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Control the Camera on Mars Global Surveyor
Angry Toad writes "According to Spaceflight Now, NASA is getting ready to take suggestions for what parts of the surface of Mars the Mars Global Surveyor should take pictures of next. Currently there are high-resolution images for around 3% of the surface of Mars, and they are willing to consider any reasonable suggestions for new imaging locations. Of course this is a publicity stunt, but all the same it would be rather cool to have a bit of 'virtual control' of the MGS camera."
I'm pretty sure that NASA knows of any interesting things on mars and will image them. The mail reading staff at NASA will probably interpret them, and submit to someone else what the people are responding the most with. This most definately would not make any decision - time on that thing is way too valuable.
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- Burn them!
*cough* flamebait *cough*
Help Fight SPAM today!
the other 97%
There's still that theory that life originally evolved on Mars and found it's way to Earth via the ejecta formed from a meteor impact, right?
So focusing on the impact craters may be a way for us to see where it all really began.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I suggest they take pictures of the polar cap. If there are any little green men on Mars, I'm sure they've built some awesome snowmen and ice castles! :)
How about we get to Phobos and Deimos instead?
Maybe if they zoom the camera all the way in they'll be able to see a cyber demon lord or at least one of those buildings we got to walk through on doom.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I'd like to see a report of the number of times each feature was asked for after they're done. I'm guessing 95% "monkey face", unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".
I've been looking at Mars each night through a small telescope (but with reasonable detail at 140x, probably as much as the atmosphere here supports). It's all pretty interesting and it's very cool to look directly at surface features on another planet, but they're HUGE features like Syrtis Major or the entire southern pole cap. It's difficult to see how the vast majority of people will be able to come up with something they actually want to see imaged.
So I guess I'm voting "Monkey face".
How about something unique and fresh, something that will imprint into people's minds, so they can recall that it is mars just by looking at the features.
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/. punsters being stumped.
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That's the sound of a thousand
What'chya gonna do boys?! Ask to see a pick of Uranus from the Mars orbitor?!
ok
If mars had nude-beaches then this would be really popular and be in the real spirit of the internet.
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
Just release the pictures of a parallel evolution on mars that you already have. Shut the creationists up once and for all!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How about turning the camera back towards us?
That ESA craft took a pic of the earth-moon system about 4 million km out - it would be fun to see what it looks like from Mars.
The resolution is probably too sucky to get much though.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
How about some more images of places that appear to be very flat? These places could serve as great landing places for probes or even humans later. As this is the closest that Mars will be to Earth in something like the next 200 years, I'm kind of dissapointed that we aren't taking more advantage of this unique opportunity by sending people.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
why not take a shot of the Mars Pathfinder landing site? IIRC, Mars Global Surveyor can take shots with a resolution up to 1.5m/pixel, so it'd be interesting to get a direct overhead visual feedback of how the Pathfinder probe landed, to see if the cushioning balloons have deployed evenly for example, or see if there's anything that could have been missed from ground shots taken by the rover itself. It might help improve future automatic ground probes missions ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I would like to see some more research done on the Pyramids of Elysium that Carl Sagan wrote about.
I want pictures of uranus... (Let my karma burn)
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
possible sites for russian nuclear power plants or the movie set for Total Recall ;)
tell us if there really is pyrmaids and the like there.
Everyone knows the cool things are INSIDE mars. Like the ringworld control center- the giant space heater from total recall- not to mention all those cool martian hives we keep hearing about.
Do you grok me?
besides a "publicity stun" as suggested, why doesn't NASA just progressively and systematically take images of the whole Mars surface?
i'm not sure if it's a job too big/long to complete (seeing only 3% is done), but won't it be useful if we have a 3D geo-map of Mars so the next landing can be more successful?
There are theroys about how mars once had river beds and Volcanos i would love to see a closer look of these
I just noticed that in the pictures of Mars taken while the Surveyor approaches Mars, there are no stars. Does NASA actually photoshop the images to take out the stars, or is it glare or something from the planet itself that prevents us from seeing the stars? I know they touch up images of nebulae and galaxies to create more aesthetic (and budget-enlarging) pictures, but I would think that images with stars would evoke more of a sense of awe in people.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
I regret to inform you that YFI.
