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

How about...

[justrob]

the other 97%

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.

Re:Focus on impact craters

[uncoveror]

Maybe we shouldn't be snooping around at Mars. According to former NASA employee, and Mars expert Harvey Kurtz, The Martians really don't like it!
Read more,
and more,
and more
and more still!

Liitle green snowmen

[InsaneCreator]

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! :)

I know!

[Renraku]

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.

Aftermath

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Aftermath

[ralphclark]

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

If we could get sufficiently high res pix to see the pathfinder rover itself we'd probably see that it's up on bricks with the tyres missing and the radio's been stolen.

Publicity Stunt

[simon_aus]

If mars had nude-beaches then this would be really popular and be in the real spirit of the internet.

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."

Re:earth?

[pclminion]

They changed the brightness, contrast, and colors for each planet and moon independently.

What they actually did (if you manage to decipher they're somewhat unclear description of the colorization process), is to use the high-resolution grayscale images as indexes to match with lower resolution color photos they already had.

Basically, they reduced the 24-bit color down to 8-bit grayscale and sorted in order of intensity. They also sorted the grayscale images in order of intensity. Then they mapped the colors from one, in a 1-to-1 fashion, onto the other. Pretty straightforward really.

So the process of colorizing was so lossy and brought out so much noise ...

The process wasn't lossy or noisy, because pixels of identical color in the result image are also of identical color in the original. The colors themselves have changed, but the distinct identity of each color remains intact. Black just happened to map to a nonblack color, so they changed it back to black. This is no different than any other "false" colorization process used in any other area of science. In fact, it's really quite aesthetic since most false color images have highly saturated colors (bright red, blue, green, etc), not the less saturated, natural looking colors these images have.

Landing places?

[digital bath]

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.

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.

The general public decides? You and I?

[teamhasnoi]

Isn't that a good way to ensure we'll only have upskirt photos of hot green Martian women?

I mean, we already know about the Leather Goddesses of Phobos...

Re:A little offtopic, but

[Siergen]

As I understand it, the exposure times needed to see features on the sunlit side of a celestrial body are too short to see stars. It's like trying to see the stars at night right after you leave a brightly lit house - your eyes are still adjusted to full light, and you just can't see the dim light of the stars...

The Face and Pathfinder sites re-photographed

[tunabomber]

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.

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: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.

I'm having a conneciton problem. Please help.

[rock_climbing_guy]

PING MARS.surveyor (207.46.245.214) 56(84) bytes of data.
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!

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.

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).

How about

[Cackmobile]

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!!!