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

Focus on impact craters

[corebreech]

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.

earth?

[HBI]

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.

Re:earth?

[kazrak]

They did it already. Here you can see Earth, the Moon, and Jupiter, as seen from Mars orbit.

Re:earth?

[panaceaa]

"As seen from the Mars orbit", eh?

Because Jupiter is over 5 times farther from the Sun than Earth, two different exposures were needed to image the two planets. Mosaiced together, the images are shown above (top picture). The composite has been highly contrast-enhanced and "colorized" to show both planets and their satellites. The MGS MOC high resolution camera only takes grayscale (black-and-white) images; the color was derived from Mariner 10 and Cassini pictures of Earth/Moon and Jupiter, respectively, as described in the note below.

So what about that picture is accurate?! They changed the brightness, contrast, and colors for each planet and moon independently. And when they were done, "the color image was edited to return the background to black." So the process of colorizing was so lossy and brought out so much noise that they then had to redraw the edges of each planet and moon when they masked out "space."

This is probably a little ethnocentric but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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 ...

Definately the pyramids

[McAddress]

I would like to see some more research done on the Pyramids of Elysium that Carl Sagan wrote about.

Why ask when you can just do it?

[maliabu]

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?

A little offtopic, but

[digital bath]

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.

Re:A little offtopic, but

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a feature of the original Capricorn One set, which they still use.

Seriously: this is a frequent reason cited for why the Apollo moon landing pictures MUST be fake. The reason there are no stars is simply that it's a camera - it has to be set to a particular exposure to take a picture. You could get a shot of the stars with a long exposure, but the much brighter planet would be completely washed out. Glare on the lens or refracted light in the atmosphere (the reason you can't see stars in the daytime here) may play a part too, but the main reason is the simple limitation of any camera - including the kind in your skull.

Re:Aftermath

[dslbrian]

unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".

An interesting idea, would pathfinder/sojourner be big enough to see? Actually has one probe ever photographed another on the surface of another planet before? Makes me wonder if they could find the Viking probes, or mabye they are buried under the sand by now..

How sad.

[WindBourne]

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.

Hmm...

[mOoZik]

"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.

Been there, done that...

[fremen]

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.

Re:New locations?

[digital bath]

Well, the surveryor has been out there for about 6 years. I bet they've started to run out of locations that they planned on imaging - maybe our guess for interesting places to take pictures of is just as good as theirs now.

Re:Re-photograph the "face"

[MillionthMonkey]

I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.

You don't see the face in NASA's latest pic? It's not as obvious as it was in the previous image but you could do a little Photoshop job on it and imagine what a better picture would look like.

I get the feeling someone at NASA considers the "face" an annoyance...

Wouldn't it be fun if clouds were turtles? Wouldn't it be fun if the laundry on the bedroom chair was a friendly monster? Wouldn't it be fun if rock mesas on Mars were faces or interplanetary monuments? Clouds, though, are small water droplets, floating on air. Laundry is cotton, wool, or plastic, woven into garments. Famous Martian rock mesas known by names like the Face on Mars appear quite natural when seen more clearly, as the above recently released photo shows. Is reality boring?

They get a lot of publicity from the face, mostly from credulous simpletons who ascribe some sort of actual importance to it, and I bet this annoys them to no end- they're trying to attract everyone's attention to the actual science they're doing, and all they get asked about are the findings relevant to mysticism and pseudoscience.

Re:Liitle green snowmen (really!)

[deglr6328]

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.

NASA's PR budget is too big

[Animats]

Congress should cut NASA's PR budget. They have way too big a PR operation. It's hard to get a budget number, because NASA obfusicates that part of the budget, but the key phrase to look for in NASA budgets is "Communicate Knowledge Crosscutting Process". At least $77 million seems to go into what NASA calls "education", but is really the part of the PR operation aimed at schools. There's other PR (NASA TV, road shows, etc.) not in the education budget.

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.

An actual photo request

[mattr]

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).

Go to Mars to study Arizona

[immel]

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!

Olympus Mons

[blchrist]

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.