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Spirit's First Mars Images
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."
The first image suffers from low-light "auterco-feedback" and the rest from "vacuum malaise". There are several distracting artifacts, and it looks as if they all underwent airbrushing before final release.
Is there any known way to take clear, reality-matching photos of Mars and get them back to Earth OK?
I read at the JPL site that the next Rover will carry a 5MP CCD camera encased in bubbleshield glass, which might just do the trick...
I am really glad that we waste billions of dollars on missions to Mars to find out exactly what we already knew... There's nearly nothing there.
Way to go guys!
Perhaps we should reserve those billions on aid to our own starving populations.
Just a thought,
So dificult is taking a good photograph in Mars? The first one seems to be filtered with photoshop.
I like the picture of the crater ring, you can see the mouth and the eyes of the "happy face".
ajf
In 1997, at least, I recall everyone with internet access rushing to the Mars Pathfinder site when it landed on Mars, and the rest going to people's houses with internet access to watch large images load up slowly on 14.4 (or, if you were lucky, 28.8) modems. We were fascinated to see that little robot go and take pictures of a rusty planet.
Now, there's little talk of it, relatively little media coverage, and so on. People just shrug it off when they hear of it, and most laughingly hope it will fail because NASA didn't use significant figures in their calculations or something. It's not a big event anymore, and it's certainly not a moment like the moon landing.
Only a few people seem to be following this, unfortunately. Interest in space has either dissipated or become extremely pessimistic. Kids now want to be members of G-UNIT, not astronauts. Hopefully, Spirit will find signs of life or at least water and change those perceptions around and re-ignite interest in the final frontier.
Here is a space hack page from Digicrime.com.
... Don't go there!!!!!
BTW: turn off java before going to his home page or he closes your browser!
ps: If you use IE
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
For a mission that cost upwards of $200M, couldn't they mount something better than a webcam on Spirit?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.