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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'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 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
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.
"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.
A meteor impact of that size would definitely be visible on today's maps of Mars. That and given that life started on Earth some four billion years ago, subsequent smaller meteor impacts, global weather(Mars has NASTY dust storms) and plate tectonics (if the theory is true) would have erased it from history.
Studying meteor impacts would however prove or disprove the theory of Martian plate tectonics. It was the same test that proved that Venus has no tectonics whatsoever. Researchers plotted a map of all the impacts on the surface of Venus and placed three randomly plotted maps next to it. Nobody could tell which one was the real map of Venus because of the complete randomness of the impacts. If Venus did have plate tectonics, then the shifting land would have created some sort of pattern along it's plates.
If Mars had plate tectonics at one time, then the impacts over the millenia would leave some sort of pattern, generally where the land has moved to since that time.
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?
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...)
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.