Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures

Guttata writes " space.com has posted 1 of 2 images taken by Hubble last night, dubbed the best Mars globe photo ever taken. The second image will be posted at 4 p.m. ET. Cool!" aderuwe points to a report on the Hubble site itself. Finally, dpp writes "Space.com is reporting how astronomers using the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) here at the Joint Astronomy Centre have made what are thought to be the sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date. They'll be studying the spectra of the infrared light to look for the signatures of minerals that would indicate the past presence of liquid water, which could have hosted life."

Comments

Are they smiling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any martians in the picture?

Re:Are they smiling?

[_randy_64]

No, but if you listen real carefully, you might hear a chorus of "We are here, we are here, we are here!" (Dr. Seuss)

Search for life in Europa instead

[Brahmastra]

Europa looks like a far better candidate for water and life than mars. We should start sending probes to land on Europa as soon as possible.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

Man, don't you pay attention?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Simon X.]

Right.

You're much more likely to encounter Europeans than Martians.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[CausticWindow]

That depends on if you're searching for intelligent life or not.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[azzy]

America looks like a lost cause, no chance to find intelligent life there. We should, as the parent suggests, concentrate on Europa.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[kinnell]

The trouble is that in order to search for life on Europa, you would need a submarine probe which can drill through several kilometers of ice. It would then have to send any data using a method other than radio, as radio waves don't propogate very well under water. No doubt a probe will be sent eventually (I believe there is one being planned), but it's technically a lot harder than sending probes to Mars.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[cK-Gunslinger]

Sound good, except for the fact that you're talking about huge orders of magnitude of differences in difficulty. Landing on Mars is like throwing a baseball at the house across the street, as opposed to throwing it to the next block over, bouncing off the north side of the house on the lot, and landing in the water dish in the dog house in the back yard. Slightly more difficult.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[assaultriflesforfree]

It might be easier to look for life on Europa than Mars, actually. I got to have lunch with Freeman Dyson a few months ago, and we talked about some of the work (which I hope I'm not misrepresenting) he's done with the JPL on the life on Europa problem. As I understood him, a big problem is the cost of sending something way out there that can land, drill down, and send back some useful data. His team eventually decided that, 1) Water's way below the surface; that's where the life's going to be, and 2) It's going to have to collect light on the surface, and even there, sunlight's a little scarce. They envisioned these sort of gigantic solar collectors, almost like satellite dishes, protruding up through the surface where they could collect light. A neat feature is that anything that collects light also reflects it when observed properly, a la a rabbit in headlights. His idea was to just send a little probe and have it lined up so that the Sun, the probe, and Europa are all in colinear positions. If, as it comes into position, some glaring is obsreved on the surface, it might mean there's a good chance of life. Anybody know more about this? Am I completely off in what I've said?

A close-up of Mars doesn't seem like it will provide the same insight, unfortunately.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[xyloplax]

I have never bought the idea of life on Europa being more likely. Water and volcanic activity does not equal conditions like on Earth. Life evolved on earth thanks to a rather thick atmosphere composed of water and carbon dioxide, with nitrogen and sulphur thrown in for fun. As the planet cooled, it rained, taking the carbon dioxide with it to the surface, where it reacted with the surface, forming organic compounds.

The water on Europa is under a thick layer of ice. The atomosphere is thin and composed completely of oxygen and would not reach the liquid water.

"But what about hydrothermal vents?" Well, a good candidtate for developing life on Earth, but all we have now are forms of life that have already evolved to fit in niches like vents and polar caps. We truly don't know what exact conditions develop life. Going from the first life forms to hydrothermal bacteria/diatoms/whathaveyou is a much smaller step than going from organic compounds to the first forms of life.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[4im]

[Life needs light]

Nice idea, but just not true, making this a bad idea (even if detailed pics from Europa sure would be welcome). Deep submarine life does exist around sources of heat (deep-sea volcanoes etc.) without light getting there - such life would be more probable on Europa than these fantastic lifeforms.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[rhadamanthus]

Nevermind the possibility that introducing a man-made probe into Europa's ecosystem (if it exists) may be the demise of said ecosystem.

---rhad

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends if there are such deep-sea sources of heat. Suppose Europa has cooled too far and its crust has settled too much for underwater volcanoes?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Zathrus]

Er... if I read what you wrote correctly, then Dyson was theorizing on some form of water life that can tunnel through a few kilometers of ice and extend a probiscus into near vacuum that would act as a solar collector.

While that sounds absurd, I won't dismiss it out of hand. Instead I'll dismiss it for other reasons. I find it unlikely that no such structure has been observed from any of the probes we've sent out (Voyager 1/2, Galileo). They may not have been in the optimal position for such an observance, but you'd still think something would show up. After all, there's no reason to be camoflauged on the surface, right? No predators there.

Second, I find it unlikely that any life on Europa will be garnering energy from the Sun. There's just not enough of it, and there's that several kilometers of ice issue. Too much energy expended to recover from sunlight. I'd think it more likely that there are some bacteria living near the rocky core off the magma/steam vents -- if there are any. I don't know if Europa is tectonically active or not. If it's not, then I'm going to vote for a dead world. I just don't see there being enough energy input to sustain life for a long period of time, especially given occasional disruptions like meteor impacts cracking the ice (which is probably fairly violent and deadly to any life near the crack).

Of course, I could be wrong and there could be some really amazing life forms there. It's worth investigating, but it's going to be hard to do. Not only do you have to surmount the environmental challenges a previous poster mentioned, you also have to be 100% positive you don't introduce a foreign life form - which could either give you a false positive or kill off what's there already (low likelihood -- I suspect Europa's environment is too hostile to Earth bred bacteria, but we've been surprised before).

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[assaultriflesforfree]

Interesting point. Some considerations that might be important are Europa's size. Being much smaller than Earth, it generates a lot less heat. As far as how that translates into vents on the floor of its oceans given all the other factors, I have no idea, but it's a question to be explored.

Also, and I don't know the answer to this either, but did the life that exists on Earth around those heat sources evolve separately from all life on Earth? Or did it require some building blocks of life to sift down through the ocean over the years?

I also wouldn't be too quick to dismiss them as improbable "fantastic lifeforms." Judging solely from the sheer number of lifeforms that prefer life near light as opposed to deep sea vents on Earth, and from the ivy that somehow found a way to grow straight through my roof in less than a year causing me about $1000 in roof, chimney, and water damage repair, it doesn't seem like it'd be too hard for life to develop in this way over eons on Europa. But I am not a biologist.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[zapp]

.... Is this a reference to something? I missed the joke...

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[assaultriflesforfree]

It's really beyond my understanding, and without some input from somebody who actually knows more intimately what Dyson was talking about, this might just be me talking out of my ass. Not taking sides or anything, there are just some assumptions I don't think are fair.

However, I do know that the position of the probe has to be VERY specific, as in directly in between the sun and Europa. Otherwise, you see nothing unusual... it doesn't matter how big a collector (unless it's leafy green or waving a big flag, which it won't be). He was very clear on that, and the reflection phenomenon can be readily observed with pretty much any light collector here on Earth.

Second, life on Earth moves pretty quickly for the most part. It doesn't have to. Think about cryogenics. You freeze somebody, and they're still alive, all that happens is all the chemical reactions in their body slow way down (a good rule of thumb is reaction rates halve for about every 10 degrees). So, life there would develop much more slowly... It'd be like watching the Earth in ultra slow motion. A question I don't know the answer to is whether or not the reactions of life processes are spontaneous at those low temperatures, and whether they would need to be, or whether the life existing primarily in warmer, liquid water below the surface could form what we might call non-living solar collectors.

The number I seem to remember is that sunlight on the surface of Europa is about 1/50th that on Earth. That's still a decent amount of light, it just requires very specialized equipment for collecting it. We power solar cars with about that much light given efficiencies of collectors, and lifeforms are much more efficient.

From what I can gather, the problem isn't so much with the possibility that life can exist in such a way. I think it's sound speculation. Still, it's a shot in the dark. Just as drilling way beneath the surface to look at possible vents is a shot in the dark. The difference is that shooting a little probe with a camera is much easier and cheaper than shooting one with a drill that can go several kilometers under the surface to find liquid water, then swim down that and collect some samples in a test tube. One could happen in the next 20 years, the other I doubt will happen in 50-100.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[pixelpusher220]

2010: Odyssey Two Arthur C. Clarke

perhaps you've heard of him?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[pixelpusher220]

Mod parent up...nobody ever seems to mention that little tidbit

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[assaultriflesforfree]

Also, I shouldn't attribute this all to Dyson. He was working on an interdisciplinary team of scientists. I don't think NASA called in just a physicist to tell them about life on Europa. He's pretty good at optics, making him pretty good at finding ways to look for something given its theoretical properties.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[confused one]

There's plenty of water on Mars. It's just not liquid. We aren't sure if Europa is solid or liquid under the surface; although, many believe it's liquid. That's assuming tidal heating due to living in Jupiter's gravity well.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Russ Steffen]

Being much smaller than Earth, it generates a lot less heat.

Europa is in a constant state of being squished and stretched by the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity. Because of that, Europa's size has little bearing on how much internal heat it generates.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. They're afraid of fscking things up at Lake Vostok. I don't see how we can do this on Europa without catastrophic effects.

Enjoy your insightful points. :)

Your moderator.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[penultimatepost]

This clolonialism thing has gone too far!!! now you are proposing invading Europe, Will the madness ever end?! ;)

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

This theory is cute, but just an example of sci-fi fantasy. Early life on Earth supposedly got the energy it needed from thermal vents on the ocean floor. It's a more likely place because it provides all the necessary nutrients and basics that life needs to develop. The odds of something being successful with a giant solar umbrella is small. Not to mention the fact that voyager gave us some pretty decent images of Europa. If something like that was at all common, it would probably have been visible at that time. It's like coming to Earth and assuming that it would be easiest for life to exist in giant hot-air balloons floating in the upper atmosphere with tendrils of solar collectors that hang out in the jetstream and beam energy to the surface in sandwich form.

