but current analysis shows that there isn't enough carbon dioxide on Mars to have caused what water ice there is now to melt.

let's hope this one gets some good info

[ravenousbugblatter]

As always it's amazing to see new photos of earth from outerspace, especially in ones like this where you can see the moon in reference to the earth.

The next couple of years could be really interesting with all of the mars missions launched recently. Let's just hope they didn't screw up any metric conversions this time...

unmanned/manned exploration

[Madcapjack]

Unmanned exploration is good because it brings good solid data. Manned exploration is good because we have opposable thumbs.