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.

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.