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

[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).

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?

[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

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

dammit

[jwjcmw]

I like this caption better.

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.

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.

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.

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:Saturn?

[wnknisely]

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

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.