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Mars Sundials - True Colors, Ambiguous Hours

Posted by timothy on from the painted-desert-is-timed-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Astrobiology Magazine today has an interview with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who spearheaded the first interplanetary sundial, which will land on Mars in early January. The Cornell sundial inscription reads "Two Worlds, One Sun" in 17 languages [including ancient Sumerian and Mayan], and was selected over such historical mottos as one French sundial that reads: "Every hour injures; the last one kills". The sundials were an inspired transformation of a needed [mainly orange-pink] color wheel to calibrate the Mars' panoramic cameras to give true Martian colors, but so resembled the shadow-casting time pieces, that Nye took it over to become an internet-updated interplanetary dial." Read on for some more. Our reader continues: "There are no conventional hour lines at all on these dials, because unlike regular sundials, they are on moving platforms. Nye says: 'Before people figured this out back in the first era of Mars probes (also the first Disco Era) the images from the Viking spacecraft were too pink or orange. Those "over-pink" images still show up in Mars science fiction movies and Mars-themed posters and restaurant walls. One of the charming challenges is roughly, "What is an hour on Mars?" Is it a "Mour?" Is it a "quadraduodeci-sol," a twenty fourth of a sol, a Mars day? ' The interview recounts the Apollo 12 controversy over whether one of the first lunar probes, Surveyor, returned viable contaminants to Earth."

3 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The obvious question is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/

  2. Check yer facts by Wonko42 · · Score: 3, Informative
    The Cornell sundial inscription reads "Two Worlds, One Sun" in 17 languages

    Actually, according to the article (there's even a picture where this is visible), the inscription "Two Worlds, One Sun" is in English only, and the word "Mars" is in 17 languages.

  3. Interesting Rover data by -tji · · Score: 3, Informative

    Following a few links from the mission site, I found the answer to a question I had about the communications capabilities of the rovers.

    They can communicate directly back to Earth at a slow speed ( 3,500 to 12,000 bits/sec ) or they can communicate via the Mars orbiting spacecraft (Odyssey or Mars Global Surveyor) at a rate of 128,000 bits/sec. The orbiters are only 250 miles from the planet surface.

    Unfortunately, there was no information about protocols, encoding, or error correction schemes..

    Some good info is here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/mission/communication s.html