I mean, we already know about the Leather Goddesses of Phobos...
Instead, I suggest trying to duplicate the same lighting conditions and view angle. This should make it easier to see how the shadows looked like a face in the fuzzier image...
It's a big feature -- the biggest (well, tallest) in fact, and I'd love to see it in all its glory. A photo will do until I'm standing there myself.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I think in light of the surveys that suggest that the public now questions the value of our space exploration, these types of public relations moves ("stunts") are very important to make our space projects accessable to the public-at-large.
Maybe we should get some images of the supposed cydonia region where extremests say that ruins exist..That way when we find nothing, we can tell them to get lost.
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I'd like to see a report of the number of times each feature was asked for after they're done. I'm guessing 95% "monkey face", unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".
Been there, done that.
Here's some shots of the Viking Lander site as well.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I actually worked on the software that controls the cameras. We used Linux as development workstations talking to a nice Solaris box. The final stuff ran on the Solaris box. It is hard to believe that somebody actually was this short sighted to require MSIE, when we were doing it on *nix. The funny thing was that it was an after thought AFTER mgs was on its way.
Things have truely changed in the last couple of years. I wonder what else got pushed through at the government level.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Many of the camera's images have sharp enough resolution to show features as small as a school bus." Given this, it'll perhaps be most rewarding to recommend canyons and valleys instead of deserts and ice-caps. Regardless, this opportunity will perhaps pave the way for future, partially automated, user-controlled satellites.
A blog like any other.
I'd like to see a photo of the Martian's take on the Statue of Liberty. I bet it's smaller and more efficient. Of course, this is contingent on the Martians having built "Earth Town"...
blatant use of the f-word and the s-word. being 12 years old (which is the mean age of most Slashdot readers), I do not appreciate the use of this foul language.
Sir, your putrid filth is the root of all that is bad about Slashdot. Please refrain from such cursing or my mother will not let me surf the information superhighway anymore!
more pics of the vallus marinarus...largest known canyon in the solar system. and take some closeups of the polar caps and those areas that look like fluvial deposits...evidence of water and all.
... but I still think they should take more pictures or the face, pyramids, and "city" at Cydonia.
We're Doomed
They do this all the time. Mars Pathfinder represented an "ultimate test" of the imaging capabilities of global surveyor, and they have quite a few images to prove it. Have a look here to see a good example. Unfortunately, with a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, the rover would be far to small to be visible.
The state of collapse and erosion, newly exposed surfaces as well as older stuff that been exposed for a while may provide some fairly accurate dating measurements. Landslides, direction of wind, geological movement(?) the mountian with black sky at its' top is likely very active. Plus it might be interesting to see what changes take place over a 25 year period.
"At this time, the Target Request site only works with Internet Explorer (IE). It was developed and tested with IE 6 / Windows 98 SE and IE 5.2.3 / Mac OS X (10.2.6). It is impractical for us to make it work with every browser on every platform, due to the incompatibility of various browsers."
Standards compliant scripting or Flash, those should be the only 2 options for developing the client side for a web application. "IE scripting" shouldn't even be on the list.
I think they should allow anyone with an internet connection to control the probe. Much like this guy http://www.drivemeinsane.com/
Could we get some some high rez passovers of these sites?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
64 bytes from my_leet_box (123.134.156.178):
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Does something need to be adjusted, or is there a problem with the optical signal. Oh, wait a minute, I just got a response. What a crappy ping time!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Instead of taking pictures of the surface, we should have a couple taken of GS from the surface.
If our friends do not feel like doing us that favor then we should use Sojourner, unless our friends are using it as a skateboard, of course.
Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.
This image and this corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS images from the mars odyssey probe here) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
That way we can all enjoy zooming into Martian highrises looking for a glimpse of green nekkid Martian bootie!!