With Europa there's a gas giant and a bunch of other moons near by. It should have plenty of tectonic activity. After all this time, you might have larger organisms swimming around, but considering the lack of incentive for life to thrive near the surface, I'd be highly surprised if this grandiose scheme would be in place. Life doesn't design, it accidentally happens. Consider also that radiation actually penetrates our atmosphere pretty well, allowing mutation on a fairly frequent basis. I'm not sure, but I doubt radiation penetrates miles of ice very well. This might not be a consideration. I'm just mentioning it for the sake of completness.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[PD]

You young kids are so cute when you say things like that!

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Blerk? Flah? Huh? Wha? A "slashdotter" who didn't get that reference? BURN HIM!

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[bill_mcgonigle]

Nevermind the possibility that introducing a man-made probe into Europa's ecosystem (if it exists) may be the demise of said ecosystem.

Are we talking about bacteria that might survive the interstellar trip and all its radiation or gear lube? The former seems like a very low risk and the latter would be addressed by dilution.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[BaronAaron]

"Also, and I don't know the answer to this either, but did the life that exists on Earth around those heat sources evolve separately from all life on Earth? Or did it require some building blocks of life to sift down through the ocean over the years?"

Actually many people think that the origins of life started near deep ocean thermal vents. The bottom of the ocean was a far safer place to hang out during Earth's early years. Comet and astroiod impacts have very little influence on an ecosystem dependant on thermal vents 5 miles below water.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[bgarcia]

A neat feature is that anything that collects light also reflects it when observed properly, a la a rabbit in headlights.

So that's what those rabbits are doing in my garden - collecting & reflecting light!

I thought they were just eating the asparagus.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomically unlikely. The probe itself is not a danger to an ecosystem. The probe will be decontaminated before it leaves earth, and decontaminated on the way by radiation from the sun. Not to mention the fact that an introduced organism from a radically different environment has next to no chance to survive on Europa to begin with.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

This raises an important and closely connected question. Namely, do rabbits get asparagus pee?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

A man was inspecting the ground around a dim street lamp.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

"My house keys."

"You lost them right here?"

"No, I probably lost them across the street. That is where I had been walking."

"Why don't you look for them there?"

"It's too dark."

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anybody could get a reference from 2001 or 2010 as both of those movies were ridiculously stupid and senseless.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the plot from the "Breaking Strain" novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Paul Preuss.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[eggz128]

Try the books then.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Movies? Try the books. The first book, 2001, was written at the same time as the movie. In fact, they were created simultaneously, differing in a few things (such as the main planet - Jupiter vs Saturn). The book of 2010 was written many years before the movie, and is significantly different than the movie in many respects. Following that was 2061, which was pretty good, and 3001, which seemed to be more of an epilogue to the series than anything else. For anyone who does enjoy true science fiction, with some major emphasis on the 'science' aspect, these books are must-reads.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you fail to mention some of the most obvious wars america was involved in? Vietnam, Iraq (where are the wmd?), Gulf war , Korea.... Oh yeah and in what year did segregation end in the USA?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[TwistedGreen]

...Dyson was theorizing on some form of water life that can tunnel through a few kilometers of ice and extend a probiscus into near vacuum that would act as a solar collector.

Hmm, this sounds strangely familiar...

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Corgha]

Are we talking about bacteria that might survive the interstellar trip and all its radiation [...] he former seems like a very low risk

First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.

Second, we already have an example of bacteria surviving on a space probe. Some Streptococcus mitis survived Surveyor 3's trip from the Earth to the Moon and the two and a half years of exposure to vacuum, temperature extremes, and radiation between when it landed in April, 1967 and when the Apollo 12 astronauts took some parts of Surveyor 3 back home in November, 1969.

Given our very small sample size of spacecraft returned for analysis and the fact that one showed surviving bacteria, I don't think one can qualify the risk of bacterial survival as "very low." When dealing with a situation in which a single bacterial spore could compromise the ecosystem of an entire moon, it pays to be cautious.

Never underestimate the bacterium -- it's been through more shit than you can imagine ;)

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

come-on now. has everyone missed this except for me? there is already blunt evidence of liquid water on Mars--the polar ice caps!!!

so how is this evidence of *liquid* water you ask? well, ask yourself how did the ice congregate in the poles in the first place? liquid water must have been covering part of Mars, evaporated, and then deposited in the ice caps as snow.

hasn't anyone else proposed this idea before???

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

To an idiot. Go back to prime time television. Sounds more your speed.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[golgotha007]

google returns 206 relevant matches.

always remember, google is your friend.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[kinnell]

Nevermind the possibility that introducing a man-made probe into Europa's ecosystem (if it exists) may be the demise of said ecosystem

No wonder they can't find any life on Mars :O)

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[0111 1110]

You freeze somebody, and they're still alive, all that happens is all the chemical reactions in their body slow way down (a good rule of thumb is reaction rates halve for about every 10 degrees).

If the liquid in the animal's body freezes, it expands due to that unfortunate (in this context) and unique property of water. I believe that some or all of the cell walls are ruptured when that happens. Some animals have a kind of antifreeze in their blood which merely lowers the temperature at which this happens.

I don't understand why Dyson would believe some kind of "solar collector" would be necessary. As someone has mentioned, the primary energy source on Europa would be the huge tidal forces from being right next to a (jovian) "planet" nearly big enough to be a star, big enough to make our planet look like a miniscule little dot in comparison.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thanks for the data - good stuff.

First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.

Right, more radiation, no?

Something else to note is that this bacteria survived inside some foam inside a metal? camera casing. Nothing living was found on the outside of the gear - so if applied to Europa, as long as the vessel is very well sealed, it might be OK.

Realistically, though, whatever we try to put down there might just implode on the first trip out. :)

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[SeanAhern]

anything that collects light also reflects it when observed properly

Really?

Not to say that there are black holes on Europa, but that all light collectors are not necessarily great reflectors. I'm imagining a surface akin to black felt. If designed properly, a material made of lots of very small surfaces (like felt) will never specularly reflect light in any preferential direction. This would make it very difficult to observe directly.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[Anonymous Coward]

go back where you came from tree hugger!

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[fucksl4shd0t]

Europa is in a constant state of being squished and stretched by the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity. Because of that, Europa's size has little bearing on how much internal heat it generates.

And here I thought the reason Denmark was warm was because of the jet stream. Silly me.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[fucksl4shd0t]

I thought they were just eating the asparagus.

You grow asparagus? Do you actually eat it? Are you bipolar or something?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

[ShadowRage]

I'm sorry dave.. I'm afraid I cant do that. *lands on europa*

post processing?

[MarcoAtWork]

in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...

Re:post processing?

[metallikop]

Fire up Photoshop, Filter / Sharpen, repeat as necessary.

Re:post processing?

[HarveyBirdman]

Many amateur astronomers now use CCD or other digital cameras to captured dozens (if not hundreds) of images in sequence, and use "image stacking" programs to combine many images into one.

There are some very good examples online if you search. The image stacking seems to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence. The effects of the air are always changing and so they tend to average out whereas your target (Mars in this case) will remain constant.

Here is a site that explains image stacking.

I think they even do this with Hubble imagery.

Another finishing trick is to snap some dark frames and subtract that out of the final image to remove effects of the image sensor itself.

Re:post processing?

[frission]

have you ever seen Super Troopers? It's easy:
"Enhance...Enhance..."

Re:post processing?

[Effugas]

Marco--

I know a bit about this. Basically, the idea is to correlate and overlap information from several individual exposures, while "dewarping" the variations caused by the target rotating during the scan. David Hilvert has written an open source tool that implements some basic methods for doing this kind of work; it's called ALE. Google for "Superresolution" for further information; everything that goes from the temporal domain to the spatial domain ends up using techniques like this.

--Dan

Re:post processing?

[bigberk]

To better see the specific surface features, run the entire image through a simple Laplacian or scaled Laplacian, which is a frequency domain digital filter. That's just the start of it.

I highly recommend "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods, ISBN 0201180758. Expensive, but gold.

Re:post processing?

[Plutor]

Yesterday's APOD was exactly this kind of image using the same kind of technique.

Re:post processing?

[Liem Bahneman]

I use Registax for this. It does stacking, aligning and wavelet processing. The best out there at the moment. A few years back AstroStack was king. There are a bunch of others as well...

I took >A HREF="http://wastelands-observatory.factspot.com/p rocessed/08262003/">some pictures of Mars last night with my 8" SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain) and a $30 Vesta Pro web camera and the results aren't too bad. Each image is comprised of 200 stacked images. The seeing wasn't very good as the air was dry and the temperature differential was high between night and day...

But it is impressive what details a $30 camera and a 25 year old telescope can glean from Mars.

Re:post processing?

[Liem Bahneman]

Lets try that url again.

Re:post processing?

[scotch]

Straight up image stacking or averaging does not remove the effects of atmospheric turbulence. HTH.

Re:post processing?

[akruppa]

in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...

For simplicity, let's first look at a case where the entire image moves at a constant speed during the exposure. Each point in the ideal image becomes a short line in the observed image, all the lines are then superpositioned. Mathematically this is a convolution where the short line that a point turns into is the convolution kernel. Nice thing about convolutions is that you can do them in Fourier space by pointwise multiplication of the Fourier transform elements of the image and of the kernel - and conversely, you can undo it by pointwise division, called deconvolution.

Unfortunately this process is VERY sensitive to noise in the observed image, this naive approach of deconvolution usually leaves you with nothing more than an image of pure noise. There are filters that take this noise amplification effect into account to do the deconvolution as accruately as possible while keeping noise down. The most popular is the Wiener filter.

