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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'm pretty sure that NASA knows of any interesting things on mars and will image them. The mail reading staff at NASA will probably interpret them, and submit to someone else what the people are responding the most with. This most definately would not make any decision - time on that thing is way too valuable.
"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."
- Burn them!
the other 97%
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I suggest they take pictures of the polar cap. If there are any little green men on Mars, I'm sure they've built some awesome snowmen and ice castles! :)
How about we get to Phobos and Deimos instead?
Maybe if they zoom the camera all the way in they'll be able to see a cyber demon lord or at least one of those buildings we got to walk through on doom.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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".
If mars had nude-beaches then this would be really popular and be in the real spirit of the internet.
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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
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 ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I would like to see some more research done on the Pyramids of Elysium that Carl Sagan wrote about.
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?
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.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
I mean, we already know about the Leather Goddesses of Phobos...
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.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
"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.
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...
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.
64 bytes from my_leet_box (123.134.156.178):
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Does something need to be adjusted, or is there a problem with the optical signal. Oh, wait a minute, I just got a response. What a crappy ping time!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It should be right on the opposite side of where the face is.
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?
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.
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).
Night side. Have the probe turned off. Then suddenly power it up and take a photo with a big flash. That should catch those Martians off gaurd.
A bit silly I know!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
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!
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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.
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.