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."
I think you're mixed up. Unless I'm gravely mistaken, the sky on Mars is indeed red and not Blue. The atmospheres vastly are different in both content and pressure. Also, there's probably a lot of rust dust in the air colloring things.
You might be thinking of the Martian sunset, which is blue.
Blaze a trail to the New World
If NASA had hi-res images of the Columbia after it reached outer space, they may have been able to prevent the disaster upon re-entry.
Maybe they're taking pictures of the robot to verify the functionality of its various components. And I would imagine they DID take hi-res images of it prior to launch, for comparison among other reasons.
Haven't you ever heard the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey"? We didn't go into space because we wanted teflon, velcro or cordless tools. We didn't find the technology to build MRIs, bone analyzers, or magnetic bearing systems laying around on the surface of the moon. The goals of the space program did not provide flywheel batteries, scratch resistant lenses, or microlasers. Instead it is the effort to stay in space that has given us the practical benefits. So you're going to be getting a lot more than just pictures of a barren wasteland from this.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Yea, I got a weird errie feeling of awe from looking at that picture that I never got from looking at other pictures of mars before. I think it was because for a split second, I thought I saw a large beetle on the surface, and during my natural instinct to look closer and verify that, a thought short circuited in during that split second before I had the chance, "No, thats Mars, that's pretty much impossible, theres no life there." and suddenly the picture had an actual meaning to me, I sensed its environment of total lifelessness that extended far beyond that horizon.
Then I scrolled over the picture, looking down at the rocks, and up at the horizon, and over, and felt how it was this huge expanse of real land, across the vacuum of space, virtually untouched, and actually sitting there with who knows what kind of potential. It was almost as if without any life, it seemed like the rocks in that picture had to make up for it, and they are sitting in that picture in total shock at the thing that just landed next to them. Eons of nothing happening and then that.