In the case of the spinning Mars, things are a little more complicated yet as the convolution kernel is not constant over the entire image - near the poles, the linear velocity of Mars' surface is smaller than near the equator, therefore the lines that points on Mars' surface become on the observed image will have different lengths. With a spatially dependent kernel you can't do the deconvolution in Fourier space anymore, but there are other deconvolution methods to handle such a case. These are, however, more computationally expensive than division in Fourier space.

Alex

Re:post processing?

[MarcoAtWork]

yeah, but a CCD doesn't have an infinite sensitivity, if enough 'lines' superposition you're just going to end up with a saturated pixel and there's no way you could get back the original information that was lost... I guess that given that every exposure was only about 5 minutes the planet didn't move -THAT- much to make this calculation impossible.

To the other posters: I know about stacking, but all the stacking in the world won't be able to undo the effects of a moving target...

Re:post processing?

[hesiod]

> David Hilvert has written an open source tool that implements some basic methods for doing this kind of work; it's called ALE. Google for "Superresolution"

Mod parent to 5, this is extremely informative, and really cool to boot.

Re:post processing?

[hesiod]

> But it is impressive what details a $30 camera and a 25 year old telescope can glean from Mars.

You ain't kidding! That's amazing; thanks for the link!

Re:post processing?

[hesiod]

> The most popular is the Wiener filter.

There's a Far Side joke in there somewhere...

Re:post processing?

[mph]

Straight up image stacking or averaging does not remove the effects of atmospheric turbulence. HTH.

It can, if the individual exposures are short enough (something like 0.1 seconds each). On those timescales, seeing (turbulence) causes an image to jump around. You can shift them all back into alignment before stacking them.

As you expose longer, you add up light from your star as it's "jumped around" to lots of positions. The result is a smeared-out image; adding multiple exposures will not help at this point, as you said.

A technique called "speckle interferometry" was used at Keck to take advantage of short exposures to get around seeing. Also, the first order adaptive optics correction, "tip-tilt," simply compensates for the image jumping around on these timescales.

Another way that multiple short exposures helps is that seeing is variable; some instants it will be good, then a second later it's poor. So you can take a couple of hundred 0.1 second images, take the 20 with the best seeing, and then just use those in your final, combined image (after shifting them to be properly aligned). With longer exposures, you'll average over both good and bad seeing, and they'll all look nearly the same, so this technique won't work.

Re:post processing?

[scotch]

Yeah, I know all about speckle interferometry, which is why I carefully chose the words "straight-up image stacking or averaging". The original poster didn't indicate that any transforms were done on the short exposure images, other than perhaps first order moving, which,as you say, givey you some very rough image improvements *if* you don't have some image stabilization in you system in the first place. I could be wrong, perhaps the original poster's description of this software was too coarse.

Re:post processing?

[hubie]

You are also assuming that your imaging aperture is smaller than the isoplanatic patch for your area; otherwise you'd need to add your own adaptive optics system to your telesope before you could rack and stack your images. The Keck adaptive optics aren't just for keeping the image from jumping around; they are for correcting the turbulence effects across the aperture (meaning that without the AO system it isn't that the whole image jumps around, but different parts of the image jump around in different directions---if your telescope aperture is small enough, then your whole image jumps around).

I don't know if I have the number correct, but I believe that for typical backyard viewing the Fried parameter is something like 6" to 8", so if you have a telescope aperture bigger than that then your pictures wouldn't differ in just tip and tilt.

Something is closer...

[azzy]

... and so we can see it better.

Wow

best Mars photo ever?

[xv4n]

images taken by Hubble last night, dubbed the best Mars globe photo ever taken...

...from earth orbit, indeed.

Re:best Mars photo ever?

[Reckless Visionary]

Actually, from anywhere man-made cameras have taken a "Mars globe photo". As the article explains, Mars orbiters can take only pictures of strips of the surface, each at the same time of day. Those strips are reconstructed to simulate a globe picture, but do not show the range of night-time to daytime that a full globe shot, like this one, does.

Those pictures...

[ArmenTanzarian]

are quite underwhelming, don't they use this thing to look at black holes burping? You'd think posting a sweet close-up would help their funding a little.

Re:Those pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need a sweet close-up, if they wanted that, they would use the Mars Global Surveyor. What they want is a good resolution picture of the entire planet. The Surveyor can take pictures of strips of land, and they piece them together later. But they don't take into account the different times of day. This sort of picture shows you the morning terminators, evening limbs, etc. It provides a better picture of Mars as a planet.

Nice close-up for wallpaper

[Chuck Bucket]

If you want a great Mars pic from last night for your wallpaper (suitable for 1024x or 1280x) today, get it here:

wget http://hubblesite.org/db/2003/22/images/a/formats/ full_jpg.jpg

It's pretty slow loading, but wget will get it for ya.

CB

Re:Nice close-up for wallpaper

[Anonymous Coward]

I can find better "close-ups" for wallpaper.

Re:Nice close-up for wallpaper

[bigberk]

Better yet, see NASA's site for the pictures

space.com is not very well informed

[BobTheLawyer]

"Recent studies have hinted at liquid water on the dusty planet."

presumably those studies aren't quite as recent as the one last week which found that Mars isn't watery now, and wasn't in the past:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3173167.stm

Re:space.com is not very well informed

[Diabolical]

Could be of course that they do not adhere the same conclusion. Speculative science can not produce a conclusion on a subject. And this is speculative science at best.

Re:space.com is not very well informed

[BobTheLawyer]

but the article didn't give the impression there was a controversy at all: either the author hadn't read the infrared spectrometer stuff from last week or (worse) he reported one side of an argument and hid the other.

Re:space.com is not very well informed

[EmbeddedJanitor]

one last week which found that Mars isn't watery now

... but that was last week. Things change you know.

That's why even though various probes over the last few years found nothing it is important to keep watch!

Those bastard Neaderthals didn't write down what they saw (or forgot where they put their notebooks). Now we can all look at Mars with our telescopes and do our bit.

Re:space.com is not very well informed

[smeenz]

"liquid water on a dusty planet" ?

I guess it just doesn't sound as good if you say that they think they've found some mud.

dammit

[jwjcmw]

I like this caption better.

Re:dammit

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing you went from -1 flamebait to +5 funny with the careful addition of a ""

XXX!

[Anonymous Coward]

One chance in a lifetime! See close up XXX pics of Mars's tight, open gorge and giant mounds! This won't happen again so don't miss out!

Adultcheck Gold required.

Re:XXX!

[zrk]

Too bad there's only one Olympus Mons...

See The Blue Atmosphere?

[tds67]

Around the edge of Mars you can see a blue tinge...is the atmosphere there more like Earth's than we've been led to believe? Or does any combination of gases produce blue (no Taco Bell jokes, please)?

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[stratjakt]

I believe that lower frequency light (reds) refract at a greater degree than high frequencies(blues), so it may be true that most combinations of gases wind up throwing the red away and keeping the blue.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Jedi Holocron]

Depends on who you believe.

You might like to look here www.enterprisemission.com and here http://www.mufor.org .

There is a lot of talk that the first Viking photos showed a blue horizon from surface side. This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know.

Just my 2 cents. Enjoy.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Jedi Holocron]

Opps...

I actually should have sent you to The Color of Mars bit on this site.

Thanks.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[tds67]

There is a lot of talk that the first Viking photos showed a blue horizon from surface side. This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know.

Yes. A blue sky would capture the public's imagination and NASA would be under tremendous pressure to send human beings there. This could be a problem if there are artifacts there from a previous civilization (maybe us?), as we would know that we are not alone in the universe. It could be upsetting to our society, especially organized religion.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Stuart Gibson]

A blue sky on Mars? That's a new one.

Goblin

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[barakn]

This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know. Backwards, my friend. They thought it was going to be a blue sky, so the color in the first pictures was tweaked to make the sky look look blue. It really is pink, looking from the surface. This is due to scattering from dust, which we may assume is limited to the lower atmosphere. The air molecules in the upper atmosphere can still scatter light, and short wavelength light (blue) gets scattered best (by gases). If you look well above the limb of Mars itself you'll be seeing the light scattered by the upper atmosphere imposed on the blackness of space.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Paulrothrock]

Is it me or does Mars look suspiciously like Arizona...

CONSPIRACY!!!

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Razor Blades are Not]

This is from the same people who bring you the secret connection between Star Wars Episode I and Mars.

don't forget those strange anomalies like animals on the pathfinder mission.

yeah. ok.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[barakn]

From the linked article:

our earth viewed from Mars, would appear clearly blue, due to the 70% water coverage in connection with refraction of light in the atmosphere. With a reverse relation of the water land distribution however, rather a brown-green planet would be to be seen from space. The color of the atmosphere, caused by Rayleigh Scattering[4] at gas molecules, determines thus only in very small amount the color of a planet as seen from space and also directly on the surface! Bullshit. I live hundreds of km's from the nearest ocean and the scale height of the atmosphere above my head is only 8 km. It appears blue, not from refraction of light from an ocean hundreds of miles away, but from Rayleigh scattering. Oddly enough, when the nearby forest fires start adding particulates to the air, the sky appears on the pink side of gray.

the white ground frost (water ice!) supplies a natural color calibration to the white alignment. Shine a flashlight with a red filter on a snowbank. Does it appear to be white? No.

Astronomers at the Hubble Spacetelescope and amateur-astronomers[8] are observing, since long time now, white water-clouds and blueish atmosphere. How it appears from above the atmosphere does tell you how it would appear from the ground.

Am I claiming the Martian sky is never blue? No. But it woud have been silly and pointless for NASA to mess with the data in a misleading manner.

Re:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[15001500]

Check out "Pale Blue Dot" By Carl Sagan. There is an interesting passage regarding the orignal landings on Mars. It states that the original photos sent back were auto-corrected to have a blue sky. Later, the NASA folks realized the error and determined a more pinkish hue as the true color of the Martian sky as viewed from the surface.

Re:didn't you hear?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, the reason Futurama gave was that they had gotten tired of all the stupid jokes. Such as the one early on in Angst Technology where Dante had named the servers after the planets of the solar system: "I think Uranus is unstable"....... What a lame excuse for writing that lame joke, isn't it?

So...

[caveat]

...whats the focal length on that lens? seems just a little longer than my 300. :P

Re:So...

[snake_dad]

57.6 meters

Oh My God!!!

[Eric Savage]

"proximity to the red planet not equaled in 59,619 years." and "Not until 2287 will the two worlds be so close again."

So it too 59,619 years to get this close, and it will be as close in 284 years, meaning Mars will crash into the Earth in 285.35 years!!! We're doomed!

Have we become obsessive?

[NaugaHunter]

Science fiction has apparently driven us to obsession over whether or not Mars had life. While it may be interesting in a historical sense, can't we just move on for now? While the search for water is important, as it could influence the ease of colonization, can't we wait until we're there until we look for life?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to know. And if it's just a matter of looking at data we're getting anyway I'm not against it. It just seems sometimes that it sounds obsessive, especially once the press gets ahold of the stories. It would seem more useful to analyze weather currents, mineral deposits, and other such issues to find good places to land/build, and if there are any local metal deposits and the like.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[cK-Gunslinger]

Rest assured, all these and more experiments/observations will be performed if/when we get a decent probe on Mars. The problem is hype. We, as a society, need and want hype. If NASA declared, "We're spending $5B on a probe to examine wind speed on Mars," the general public probably isn't going to rally behind them with anything even remotely resembling enthusiam. They need a little "potential alien life" hype to justify themselves once in a while. Meanwhile, those "in the know" will understand the true value of such research.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[vidnet]

If there is life on Mars, what rights do we have to colonize it?

Actually, I'd like to get people on Mars first too. We'd probably find life sooner with people there, even if colonizing takes a while. Just make very, very sure the planet isn't contaminated in the process.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[lobsterGun]

Do dogs have rights? What about plants, to they have rights? Do bacteria? Do viriuses? Why should we extend rights to martian life that we don't extend to life forms on our own planet?

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[NaugaHunter]

If there was life on Mars before but died out, it's mostly useful to know only in the sense that it might provide further insights to how life originated here, and gives a heck of a boost to the concept that there might be life elsewhere in the Universe.

If there is any life past the, let us say for the sake of arguement, ameoba stage*, then it is only of effective consequence if it is somehow threatening. Yes, it will be important to keep an area 'untainted' to research how it developed and survives, but I don't think we'd need a Prime Directive or anything. I would not agree with leaving whole tracts of the planet alone on the off chance microbes* or whatever may someday evolve to be Martians. I imagine at least one hoped-for scenario would be that a human breathable atmosphere is possible, and that would probably use plants/trees. This would require a whole ecosystem that would by definition replace whatever is already there if it can't adapt.

If there is any well developed life that we haven't seen yet that hasn't objected to our probes/robots, then either it's in an inconceivable form or, if intelligent, it will deal with us when it wants to. I think we've been able to get readings of the crust to know if there is underground life, but I may be mistaken. So either it's in a form we don't recognize, or it's hiding very well.

*[I apologize for mixing ameoba's and microbes like this. It's been a while since Biology so I don't know what is currently regarded as the smallest possible unit of life, but hopefully my point will survive any mistakes.]

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[Omestes]

Science fiction as a genre decideded that mars had life because of early science. The whole E.R. Burroughs thing got started because of the astronomer Lowell pointing out the 'canals'. While the popular obsession came from sci-fi, the general idea is older. Most of this speculation exists because mars has obvious geological features caused by some form of liquid erosion.

Finding out that Mars has life is more important than than some silly historical obsession, or utilitarian colonization scheme. Finding that there is life there would increase our understanding of how WE got HERE, especially if said life has genetic matches to that on earth, meaning that there is a possible common ancestor. There also is a psychological effect of discovering life, we are then no longer alone on our cosmic dirt ball, even if we KNOW that we share the universe with single-celled mars bacteria.

Also we might have to revise our view on how unique we are in the scheme of thing, esecially if this hypothetical life is genetically unique from us, life must be more common than some say. This could also lead to some interesting theological issues.

And if we find life, your colonization idea would start to have some serious ethical issues. Is it right to destroy/exploit another planet, like we destroy/exploit our own? Even if we are only displacing so archeon bacteria thingies, do we have the right to do that? Also on the more utilitarian side of colonization, would said life be harmful to human life?

So the question of maritan life is a little more important than some silly bunch of sci-fi nerds thinking it is a neat idea. It actually would be one of the most important things that humanity has ever discovered, if not THE most important.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[rev063]

Discovering extraterrestrial life would be one of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries, ever.

And I'm not talking about little green men, either. Even just the discovery of the tiniest microbe or virus has the potential of completely changing the way we think about biology. Right now, we have a sample size of 1 for fundamental variety in life -- all organisms on Earth are based around the same principle of DNA. But is that the only way life can emerge? We know for example that a mirror-image of all the molecules in DNA could produce life identical, but fundamentally incompatible with ours. Why hasn't this happened? Maybe it has on Mars. Maybe it's something more exotic -- perhaps not as extreme as silicon-based life, but even a different library of base-pairs would change our thinking dramatically, and could have huge impact on our understanding of our own biochemistry.

So no, I don't think this counts as being obsessive.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[gobbo]

We'd probably find life sooner with people there, even if colonizing takes a while. Just make very, very sure the planet isn't contaminated in the process.

We are mobile bags of microbes in solution. Contamination would be inevitable with people jumping around over there [insert jurassic park reference here].

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[17028]

Seeing as humans have had little trouble killing and/or displacing other humans in the process of colonizing, I have serious doubts that a bacteria is going to be afforded any courtesy.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[Fear the Clam]

If there was life on Mars before but died out, it's mostly useful to know only in the sense that it might provide further insights to how life originated here, and gives a heck of a boost to the concept that there might be life elsewhere in the Universe. ...and basically to piss off the fundamentalist Christians.

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, my dog always thinks he's right. Does that count?

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[vidnet]

What if they, for example, wore air tight space suits?

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[vidnet]

You don't put your feet on the table in other peoples' homes, do you?

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[vidnet]

...and basically to piss off the fundamentalist Christians.

Amen to that!

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[vidnet]

I doubt there is intelligent life on Mars before we colonize it (though you never know what kind of rock-rubbing they could be doing). I just wouldn't start terraforming until I had analyzed sufficient samples from high and low, near and far.

Anyways, I'm sure they wouldn't mind roommates, even if they were intelligent. Would we?

Re:Have we become obsessive?

[gobbo]

"What if they, for example, wore air tight space suits?"

That should work--for awhile. But consider all the other factors: those suits will have to go in and out of the shelter, as well as scientific instruments and other goodies; waste matter of various kinds; venting from the shelter (assuming emergency protocols for clearing out airborne toxins), etc. Obviously any attempt to avoid contamination would have to include some heavy-duty sterilization protocols, but [insert jurassic park reference about "nature will find a way" here]. Don't forget that bacteria survived for a few years in equipment left on the moon: Pete Conrad (Apollo 12) - "The thing that had the bacteria in it was the television camera. The Styrofoam in between the inner and outer shells. There's a report on that. I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it."

So, finding life on Mars would seriously complicate setting up camp there, and probably require extensive robotic and remote exploration first.

Exploitable mineral content

[Yanray]

Exploitable mineral content

I want to find some Rare Earth Elements and excessive mineral/gem deposits. Showing pictures of a 300-carat diamond sitting on the surface of Mars will get us their a lot faster then looking for trace amounts of water.

Yes I understand that it is necessary to sustain life on Mars but your average investor/citizen of such an endeavor couldn't give a rats ass.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[Abcd1234]

And this would be why trusting science to corporate interests is a *bad* thing. Because they're obsessed with the profit motive, they'll never do work which doesn't have obvious immediate benefit. Hell, with this attitude, we might as well just scrap the entire space program... there's no diamonds in orbit, last I checked.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[blchrist]

Showing pictures of a 300-carat diamond sitting on the surface of Mars will get us their a lot faster then looking for trace amounts of water

Not if De Beers has anything to say about it!

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[confused one]

I predict that the first time someone can prove there's ktons of gold ore (or the like) in one of those asteriods, industry will become very interested

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[Paulrothrock]

Without cheap access to and from space there would be no way to profitably colonize Mars. And the fact that all of the easily accessible mineral deposits on Mars haven't been exploited by thousands of years of mining is also advantageous. In addition, the environment on Mars permits high-quality carbonyl manufacturing, meaning that the first exports from Mars might be high-quality manufactured goods.

But diamonds aren't enough to get people to go.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[toddestan]

I've heard that if all the gold in Fort Knox was sitting on the moon, free for the taking, it would still not be profitable to go up there and get it.

I doubt Mars would be any different.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[targo]

Exploitable mineral content

Unfortunately this would not help either. There are significant proven mineral reserves under the ice of Antarctica but no one seems to be very interested in mining it because of cost issues. With Mars the cost would be several orders of magnitude higher, so don't have any hopes about that.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

[Yanray]

Ya, but if we were mining asteroids, mars, or the moon the price would drop to were removing it from Fort Knox would not be profitable.

sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[stratjakt]

I'm not surprised considering it's the closest mars has been in 60,000 years.

Why all the mars fascination among astronomers? I find that theres much more interesting stuff in the solar system. And no, I'm not making a Uranus crack. (Uranus crack heh ok I guess I am).

But Venus, Jupiter, near earth asteroids, all this stuff seems so much more interesting than some dumb old red rock.

Venus is close, and I bet that place is super crazy insane. Would it even be feasible to send probes to Venus, or is it just too hot?

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[bgp4]

For those of you that can see Mars from the ground, that is. For many of the readers, the stars are something you only see when you leave the lights of the city behind. And anything that lives near the horizon.. well, some of us have forgotten what a "horizon" is, or think it means the building next to yours.

I really want to get a telescope for my kid, but until I move away from the lights of the city I'm near, it's pointless. We can spy on our neighbors (at pornographic magnification) but we can't see much at all when we look up.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[stratjakt]

Actually there was a big storm here last night that knocked the power out at my home from about 5PM till 2AM. So I had a great chance to crack out the telescope.

Great thing was it blew over quickly and the sky was relatively clear by 10 or so.

And all the same, mars is just a goofy red rock. It gets old fast. I want to see the CrAzY KoOkOoO NuTtY planets, like Venus or Jupiter or Saturn.

Venus seems much more like Earth, just a lot hotter. It's like Earth in a microwave. Thats some cool cosmological shit right there.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[HarveyBirdman]

I think it's more a fascination amongst the public, and the astronomers are feeding it. Mars is interesting because it's another place on which we could potentially walk around. You couldn't exactly go traipsing around in a polo shirt and Levis shorts, but you know what I mean. Carl Sagan put it best when he said, after the Viking landings, Mars would now always be "a place" as opposed to some abstract idea.

And they have sent probes to Venus. There's even some ground based images from a Russain lander, but they don't show very much. The surface has been fairly well mapped by radar bearing probes from the US.

href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/ surface_venus.html">The surface of venus.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[bgp4]

5pm, eh? you must live in the metro DC area? south and or east just a bit...

At least, at 5p last night that's where the center of the big storm in the area was :)

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[HarveyBirdman]

Generally true for stars and other deep space objects, but you can observe Mars from the middle of a brightly lit mall parking lot.

Heck, I once located a crescent Venus in the middle of the afternoon when it was at its peak in brightness. It was odd seeing a crescent (through a telescope, of course) floating in blue sky that wasn't the moon.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[RealErmine]

Would it even be feasible to send probes to Venus, or is it just too hot?

Yeah, according to Roman mythology, Venus was pretty hot.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[cje]

The reason that there's not much interest in Venus is that the atmospheric pressure is 100 times greater than it is here on Earth, the temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and it rains sulfuric acid. Not the most hospitable environment for exploration, at least on the surface, although the surface has been mapped using radar (which is really the only way you can do it, given the planet's perpetual thick cloud cover.)

That aside, the Soviets actually were able to put several landers on the surface of Venus in the 1970s and early 1980s (check out HarveyBirdman's link.) None of them were able to operate for very long in such extreme conditions, of course, but most of them returned valuable scientific data and some of them even returned surface photographs.

There's far more interest in Mars because that planet would be explorable and perhaps habitable by humans, given the proper facilities. A day on Mars is roughly the same as a day on Earth (24.5 hours or so) so there would not be major adjustments needed to things like the human sleep cycle. Compare that to Venus, where the length of the day (243 Earth days) is longer than the length of an entire year (225 Earth days!)

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats wrong with mars capturing our psyche?

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[confused one]

surface temperatures on Venus exceed melting temp of lead... It's not easy to build electronic devices that can survive on the surface when all the solder, gold interconnects, etc. melts.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[Cro Magnon]

Good point about Mars being a place you could walk around. Like the moon, you'd need spacesuits, but even WITH spacesuits I don't think we could handle the conditions on Venus or Mercury, and the outer planets are just giant balls of gas (insert Uranus joke here).

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[Mr Slushy]

I really want to get a telescope for my kid, but until I move away from the lights of the city I'm near, it's pointless....


Go ahead and get a telescope. Learn how to use it. Go spend time with your kid. You will be surprised how much is visible from the middle of the city even in a small scope.

I started with a pair of 6X30 binoculars from my apartment balcony in the middle of San Jose, CA. I eventually moved up to an 8 inch Celestron.

I now live in the country with thousands of visible stars instead of forty or fifty, but my most memorable nights were on that balcony in San Jose. It was a great thrill to track down a 10th or 11th magnitude galaxy when it seemed that there were only 3 stars visible in the sky.

Last night I stayed up with my two kids to look at mars with my 20 year old telescope. I certainly don't regret buying a telescope back when I lived in the middle of a sea of light pollution.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[tsorichta]

Here's a working link: The surface of Venus.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[snake_dad]

Would it even be feasible to send probes to Venus, or is it just too hot?

Several probes have been sent to Venus by the Russians. At least one lander managed to stay operating long enough to send back a lot of data from the surface.

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

[smeenz]

Venus is damn hot, and by that I mean hot enough to melt just about anything you send there to take holiday snaps.

I believe the last Russian probe that went there landed on the surface and took lots of lovely black photos because the lens cap had melted to the camera .

Life

[MagPulse]

Finding Martians is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some bacteria living underground on Mars? What would that mean? That life doesn't require Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.

I'm far more interested in either colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.

Re:Life

[cK-Gunslinger]

Why yes, that is true, O' Master of the Obvious. Conversing with aliens light years away and then building a interstellar ship and traveling there to meet them probably would garner more public attention than finding some microscopic bacteria fossils on Mars. Nice observation.

Re:Life

[danila]

Visiting nearby stars is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some habitable planets in other star systems? What would that mean? That we can colonize world other than Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.

I'm far more interested in either travelling to Andromeda Galaxy or visiting another dimensions after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.

Re:Life

[MagPulse]

Finding bacterial life on Mars doesn't allow us to do anything new. It will likely be very boring bacteria. Moving our species on to other planets and making contact with intelligent civilizations will bring us a huge step closer to populating the galaxy/universe and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress (and maybe wars, plagues, etc) if we can borrow from other peoples.

That, and visiting other galaxies and dimensions is clearly out of our means for the time being while colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars isn't.

Re:Life

[Red Weasel]

And of course if we we do make contact with an intellegent species we would then need to share with them the truth of Jesus.

Re:Life

[danila]

and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress

You see, that's exactly the catch. We haven't yet encountered those advanced alien civilizations and it might be that we will never ever find them. So for the time being we have no conceivable way to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and need to proceed gradually and step by step. That's why we needed Moon landing, that's why we needed Fon Braun's rockets, that's why we need to travel to Mars. And since we cannot be sure which attempts will be fruitful and which will not, we need to try everything and diversify. Personally I think that at present almsot all space exploration is waste of time and resources, because in my opinion nanotech and AI are much more important, since they might actually allow us to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and jump straight to intergalactic travel. But I am not so sure as to insist that we stop our space programs, because I may be wrong and space might be important even in short term.

Re:Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, plus it will be especially nice to have that Mars colony when your AI goes all "rise of the machines" and your nanotech turns the Earth into grey goo.

Re:Life

[fucksl4shd0t]

And of course if we we do make contact with an intellegent species we would then need to share with them the truth of Jesus.

As always, at the barrel of a gun.

Actually, I can't spread the truth of Jesus anymore, Jesus thinks I'm a jerk.

Wow, what a difference an atmosphere makes

[JCCyC]

Compare the photos by Hubble and by the UK ground-based telescope. It's like looking at PHP code vs. Perl code.

Gas versus dust

[HarveyBirdman]

The Martian sky looks reddish from the ground because of the dust content. From space (or Earth) we are seeing the upper atmosphere which is just gasses (CO2 mainly), and gasses scatter the blue light (look up "Rayleigh scattering").

Actually, there are some on the fringe (but not quite into "the face on Mars" fringe) insists that the Martian sky *is* blue from the ground. They claim that NASA's color correction of the incoming images, dating all the way back to the Viking landers, is off. The URL escapes me at the moment, I'm afraid.

Re:Gas versus dust

[Yet Another Smith]

While I wouldn't 100% put it past NASA to do a little color-correcting (REAL easy to do with RGB imagery) it's entirely plausible that the Martian sky could vary all the way from an Earth-style high-altitude deep blue to a total-sunset deep red. The big governing factor will be the dust content of the air.

The dust content, of course, will be highly variable from total during a dust storm, to fairly little. I'm not sure (and perhaps no one is) whether there are ever 'dust free' days on Mars, or if there is always some small amount of dust sufficient to keep some reddish hue 24/7/365. Or rather 24.8/7/580 or whatever (I forget the number of Martian days in a Martian year).

But to expand a bit on Mr Birdman's explanation, all normal gasses (O2, N2, CO2, probably even H2S and H2O in gas form, but not in aerosol form) will look blue, due to the aforementioned 'Rayleigh scattering'. Basically light (and all other forms of EM radiation) is scattered if it hits any object that is near or larger than its wavelength. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, is scattered more by air molecules, so you see more blue light from the sky than red. This will happen in the upper atmosphere.

If there's also dust, which will scatter red light as well as blue, you will see more red than blue. This is because the there is a higher intensity of red light in sunlight than blue, coupled with the fact that shorter wavelengths are getting scattered away and losing intensity before they reach the lower atmosphere where the dust resides. Aerosols in the atmosphere will act much like dust.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty much going on memory here, and didn't google this to check my facts. I am especially unsure of my explanation of why dust and aerosols look red. There may be more to it than that.

Re:Gas versus dust

[SeanAhern]

Actually, there are some on the fringe (but not quite into "the face on Mars" fringe) insists that the Martian sky *is* blue from the ground.

Yeah, I read that recently as well. Too bad I can't quite find the URL either.

But I coulda sworn that we did see some blue skies from Pathfinder a couple years back.

Anyway, Rayleigh scattering says that we should see blue skies on Mars when there is no suspended red dust to color it otherwise. This shouldn't be a question of "fringe" armchair astronomers.

Re:Gas versus dust

[0111 1110]

it's entirely plausible that the Martian sky could vary all the way from an Earth-style high-altitude deep blue to a total-sunset deep red

Does mars even have a sufficiently dense atmosphere to have a "color"? Maybe the red color is just a result of the Arizona-like martian soil.

