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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
"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 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?
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.