There didn't really seem to be a huge difference between Cold War era and following within NASA; internal events (read: Challenger) have had much bigger impacts. However, the difference between when the "no, we're better than you" arguments were taking place, i.e. the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, are tremendous. I tried to google funding info from the 1960s but failed. However, it was a hell of a lot higher than it was following the end of the Apollo program and the mostly ended US/Soviet rivalry as of Apollo-Soyuz.
It should be right on the opposite side of where the face is.
A recent New Scientist article mentions: Unusual warm spots on Mars might represent "ice towers" similar to those seen in Antarctica, say researchers. They could even harbour life...
These are located in the Hellas Basin, a large feature on the bottom left of Mars, viewed from Earth. Here's a photo of Mars, the elliptical bright feature at lower-center in the image is the Hellas Basin, the largest unequivocal impact basin (formed by an asteroid or comet) on the planet. Hellas is approximately 2200 km (1,370 mi) across. Really amazing detail, photo was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, check out many more of its pics here.
So THAT looks like an excellent area to Survey!
Do you need a website upgrade?
Don't point it at the Sun!
The lag will make their heads explode.
sig fault
"Dear God, they ./ed the Mars Global Surveyer!"
an article here suggests they use this
How about you map out a nice future home for the Russian_Mars nuclear reactor. I hear they have almost completed the technical drawings.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
When my own mouse gets to choose four of the pictures to be taken then I'll be pleased. But I won't be happy till I get four hours a week to rove around and explore on my own.
How abou the polar impact site of the probe we decided to have math error's on?
or better yet.. I want a picture of the viking site.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
.....I'll never understand how /. moderation works.
NASA keeps trying to compete with the National Science Foundation, and it's into research programs that have nothing to do with aeronautics or astronautics. The NSF has a better track record of getting results, but their PR budget is only $3.5 million.
I want a picture of the hitchhikers.
So much for a multiplayer game of Doom, then...
Okay this is Slashdot but how come only 1% of the posts are actual requests? Not that most of them are for Cydonia.
Well I have a couple though I am not too far along in areography. If anyone knows the best way to get a navigable copy of a radar map and maybe a mineral content map for Mars at high resolution I'd like to know. Otherwise will look myself some time..
If anyone knowledgeable has any comments on these ideas I would find them very interesting. Also how to get them to NASA.
Request 1. High resolution shots of mountainous areas within 500km of viable (flat) landing spots. This might have the following merits
- higher resolution of more vertical planes should increase the apparent resolution of three-dimensional models to which these images are mapped.
- these areas may also be rephotographed later on and compared to seek changes due to wind, sand or water springs.
- If robust fleets of robotic explorers are sent as has been mentioned, the robots might even be able to get nearby and shoot telephoto images from other angles
Request 2:
How about looking for small regions at the lowest altitude (i.e. farthest below "sealevel") in radar maps and shooting those with high resolution cameras?
- Conceivably there could be a deep crater or canyon which provides shelter from weather as well as possibly slightly higher atmospheric pressure
- Maybe such areas could have interesting cracks which lead even farther down.
- Possibly siting a manned expedition in a canyon would reduce the (not so dangerous but more than a nuclear power plant worker gets) radiation?
- Possibly geographical features in the near vicinity, crater/canyon rim, etc. could be utilized for stringing radio antennae or even anchoring observation kites/balloons
- Conceivably wind caught in such an area would increase the apparent air pressure in the area temporarily
Request 3. How about photographing a broad swath in all directions around proposed landing sites so that it is possible for earthlings to do lengthy walkabouts (flythroughs)?
Request 4. How about shooting interesting areas multiple times from different angles to attain stereo and also make possible extraction of higher resolution data through computation?
- reasons would be various but basically same as #3.
- different orbits will be a little off anyway so slightly different angle is possible right off the bat..
- shots taken from farther away may be able to catch a given location at a later local time (i.e. shoot at 2pm where the satellite is but it is 3 pm in the next time zone where you are focussing) to get different shadows that will let you extract some more topology. Of course if the camera can tilt..
