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."

Comments

Re:A little offtopic, but

[Siergen]

As I understand it, the exposure times needed to see features on the sunlit side of a celestrial body are too short to see stars. It's like trying to see the stars at night right after you leave a brightly lit house - your eyes are still adjusted to full light, and you just can't see the dim light of the stars...

The Face and Pathfinder sites re-photographed

[tunabomber]

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.

Re:earth?

[pclminion]

They changed the brightness, contrast, and colors for each planet and moon independently.

What they actually did (if you manage to decipher they're somewhat unclear description of the colorization process), is to use the high-resolution grayscale images as indexes to match with lower resolution color photos they already had.

Basically, they reduced the 24-bit color down to 8-bit grayscale and sorted in order of intensity. They also sorted the grayscale images in order of intensity. Then they mapped the colors from one, in a 1-to-1 fashion, onto the other. Pretty straightforward really.

So the process of colorizing was so lossy and brought out so much noise ...

The process wasn't lossy or noisy, because pixels of identical color in the result image are also of identical color in the original. The colors themselves have changed, but the distinct identity of each color remains intact. Black just happened to map to a nonblack color, so they changed it back to black. This is no different than any other "false" colorization process used in any other area of science. In fact, it's really quite aesthetic since most false color images have highly saturated colors (bright red, blue, green, etc), not the less saturated, natural looking colors these images have.