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Spirit's First Mars Images

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the isn't-that-special dept.

An anonymous reader writes "First panoramic and overhead polar views of Mars, a quarter billion miles away are available. Some spectacular examples and accompanying commentaries are at NASA's Astrobiology Magazine, and JPL."

7 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. All the images by Cee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here.

  2. Re:Colour calibration? by SSJVegeto2001 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The pictures that have been released were taken by Spirit's Nav Cam, and at only 1/4th of the Nav Cam's maximum resolution. Remember, we weren't even expecting images at all yet. We were only able to take these because we only had a relatively small amount of time to transmit data (at 24 megabits per second). Larger images and color images from the Pan Cam will be coming by evening when Spirit's high gain antenna is directly in line with Earth. Then we'll have the bandwidth for the higer resolution (3 times the maximum resoultion of the Nav Cam, 12 times higher resolution than what we've seen so far) color images that the Pan Cam is capable of taking. It will probably take a few days to get an accurate full color panorama of the landing site.

  3. Re:Problem with images by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Informative
    FWIW, there's a slightly less blurry version of that first image here

    There's loads of images here.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  4. Re:how come by Ada_Rules · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are not seeing the curvature of the planet. You are seeing an effect of the wide angle lense that causes the picture to have a fish-eye like distortion.

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    --- Liberty in our Lifetime
  5. Re:Which desktop are they using in this image? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's almost certainly Sun CDE. CDE is (or at least was) used fairly extensively within NASA, and they have a great deal of Sun iron. For kicks, see this Google search which provides a bit of evidence as to the use of CDE within NASA. Note that the word "cosmic" has been excluded from the search, because NASA once had a project called "Cosmic Dust Experiment" or - you guessed it - CDE!

    In any case, their environment is absolutely not Windows. Any number of choice quotes could be derived from this fact, not the least of which is, "When it's worth 400 million dollars, don't use Windows to keep track of it." If only the Fortune 500 were so savvy!

  6. Nerd Information about Mars Cameras by Danathar · · Score: 5, Informative

    In case anybody wants to know what resolution the cameras will be taking the photos at you can get the whole technical specs for the pan cameras at

    http://athena.cornell.edu/pdf/tb_pancam.pdf

    It's quite interesting actually. Real News for Nerds!

  7. Color Pictures by ironwill96 · · Score: 5, Informative

    People keep commenting on the black and white quality of these pictures. AFAIK, these are lower resolution black and white photos taken for initial analysis to keep the file sizes low. The nice color pictures we all want to see should be here later today (around 12:00 P.M. PST 3:00 P.M. EST). Overall, i'm impressed that we have once again gotten something on Mars without unit conversion issues or just plain bad luck. Now it could only be topped if our President (or the next one) would announce a manned mission to mars challenge, similar to the one issued by Kennedy to go to the moon in the 60s.

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    "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson