Slashdot Mirror
First High-Res Color Photos from Mars
mzs writes "The first color thumbnail from Spirit was available yesterday from a larger image. Today some full-size color images are available. If you are in the USA you may be interested in catching the NOVA program on your local PBS station tonight." Acrobatman notes the existence of a nifty utility:"Mars24, a Mac OS X and Java application and applet which displays a Mars 'sunclock', a graphical representation of Mars. This free utility shows the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format and landmarks such as the landing positions of the rovers."
Perhaps all those oxides in the soil get whipped up into the air by the intense winds on the surface, coloring the sky kinda butterscotch?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
It looks to me to be damaged tiles. Most likely, NASA is sending the images in chunks of compressed data. Given the distances involved (and the processing power for images this large), they are probably slicing the images into squares and using those as the chunks of data to compress. When the data is received on our end, NASA reconstructs the images and throws away bad data that didn't make it.
It's possible that they'll have the lander retransmit the image at a later date. (Does anyone know the storage capacity of this thing?)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Those are probably places where some data was lost in transmission. When you have a half-hour ping time, it's not so easy to re-request lost packets. Those parts are still being stored on the lander's memory, if someone decides that they really want to see them.
There is a decent article available at space.com with some more information from the press conference and the first color image as well.
The sky on Mars would be blue, if it weren't for all the dust particles within it. These red dust particles colour the sky with a pink shade. Vikings 1 & 2, Pathfinder and now Spirit have confirmed this.
e /c limate_history/sky_color1.html
http://calspace.ucsd.edu/marsnow/library/scienc
-James.
First of all, there's a vertical line just left of center. This is where the image is stiched together. Although NASA may like us to believe this is one image, it's really a composite.
Aside from that, I see nothing terribly unusual. Interesting, yes, but not unusual.
The "line of rocks that starts at the middle left edge of the picture and goes up and to the right" is an illusion created by shadows and perspective. If I stare up at the light fixture on my ceiling, there appears to be a "pattern" of concentric rings and radial lines of texture. It's daylight, the curtains are open, and snow is on the ground so when the light is off, I have plane-source scattered light and any "pattern" disappears.
Any appearance of order in the image is just an illusion.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
The Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed in 1998 so I think it was wise of them to be cautious and realistic about their chances this time. They sent two to improve their chances of getting one down. They went with stuff that worked in 1996 on Pathfinder, airbags, instead of lander legs which proved troublesome. More importantly, they included telemetry on the way down which is more expensive but which means you aren't left with such a guessing game if there is a failure. You at least have a clue how far it got, unlike the Beagle which hasn't been heard from since it left its mother craft; we have no idea whether its chute opened or if it was eaten by a space-probe eating monster. I applaud NASA for being more careful this time and for putting the equivalent of some printfs in there to make sure it wasn't going to slip away quietly this year.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
this is somehow a reverse-engineered date/time format?...i mean, clearly, humans knew mars existed well before 1873, after all....
:)
The Mars epoch of 1873 was chosen for its precedence to a cosmic Martian event in 1877. Read the Mars time technical notes. for more info.
I think it's safe to say all epochs are "reverse-engineered" by being placed in the past. You don't see any ancient documents dated "1066 B.C.", do you?
Hate to burst your bubble, but there won't be pics of the Beagle 2 crash site, as it's on the other side of Mars. According to USA today (dead tree addition, dated yesterday), it would take the rover 1,000 years to get to the intended landing position of Beagle 2, assuming it crashed even remotely near it's target.
"Well, I am mad, and I'm a crazy fucka when it comes to tea"
On the chance that this gets slashdotted (it's been slow for a while), I'll mirror the high-res panoramic image here: http://nccs.nasa.gov/~lsherida/PIA04995.jpg
Here is a link to a high-res mosaic, 3498x3851, TIFF format, 40.4MB:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/PIA04995.tif
And the same picture as a 1.1 MB JPG (still full resolution):
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA04995.jpg
As for space certified. I'm not aware of PCSAT having any CCDs on it. However, I'm also not sure that it was built using space certified components. It was meant as a student exercise, to give the students experience at building a satellite. If it lasted a week then failed, then that wouldn't be the end of the world. The mars landers have to last at least several months to get ANY results, and therefore have to be built to be more bulletproof.
Actually landing something with rockets requires a liquid fueled throttle controlled engine attached to the radar altimeter which is very complex and expensive to build. The vikings landed this way at ~$1 billion 1976 dollars. Their landings were *amazingly* accurate, designed to disturb the ground as little as possible. Viking 2 I believe landed with an estimated disturbance of less than 1 mm of dust blown off the ground.
How this mars lander worked was to deploy a parachute to slow it down and then fire some solid rocket motors (can't be shut down or throttled and are really cheap) to bring it to a dead stop around 20-40 ft in the air and then deploy airbags to cushion the last few feet fallen. The system, though complex as it is, is far cheaper and less complex than a liquid fueled rocket motor landing system.
The reason for stopping in mid-air is because of timing variations in calculations. Its difficult to tell exactly what conditions the lander will encounter from 300 million miles away and months before launch. So they fire the rockets early enough to bring it to a stop well before it would hit the ground.
-
From the JPL website:
The rover has a top speed on flat hard ground of 5 centimeters (2 inches) per second. However, in order to ensure a safe drive, the rover is equipped with hazard avoidance software that causes the rover to stop and reassess its location every few seconds. So, over time, the vehicle achieves an average speed of 1 centimeter per second. The rover is programmed to drive for roughly 10 seconds, then stop to observe and understand the terrain it has driven into for 20 seconds, before moving safely onward for another 10 seconds.
Just click on the Technology button.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I know dick about the Martian atmosphere, but I know about photography and photoshop. The "corrected" image on that page is wrong. It has an overall cyan cast. For most images there is a sweet spot where you get the most vibrancy. If there is a colour cast, it degrades that vibrancy and makes the picture look flatter. You can clearly see this effect in comparing the two images. Its possible that the person didn't do a proper job with photoshop and the image needs a differential correction rather than a uniform change, but that's not evident from the picture.