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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."
Hey, that's just Tatooine. Man, what a rip-off.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
No matter how many space missions are made, this stuff still puts me in awe. I know that quite a few NASA guys lurk on /., and all I can say is: good work!
I think I see Beagle2! - or what's left of it.....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Could someone please tell NASA to upload some pictures at 1280X1024, I really need some new wallpaper.
XP's rolling hills are starting to get old... although I could isolate the red channel and tell people it was pictures from Mars, but I digress.
We hurl the craft towards the planet millions of miles away on a gigantic explosive rocket, just so the robot can land and take pictures of itself. Sounds like my last vacation.
That is exactly what the driver of the last mission to Mars said when he hung up the rover on a rock and got it stuck.
I would hate to be the person who got the rover stuck on a rock with all those rocket scientists looking at me really steamed...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
>Why not divert the billions of dollars spent on WMD to aid the starving populations instead?<
The Mars mission was to search for Iraq's WMDs that cannot be found on Earth.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Those are black and white images. The bluish color results from taking a picture of the big screen at JPL as these images were shown (or doing screen grabs of NASA TV). The first color images should be sometime Sunday night.
I was watching these (on NASA TV) as they came in and it was just amazing. Everyone at JPL was really quiet as they knew the data was about to come in. As earth had already set, this data (~12 minutes) was being relayed by Mars Odyssey. The first couple images were really dark and small. You got the impression most people had no idea what they were, but none the less everyone was cheering that they were getting data and pictures back. They got at least one picture that was taken during landing that they weren't expecting. Then the big detailed pictures of the landing site started coming in and everyone was just in awe. Pretty quickly they combined images into mosaics and panoramic shots. I can't wait until they get their good cameras up and running. The commentator was saying the resolution will be hight enough that the pictures will still look good when blown up to the size of a movie screen.
Here.
All that money and all that time and still got the picture of the backs of heads. Funny how these martians look like NASA geeks. Maybe if we flew in some babes and a couple cases of beer there really would be life on Mars.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
There's loads of images here.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
In case anyone of the NASA guys is reading /. (I know some are), I'd like to express my congratulations on an excellent job. I really enjoy following each step of the mission.
Sigged!
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!
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!
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.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson