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

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

[CausticWindow]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[PD]

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

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 ;)

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?

[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?

[Plutor]

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

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.

Something is closer...

[azzy]

... and so we can see it better.

Wow

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

[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.

dammit

[jwjcmw]

I like this caption better.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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:See The Blue Atmosphere?

[Jedi Holocron]

Opps...

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

Thanks.

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.

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

[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.

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: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:Saturn?

[wnknisely]

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

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: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.

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.

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: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

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.

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: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.

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.