- of course shooting the same place again will also help if the first time was messed up by a sandstorm.
Request 5. Shots of horizon with Deimos/Phobos/other planets rising/setting above it.
Request 6. Shots of places that aren't bright orange (are there any?)
- I'd like to see what different landscapes look like to get an overall idea of what it is like to be on the other planet.
Request 7. A series of overlapping high resolution shots which form lines crisscrossing Mars in a pretty much balanced "brocade".
- This will allow virtual voyagers to travel all over
- It will be relatively easy to shoot more photos to link a previously uncovered area to the hi-res web
- It guarantees that all areas can be viewed in relation to a nearby context
- Perhaps the brocades should be instead of a diamond pattern, follow latitude and longitude lines and be closer to the equator. This might make it possible to simulate landings and takeoffs on Mars from equatorial orbit (if that is the orbit that would be used).
... the structures discovered on the martian surface last week have been identified as a Russian nuclear power plant.
The World Wide Web has been created to ensure anyone can freely access information and share it.
Some people seem to forget this goal and create websites that can only be accessed through a defined browser, operating system or a combination of the two.
This is a real pity when we consider such sites could be fully accessible without sacrifying the design or features.
Through these pages, we aim to list websites that discriminate visitors according to their Operating System or Web browser. We also provide informations and links about the W3C standards (the best way to create a compliant site).
Just to let you know, this is probably the most painful slashdotting I have witnessed in a long time. Folks, this is high bandwith material.
NASA is not up to the task and is it perhaps time that we help rather than hinder?
This could be a big feather in the open source movement cap.
Please help mirror.
This image and this corresponding daytime image
I think this is the first time I've seen a 320x10768 picture.. how do you print that out, on toilet paper?
Vulgarities? Net Nanny takes care of that, and stops me seeing any bad language, you freaky rock-holding melon farmer.
You know how people will say about someplace on Earth,"If the Earth were to get an enema, [insert name] is where they'd stick the tube."
I wanna see the Martian equivalent.
I just want this robot to start at the bottom of Mons Olympus, take some some shots there, then make it climb to the highest peek and take some shots there.
Is that to much to ask?? jeez.
Hello sir NASA sir?
Yes, I would like to see some martians mate, is that possible?
Thank you.
Night side. Have the probe turned off. Then suddenly power it up and take a photo with a big flash. That should catch those Martians off gaurd.
A bit silly I know!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
up my ass???
So many levels, dude... so many levels...
i want the tall mountain (the 12km one) and some really deep canyons (zoom in if you have to).
maybe their is a atmosphere in the canyon we can live with?
also i would like some hotspots. (volcanos=heat=power-source...)
I would suggest taking pictures of the debris that eminates from the edge of a crater. Different patterns could suggest the presence of water. For instance, when an object hits dry land, the rocks and junk thrown out form thin lines that seem to point to the center of the crater. When an object hits liquid-saturated ground, the center of the crater may rise up to form a little mountain inside the crater. There also may be a sort of lava flow-looking pattern of ejecta. I will be going to Arizona State University in November to take some optical pictures of Mars and possibly use some of the more sophisticated images on the THEMIS package. Meanwhile, I must brush up on my Russian. Da Svedania!
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
....but I already *had* control of the MGS camera...how else could I have taken those pictures of Metal Gear Ray at the end of the tanker level!?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
These look completely different from the warped computer processed images NASA put out a few years ago along with the big claim the that face was not a face at all...
The Apod showed this Mars mountain a month or so back, and one of my ski discussion boards noticed that there's a nice little bowl in the upper right. I'd like a better photo to pick some lines for my first interPlanetary ski trip.
:Co2 != Snow problem)
(We have solutions for the whole
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Or they could check out this footprint - about half way down, slightly to the right.. If fact it reminds me of a day at the seaside, now wheres my suncream..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Will the dimensions and focal distance of the pictures be in English or Metric units? Do NASA and their contractor(s) know this time? I'd hate to have an accidental extreme closeup of some Martian's nose hairs.