This is because the there is a higher intensity of red light in sunlight than blue

If you examine a planck radiation curve for a 5800 degree (or any other) black body, the slope of the curve appears steeper at wavelengths shorter than the peak, implying that there is slightly more energy in the longer wavelengths. Whether this is significant enough to influence Rayleigh scattering I don't know.

550 nanometer yellow-green light, the intensity peak of solar radiation is exactly equidistant in wavelength between 400nm violet and 700nm red. If you assume a symmetrical curve the intensity of the red light should equal the intensity of the blue. Of course, the curve does not appear *exactly* symmetrical.

Dust particles will produce a red color because they are much larger than the nitrogen and oxygen gas particles. The wavelength of scattered light is proportional to particle size. Larger particles mean longer wavelength red is scattered more than shorter wavelength blue.

Re:Gas versus dust

[Anonymous Coward]

This page explains the "fringe" theory : The color of the sky on Mars, the true true images

Re:Gas versus dust

[Yet Another Smith]

Does mars even have a sufficiently dense atmosphere to have a "color"?

There's enough of an atmosphere to have some color, although it will never have the bright sky we recognize on Earth. At very high altitudes on Earth, the atmosphere is roughly as thin as the Martian atmosphere at the surface (at least at very low points like Hellas Basin). There will be a very dark blue color, probably similar to twilight on Earth. On top of Olympus Mons, the atmosphere would probably be so thin that color would only be visible at dawn and sunset, when the sunlight is traveling through the atmosphere at a very oblique angle.

With dust you're not getting Rayliegh scattering, but rather Mie scattering. Mie scattering is the type of scattering that occurs when light hits particles much larger than the wavelength of light. There is little or no variation in the intensity of Mie scattering with wavelength, so red and blue light are scattered roughly equally. That's usually what you see with red sunsets, when water vapor in the air scatters the incoming light. The reason it appears to favor red light is that the blue and yellow light is being attenuated by Rayleigh scattering before it reaches the troposphere where the water vapor is present. Therefore there's more red light left in the spectrum.

A quick googling of Rayleigh Scattering came up with this very excellent expanation:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos /b lusky.html#c3

One thing that surprises me...

[erroneus]

...with this once-in-a-very-long-time opportunity, why hasn't anyone put a manned mission to Mars together?

All the science guys knew that Mars would be this close decades ago. I just wonder... what a wasted opportunity.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[ip_vjl]

It's not like Mars is within walking distance now. Even with this pass-by, it would still be a very lengthy journey for a person to take. Too long for any technology we have now to support.

And by the way, once they get there - they'll have to come back (since we don't have any way of setting up a permanent settlement) so they'd have to do that without the benefit of this close pass.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[Omestes]

Though some silly news guy told me that if I loaded up my Ford Expedition and started driving, I could get there in 55 years. Though I'd prefer something a bit more economical with fuel, since I doubt that exxon/shell/mobil has expanded past the moon yet. Maybe a Geo Metro will get me there.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[da' WINS pimp]

You should check out this book: The Case for Mars. Everything you just said is refuted, plus a few more you haven't mentioned yet.

When it comes right down to it we could have a sustainable base on Mars within 10 years. All that has to happen is for the US Congress to get off it's ass and tell NASA to do it.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[confused one]

Because using chemical rockets it's a year long trip each way. It would cost 100's billions to build and launch. And in order to have a landing today, they'd have to have started working in the '80's.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didja read the news? The deficit's growing. They're talking half a TRILLION dollar a year deficit. And you want to get the Congress to "get off its ass" and presumably spend more money the government does not have to fund a Mars mission. Incredible.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[da' WINS pimp]

NASA's budget is only $15B/year. That is less than 1% of the US federal budget. Of that a Mars mission will cost $5B/year over 5 years.We spend more than that on the shuttle!

Exactly what about this do you find incredible Mr. AC troll? Damn, I'm glad you didn't work for Isabela(sp?) of Spain in 1492. The Europeans would never have found America. It takes a VISION to do great things. Sometimes those things are not what you intended, but great neverless. What program of higher importance would benefit mankind in such a way, for such a paltry sum?

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a VISION to do great things

And in this case, it takes other people's money, extorted from them under the rubric "taxes" and under threat of jail.

Go to Mars, by all means, but not on my dime, and not with looted funds.

Re:One thing that surprises me...

[snake_dad]

...with this once-in-a-very-long-time opportunity, why hasn't anyone put a manned mission to Mars together?

While Mars today was closer then ever in 60,000 years, it still does not make that much of a difference compared to every other "closest-approach" (the right word for it escapes me for now). The couple of thousand miles that you would win now are insignificant compared to the distance you need to travel to go to Mars.

Here's me waiting...

[DJCouchyCouch]

for a Uranus joke!

DJCC

From the article:

[RealityProphet]

The south polar ice cap is currently melting and shrinking in size...

Oh my God! This global warming epidemic is contagious!

Re:From the article:

[stratjakt]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd read that, unlike Earth, Mars does not spin on a fixed axis. So while we have stable seasons as we revolve around the sun on our slightly tilted axis, Mars flips and flops and tumbles all over the space.

Like the axis could be pointing right at the sun, leaving the bottom half in perpetual darkness, the next day it could be backwards. Well, not day to day, but the point is that its a koo koo nutty kind of a wibble wobbly rock.

Which means martian "seasons" are completely unpredictable, and makes the concept of setting up any sort of permanent settlement there less feasible, since you're on the equator one day and the dark pole the next.

Anyone?

Re:From the article:

[HarveyBirdman]

Mars has greater seasonal variations, but it does have predictable seasons. This is due to its orbital eccentricity rather than any stability in its axis of rotation. In fact, Mars' eccentricity is second only to that of Pluto.

What you are probably thiniing of was a research paper in the 1990s that claimed Mars' axial tilt varies chaotically between 10 and 50 degrees. However, these variations happened over millions of years. The cuttent tilt is twenty-ummmmmm.... something degrees.

Re:From the article:

[dlt074]

you forgot to blame the humans of Earth for this trend! it can all be traced back to our evil Viking landers! destroying the Earth was not enough for us greedy Americans! we had to go and pollute and destroy Mars as well! or that is what some would say.

Sure it's close...

[JabberWokky]

Yeah, it may be the closest it's going to be for awhile, but I'd imagine that atmospheric conditions will affect the image Hubble gets of Mars' surface more than the distance to Mars.

--
Evan "Let's see who understands"

Angry red planet

[Lord Agni]

Is it just me, or does the large close-up of Mars' Hellas Basin on the Hubble site look like Yosemite Sam?

Re:Angry red planet

[sTavvy]

It's just u...
he's off hunting Wabbits, so be very very quiet....

Opposition

[Walrus99]

From CNN.com's story on Mars:About every 26 months, the two planets pass relatively close to one another, during periods now known as opposition.

So what was it know as before? Realcloseness?

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirror. Please, don't slashdot it too much, no wget etc.

The main site is really slow, so not all files are on this mirror yet. Just try back in a few HOURS :)

Re:Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks.. Amazingly fast.

There's a Steven Wright joke that applies

[HarveyBirdman]

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."

It's expensive and dangerous and there quite simply is no political will to go to Mars, and politics, sadly, rules the minds of man.

Personally, I love space stuff, but even I would like to see some more logical things done around Earth (orbital industries, commercial ventures, etc.) before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.

Re:There's a Steven Wright joke that applies

[da' WINS pimp]

>before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.

Well I never thought of Apollo as a boondoggle. The shuttle is IMO, but not Apollo. Apollo inspired a whole generation of us to become engineers and scientists. The payoff for civilization on that one was huge.

You are right about seeing more things done around earth(LEO). But the key part of your phrase is commercial ventures. NASA was founded to do the big stuff - like Mars. And we can do it within NASA's current budget. See the Mars Society for more information.

Re:There's a Steven Wright joke that applies

[HarveyBirdman]

I know there's a lot of starry-eye feelings about the moon landings, but ultimately Apollo was "Beat the Russians" who were busy beating themselves into the ground anyway. It was a big build up, and then a big blowout into... nothing. NASA should be reduced to an agency with two missions:

1. Unmanned science and exploration. Some things, like Big Science, just don't have a clear monetary profit motive, but are valuable science, so stuff like Mars rovers and Europa landers are fine.

2. The promotion and highly targeted funding of commercial and private sector space efforts. One of the main impediments to these things are the up front investments being beyond the dreams of even the venture capitalists. There were some numbers run a while back that indicated a small solar panel farm in space could pay for itself in the first year of operation, but there was no one outside of a major government who could afford to actually put it there.

The taxpayers, of course, would get a cut of any profits from the commercial ventures, just as any investor would. A check in the mail thanks to orbital utilities would do more to inspire the average man on the street to appreciate space than men on Mars. I really think we as a society have progressed beyond the gee-whiz stage of space into a "What can we do with it?" stage. And it's a fair question.

We really should have followed the vision of Von Braun and his contemporaries and gone in solid, incremental, logical steps. We'd have had a rotating ring station by now, and currently have a presence in space of more than 100 people at any given moment. The manned mission to Mars would have happened in the late 1990's because we'd have an assembly platform for the craft in Earth orbit. I submit the payoff to civilization would be orders of magnitude higher.

And Martin Landau really might have been on the moon in 1999. ;-)

Re:There's a Steven Wright joke that applies

[da' WINS pimp]

You don't justify something like manned spaceflight with a P&L statement. Although I'll make some good points there- first, manned exploration is 600% more effective than unmanned (NASA study, 1998 if I recall). Even with the weak science agenda of Apollo we learned many times more about the Moon than we learned before or since.

In exploration (which is what we are talking about here, not just science) the initial outlay usually has to come from government. Once the profit is there corporations get involved. This is where we are right now with LEO. There has never been a case where exploration did not make a lot of money. But first, in order for you to change the payoff structure for government funded science you will have to change a lot of laws. Some of those laws are found in the US Constitution. We are a republic, not a corporation. I'm definitely not arguing this point with you though. I agree that citizens should see money back from government funding of science. I'm just pointing out that right now we don't. The corporations get the lion's share.