Can they take pictures of the place on Mars where Brittany did her 'whoops, I did it again' video.
Then have her autograph them. If they wanted, they could even shoot the photo in black and white and then 'color enhance' everything. The guys at NASA really seem to have fun doing it. And at least that way they could change Brittany's awful shade of lipstick
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
What about high-res images of the largest mountain in the solar system (which also happens to be an extinct volcano). It is almost 3 times as high as Mt. Everest (over 16 miles high), and MUCH bigger in area. After the ice caps, Olympus Mons is clearly the most interesting surface feature of Mars.
Yeah, set the ttl to like 12 minutes or so...
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
It kinda looks like a framed picture of the classic "gray" alien.
For me, it's the border that makes it such a hard call. It just seems to be too highly ordered to be a natural formation, but not so much so that I'd be certain of that.
It seems like it will take a still closer look. Mostly likely more so than the current probe can manage. Therefore, it is probably better used elsewhere (maybe there is another such "feature" somewhere on the other 97% of the planet).
A goal is a dream with a deadline
You grok?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
My complaint is that NASA Just Doesn't Get It when it comes to PR.
Ever watch NASA TV? The idea is a great one, and you'd think, given that NASA missions require them to touch on nearly every interesting area of science, NASA TV would be awesome. But it isn't.
I watched a program recently about the Mars missions, Spirit and Opportunity. How can you possibly make going to Mars boring? NASA TV did. They talked about the amazing prospect of building robots and sending them all the way to another planet with all the passion of Ben Stein asking for "Bueller". I couldn't believe it.
NASA TV ought to be riveting. It ought to be exciting. There's no excuse for being boring. The goal isn't just to communicate, but to excite citizens about space exploration. So why didn't they make a reality show about the struggle to create Spirit and Opportunity?
You've got power struggles, fear, hope, accomplishment... in short, drama. Will the spacecraft be destroyed on landing? Tune in and find out! It'll mean more once you've become emotionally involved with the characters who've devoted their entire lives to this moment.
Whether you like this particular idea or not, I think anyone has to acknowledge that NASA TV isn't achieving its potential. And I want them to. If you were a NASA TV producer, what would you do to fix it?
What the resolution in high-end spy satellites is nowadays...
Richard C. Hoagland of the Enterprise Mission and Art Bell decide where to take the photographs. If there's really something there, great. If not, then they'll have to shut up.
I'd like to have a rover go on the so called "dark" side and show us all the secret ports and launch sites and hideouts and all the other good things you'd hide on the nearest stellar body that amazingly enough has a side that never faces the earth.
oh, and you could drive it up to the flag and prove to all the conspricytheorists that they really did go to the moon.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
A few years ago, when I got a stereoscopic microscope and an ultrasonic cleaner, I cleaned and examined all of the hundreds of mineral and fossil specimens I'd collected over the years. In so doing, I noticed something interesting and unexpected. (Actually, I noticed several interesting and unexpected things, but only one of them is germane here.)
The specimens that were the most interesting to the naked eye were generally duller than heck at a microscopic scale. The really interesting microscopic features were almost always on stones that were completely unremarkable to the naked eye.
I suggest that the MGS scientists sit down and make a list of the areas on Mars they consider least interesting and take pictures of random locations within those areas. They might indeed turn out to be uninteresting, but on the other hand, the surest way to find unexpected things is to look where you don't expect to find anything.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Step right up! Make your guess where the ill-fated
Mars Polar Lander ended up.
It's kinda like a scavenger hunt, but on another planet!
There might be little green penguins too!
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Instead of letting the Russians build a nuclear power plant, why don't we put a dormitory full of cute 19 year old babes with little green antenna's on their head and nothing else, then charge $19.95 per month for subscriptions to "NASA MARS VOYUER" hey... it *could* work...
I think we should go with the recommendation of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Mars) and go look at the American flag Neil Armstrong left there in 1969!
After all she is on the House Space Subcommittee. She certainly would know what's most interesting on Mars.
OMG, you aren't telling me that you depend on that Martian server to control your pacemaker, are you?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???