You are also right about the real purpose of Apollo - to beat the Russians. I contend that it is not the goal that matters, only that you have one. Apollo was a big one and we got paid from it big time (please, oh please, argue with me on that count!). I'm sorry that you are not a "starry-eye" visionary, this would be easier, but the plain fact is you don't have to be. There is enough profit on Mars to make the Feringi happy, but to find it we have to go, and the goal is what we need. In the course of pursuing that goal we will make money, since that seems to be the only thing that motivates you.

Re:didn't you hear?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you're watching a lot of TV if you find yourself thinking about cartoons when staring up at the night sky. Brain a like haunted house with television ghosts.

Keck observatory & optical interferometry

[TheOrquithVagrant]

I'd love to see how the images the Keck observatory, with its adaptive optics and 10-meter mirrors, and how they would stack up against the hubble images.

Better yet, the images they could produce if the Keck optical interferometer was fully operational. I know taking pictures of things inside our solar system definitely is not what they're aiming for with the interferometer, but it would still be very interesting to see if a ground based "virtual 85-meter mirror" could produce better results than an orbital telescope like hubble.

And STILL better - a space-based optical interferometry array! Imagine images of planets in OTHER solar systems with resolutions similar to the Mars pictures we're marveling at today... Interferometry is cool. I just hope I live to see a really big optical interferometer in orbit, and the images it will be able to snap.

Better stop now, starting to ramble... :)

Re:Keck observatory & optical interferometry

[Grendol]

Are there any optical interferometry software packages out there for amature astronomers to use?

Re:Keck observatory & optical interferometry

[niall2]

It's not quite as you would think. Keck has two telescopes to do interferometry. That gives it one axis to resolve. So really all you get from Keck is an interferogram showing how resolved an object is in one dimension, as interferometry is really just measuring the spatial forier transform of the wavefront you are sampling with the two telescopes. And the spatial frequency you are most sensitive to is that right around the sampling limit of the interferometer (with the width of your sensitivity range having something to do with how large the different telescopes are doing the sampling).

What you need is something more like the VLA in the optical, where you have multiple axis you resolve and multiple baseline widths to incresase your spatial sensitivity. But even then there is the spatial frequency problem. As interferometry is good at resolving objects right around its resolution limim, Larger structure is lost in the forier transform. So to improve that you need more elements packed closer together. This, in the limit of maximizing the image quality, is a single mirror.

So in reality, if you want a good image its best to launch a BIG single mirror telescope than a bunch of smaller ones and do interferometry. Its just much cheeper to do the later.

Re:Keck observatory & optical interferometry

[niall2]

And someday I will learn to spell fourier. No its not the english spelling either.

Re:Keck observatory & optical interferometry

[TheOrquithVagrant]

> Keck has two telescopes to do interferometry. That gives it one axis to resolve.

I am aware of this, hence my use of "fully operational". The _completed_ Keck interferometer is going to have six telescopes, and resolve on more than just one axis, although the other four telescopes will be not be as big as the two that are currently in operation.
I guess since Mars is plenty bright, the CHARA array on Mount Wilson might be a closer fit in this case.

As to your last comment, the point is that a space-based interferometry array can be made much larger than any single big mirror you could build, let alone launch into orbit. Last I looked, NASA's plan for the Terrestial Planet Imager is a large, space-based optical interferometry array, and the project which I was "hoping to live to see", in my original post. I don't think they even have a time estimate for that one.
The Space Interferometry Mission, on the other hand, is planned for 2009, but it is not meant for imaging, even if I understand it is meant to do some experiments with rotational synthesis imaging, for "proof of concept" and to gather information to help build future, bigger space-based interferometry arrays, like the Terrestrial Planet Imager.

Nice sharp image

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

however, I *still* dont' see Arnold there...

Face on Mars

[ALeavitt]

Finally, we'll be able to get detailed, close-up pictures of the face on Mars! I'm sure the Weekly World News is scrambling to scoop everyone else in this potentially groundbreaking revelation. I hope that they're able to prove conclusively that, just as theorized by the eminent astronomers behind the classic Mission to Mars, the Earth was indeed seeded by Martians after a cataclysmic meteor strike.

Re:Face on Mars

[RandomHavoc]

That may be wishful thinking. Photos "proving" the existence of extraterrestrial life are always out of focus. Besides, this is the Hubble telescope after all.

What the eye wants to see

[unfortunateson]

Looking at the image, my brain tries to fit it to 'known' continents.

The Terra Meridiani area looks like either the east coast of southeast Asia (Vietnam, etc.), or the Gulf of Mexico.

Arabia Terra could easily be China.

Hellas is in the right place for Australia.

Re:What the eye wants to see

[tds67]

The Terra Meridiani area looks like either the east coast of southeast Asia (Vietnam, etc.), or the Gulf of Mexico. Arabia Terra could easily be China. Hellas is in the right place for Australia.

I think you're promulgating a theory that Mars is really an orbiting mirror.

also on the APOD

[contrapuntalmindset]

see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ The resolution is a bit better. For an even better image, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030824.html

Re:also on the APOD

[joepa]

The latter image looks good in the root window along with fluxbox's "carbon dioxide" style.

/me ducks

The face! Not the face!

[Channard]

Now let's see just how many new 'alien' features -pyramids, etc, your average tinfoil hat wearer spots in these images.

Saturn?

[jabberjaw]

Although it is slightly OT, I have heard that one astronomer has stated that Mars is a bit hyped and that Saturn will provide a much better show in a few months. Does anyone care to shed some light on this?

Re:Saturn?

[wnknisely]

Maybe they're referring to the Cassini mission that arrives at Saturn next year? Here's a good site for basic info.

Re:Saturn?

[boredman]

It's true. I'm an amateur astronomer, and I can tell you that Saturn is always a better show than Mars, as is Jupiter.

Nothing special about the geometries of the next opposition of Saturn, it's just a *much* prettier planet, IMHO.

-boredman

Nice blue halo...

[twoslice]

Did Arnie press the big button?

Re:Does it means the martians can also see us?

[JeffWhitledge]

Don't worry. All the martians can see is our night side. So stay in unlit areas at night, and you should be alright.
It's the same reason we can't see all of those hot venusian women.

Blue sky on Mars

[(trb001)]

Cue TNT running 'Total Recall' at least once a week for the next few months...

--trb

Re:Blue sky on Mars

[snake_dad]

Too bad they can't run it in California. If a station does air it, they have to give free exposure for all the other governmental candidates in the recall (no pun) vote...

Better Venus link

[HarveyBirdman]

I narfed that first URL. I'd swear it passed a preview.

Here's a better one one without whitespace.

Click on the Venera links.

The next step

[not_a_george]

before we go probing around, we need to follow the (updated as of 2000) natural progression for visiting other planets
1)if planet may contain life
2)wait for Mcdonalds to build thier first mars location
3)???
4)colonize!

Re:The next step

[not_a_george]

oops,
1) determine surface characteristics

but what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

i want to know when we're going to get the close up pictures of uranus...

Is Mars really red?

[hammarlund]

I went down to look at Mars last Saturday night with the local astronomy group. But instead of seeing the Red Planet, it was the White Planet. Not even a smidge of red to it. Three separate telescopes all showed Mars white. What's up with that?

Re:Is Mars really red?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude...that was the moon.

Re:Is Mars really red?

[hammarlund]

It really wasn't red. I should have asked about it then, but I didn't want to look like a moron. The others that went with me saw the same thing: white Mars. I thought maybe it was a filter on the telescope, but it couldn't have been on three different scopes.

Very weird.

Re:Is Mars really red?

[PhreakOfTime]

No, mars is not really red. Its more of a tint of orange, but thats not the reason you dont see color.

You should be complaining about your eyes, not the telescopes you were using. Your eye is made up of rods and cones(HS biology). For numerous reasons, you cant see colors under normal nighttime conditions. In low light conditions, you are using your rods, which only detect black and white shades. While mars might be incredibly bright throught the telescope, you are still only using your low light optics, which explains why you percieve it as being white. In fact much of the sky, save some binary stars is mostly wisps of black and white through a telescope, with the rare dull pastel showing up once and awhile.

If you dont believe me, take a picture of it through that same telescope and tell me if the color on the picture is the same as what you saw(it wont be)

Re:Is Mars really red?

[hammarlund]

I believe you.

Re:Is Mars really red?

[interstellar_donkey]

You just made me laugh more then I have laughed in over a month. Amazing. Simply amazing.

Re:Is Mars really red?

[hammarlund]

Glad I could cheer you up. Obviously I am aware that Mars has a red/orange/rust/whatever color to it. However, when viewing it and it appears white (apparently for the rod/cones reasons explained elsewhere), I was hoping for an explanation.

Re:Vote Arnold for Senator

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not say that he is runnig for senator. I said he can not be President of the US cos he was born in Austria.

So slashdot really is stupid?

[Cyno]

I know this is a big thing for CNN readers, but slashdot?

Its just pictures. We've got thousands of those. We sent a freakin probe to survey the geography of the planet. What's so big about this? Is it so close you can almost touch it? Ooo, purty shiney red planet. *snapsnapsnap*

Too bad it's August...

[ktulu1115]

It's a little unfortunate that Mars had to have its perigee and opposition during the summer months. Scientific observations taken from ground-level are always clearer during the wintertime (atmosphere more calm, less air turbulance).

Re:Too bad it's August...

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical Northern thinking. Observers in Austraila and Chile, and the people who are running the Hubble Space Telescope and other platforms in orbit are loving it.

Mission to Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

If we could send up a probe with WiFi, and establish a P2P music download site there, I'm pretty sure the RIAA would have a man on Mars within the year to serve subpenas.

Hey!

[FrostedWheat]

You can see my house from here!

Ice Cap is melting!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

The south polar ice cap is currently melting and shrinking in size.

See! Further proof of global warming! It's affecting even Mars!

Why so excited?

[baz00f]

I'm sorry, but if you look at the numbers here you'll see that past perihelic oppositions of Mars to earth are just about as close as this one. Year 2003= 34.6 million miles. Year 1956 = 35.1 mill. = difference of 1.4%. Year 1971 = 34.9 mill. = diff. 0.9%. Year 1988= 36.5 mill = diff. 5.5%

I doubt that such a marginally closer opposition distance significantly improves observations of anything.

Re:Why so excited?

[Anonymous Coward]

BAKA! The telescopes of today are soooo much better than olds of yore. That means it exciting!

Re:Why so excited?

[baz00f]

And last year's (2002) nonperihelic approach was 41 mill. miles, 18.5% further than this year's.

Nonsense

[SuperKendall]

At $5 a carat, is it worth a few hundred dollars to go up there after a gem that we can just grow back home?

No, if you want people to travel to mars you have to provide a REALLY compelling reason to go there. I propose sending a probe to the surface of Mars whole SOLE PURPOSE is to be loaded with Metallica and Brittney Spears songs and use IP over radio technology to act as a distant P2P node. Then the RIAA with its vast resources will be quick to organize an expedition... the key then is to tie up all of the lawyers destined to travel on the ship in the locker room and stow away ourselves (ala countless bad movies), so as to make the trip more useful and also allowing us to plant ANOTHER P2P node and have it sharing with the other one on Mars, which will greatly increase the rate of violations. This will mean even more launches and tying up in the locker room and so forth, until we have a permanent colony (hopyfully at some point with some decent music brought over by iPod). A side benefit is we have a locker room stuff with bound RIAA legal staff.

Your solution just made no sense at all. Martian gems? Right.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Or send a stash of porn to the planet and our industrious /.'s will reach the planet first. Of course the prospect of the colony being able to sustain its population would be about nil.

Go back under your rock

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think it's a big deal? Well yippee for you.

Honestly, this level of lack of interest in the wonders of the real world is the kind of thing that gives geekery a bad name.

Has anyone noticed that

[Wolfier]

Mars is also not Lambertian?
Is it the case for all the planets?

What?

[NaugaHunter]

Is it right to destroy/exploit another planet, like we destroy/exploit our own? Even if we are only displacing so archeon bacteria thingies, do we have the right to do that?

What are these 'rights' that keep coming up? Do we have a 'right' to eliminate syphilis, or anthrax, or the common cold? How would it be different? These aren't dolphins or seals or minks we're talking about. With population growth at its current rate, are we bound to either have another plaque or go 'Logan's Run' to control things, just so we don't disturb some precious archeon bacteria?

I do agree with your other points, that finding life would have a serious impact on our uniqueness. The problem is it would only affect those that already question it; I foresee more battles to keep any such notions out of schools where children might learn them. I also agree that we should be careful in how we colonize, though by the time we can colonize with any chance of success I think we will likely have much better behaviors - the road we're on just wouldn't support it. I'm just not overly concerned about supplanting native single-celled life, if the only other choice is no colonization at all.

Re:What?

[Omestes]

If it come down to human survival I really would have no qualms about colonizing Mars, even at the cost of extraterrestial single cellular life, as long as it was done intelligently.

But I misread your original post as colonize for the sake of commercial exploitation. You know, like paving mars so we can open a Ramada and a Wallmart there for rich space tourists.

As for over-population I'm sure We'll hit up the Moon first, closer, need less technology.

Which Begs The Reverse Question

[EXTomar]

It is very well known where Mars would be in the sky and how to find it (right now you can't miss it anyway).

An interesting question would be for this celestial event: How does Earth look from Mars? Since Earth is interior to Mars would someone one Mars look up and see the large cresent blue dot? Or would Earth not even be see able because we are positioned in the middle of the Martian day?

It is always fun to apply our knowledge of gravitation to predict position of planets from Earth. We should by now have the knowledge to predict it from other vantage points.

Re:Which Begs The Reverse Question

[akruppa]

Mars and earth currently are in opposition (which is why they are so close), meaning than mars, earth and sun lie on one straight line. If you were looking at earth from mars, your eyes would hurt, because you'd be staring right at the sun behind the earth.

Alex

Re:Which Begs The Reverse Question

[hottoh]

Perhaps it would not be too hard to look towards the earth given your were pre dawn or post dusk on Mars.

Bottom line, the Earth is *not* illuminated on the side facing Mars! It would be a nearly invisible black disk.

Re:Which Begs The Reverse Question

[raind]

I'm sure they're out there but does anyone have a photo of Hubble from earth?

Wot no canals?

[C A S S I E L]

The Hubble images are lovely, but I can't make out any of the canals. Perhaps the Hubble needs repairing again.

Look out for thread....

[mattsucks]

Now that Mars is at its closest point for thousands of years, we should expect the voracious thread to start appearing in our skies any day now. And us without any dragons to fly .... we're doomed!

Ther it is!

[pkunzipper]

I think I see the lot that will house my future home!!!

nasa has a better file to down load

[thbigr]

Better resolution the the link at space.com

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/imag e_ feature_85.html

Martian Date Calculator

[Paulrothrock]

For any who are interested, I made a Martian Date Calculator so you can figure out important dates in history on the Mars Society's calendar

For example, today is Aquarius 34, XXIII.

Have fun with it.

Huge staplers live on mars?!

[kaltkalt]

I was looking at the large, detailed mars pic on the linked site and low and behold, a huge, living stapler with some english words growing on its side appeared and started to stomp around on the planet. I, for one, welcome our new stapler overlords.

Wait, what's that you say? It was just a tacky, utterly-annoying pop-up advertisement hopping around on my computer screen? Oh. Fuck them then.

Mars Globe?

[Yet Another Smith]

Hey this is a bit O/T, but I was looking at the space.com article, and really liked the fact that they had a 'normal' version of the picture, and then a version with major land features (hellas basin, Arabia terrain, etc). Ever since reading the RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, I've been interested in the geography of Mars. For whatever reason, I've had real trouble getting it in my head from the lat/long maps that I've seen. I'd really like to have a globe of Mars to help keep this strait. I know there are globes depicting the features of the Moon, but does anybody know if there are Mars globes available?

Re:Mars Globe?

[pease1]

Google Sky Publishing, who also publishes Sky and Telescope magazine.

Barsoom!

[Anonymous Coward]

But where are the Canals?

Full Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

There is now a FULL MIRROR available.

Enjoy! :D

space.com is better-informed that you

[Corgha]

Those two pages are talking about the same study, which was recently published in the journal Science (non-free reg required).

What the study showed is that Mars lacks the large deposits of carbonate rocks that would be expected from the presence of large, longstanding bodies of water like oceans. So, Mars was not "watery." This is what the BBC was talking about.

This is not the same thing as saying that Mars never had liquid water on its surface. On the contrary, the study revealed carbonate in the Martian dust, which may have formed by the interaction of liquid water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is what space.com was talking about.

On the other hand, the carbonate could also have formed by the direct interaction of atmospheric water and carbon dioxide with the dust. That's why space.com points out that "Bandfield cautioned [that] the results are not 100 percent conclusive in proving the existence of liquid water."

Perhaps more significantly, however, the study shows that large amounts of carbon dioxide are locked up in these carbonates, which points to a thicker atmosphere in the Martian past, which may have been better able to support liquid water on the surface.

In fact, Bandfield (one of the authors of the study) also says elsewhere about the study:

"Mars appears to have locked up its atmosphere in minerals until it reached the point where the process largely stopped because liquid water ceased to exist at regional to global scales at the surface."

This study does not end the debate about water on Mars, and I don't think it's too strong an assertion to say that this study (among others) have hinted at liquid water on the dusty planet."

Amateur Astronomer Images of Mars

[fishbonez]

Even the images now being produced by amateur astronomers are really excellent as a result of the close proximity of Mars. An archive amateur Mars images can be found at the International Marswatch site. Looking back through the archive, you can see how much more detail can be seen in the images as Mars has drawn nearer.

With it corrected to blue...

[KalvinB]

It looks like they were in Arizona or some other desert region.

I bet the color correction was some evil NASA plan to fool us again.

It is really kinda bizzare to look at it with the rusty sky which is foreign and then with the blue sky which is quite familiar.

Ben

Watching ants from the top of a tower

[KalvinB]

Percentages go from 0 to 100 which of course looks insignificant. But when you consider the actual number of 500,000 - 2 million miles it's quite obvious why it's a big deal.

2 million miles makes a HUGE difference in what you can and can't see.

Ben

Re:Watching ants from the top of a tower

[baz00f]

You are saying that you can resolve a significant difference between a golf ball at 101 yards and 100 yards?

0.5 million miles is a large absolute distance, but a small relative distance in this situation- don't confuse the two...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Pity...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

they ran out of paint near the bottom.

Detailed analysis of Mars photos

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look hard enough, at the Tharsis Montes, you can make out the 3 fully equipped divisions of Republican Guards, all poised and ready for an invasion. 16 wheeler mobile biological laboratories can be seen at Valles Marineris whereas Terras Sirenum has exactly 238 terrorist training camps. Meanwhile, at the Terras Basin, there is very strong evidence of several mobile missile launchers. These can be deployed in exactly 9 minutes and 1.1 seconds.Arabia Terra spots a massive chemical weapons storage facility. There is uncompelling evidence too,of missile silos containing missiles with chemical warheads at Terra Meridiana.

I assure you that this analysis has not been 'sexed-up' (note no mention of Mons or Hood), nor has it been plagiarised from the Internet. "Cross my heart and swear to die if I lie".

I mean, shouldn't Mars be bombed out of existence or something? Bush?? Blair?? Howard?? Any takers?

Clouds

[paulfwilliams]

Wow, those were good pictures. We were lucky that both Earth and Mars were cloudless.

(For the humor impaired: can you find two instances of silliness in my post?)