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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."
Why is it that when scientists need a medium-large object to compare with the size of a rock, it is always "the size of a Volkswagen"? It's even worse than using football-fields to measure distance.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
Interesting how the Martian clock gives the Mars date like so: MSD 46218.763 This looks very similar to ye olde Star Trek stardates.
...the "Mars Sol Date" (MSD) defined by AM2000. This represents a sequential count of Mars solar days elapsed since 1873 December 29 at approximately Greenwich noon
Very cool! I'm not sure I even care how they compare to previous pictures. There's something about knowing these are from virgin ground (so to speak). Alien landscape. I can't get enough. Right now, it just doesn't get much better.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
I need alittle help. Who can tell me where in Utah this picture was faked by the liberal space establishment?
If we work together we can beat the system!!
If you look at the first photo, you will notice that a small area is blacked out. Is there something there that NASA doesn't want us to see?
C:\>
...I wonder how long the commute is to the Bay Area from there? Maybe I could talk my boss into letting me telecommute a couple of days a month...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Check out this pic There's a line of rocks that starts at the middle left edge of the picture and goes up and to the right. In addition, there's a line of rocks that intersects the first in the upper/center. Finally, there's a "wind trail" in the sand that intersects both rock lines, forming a triangle.
In the center of the triangle are two triangular rocks.
Isn't that interesting?
One interesting mystery is the presence of dark patches that look like mud near the rover - they are clearly visible at the bottom the larger 8MB version of the photo on the nasa site. They are most likely formed by the airbags, but have an unusual dark appearance that really looks like wet ground.. nobody seems to know why they'd look that way from what I've read so far.
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
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
i know.
they could have at least landed near a town or a beach or something.
lysergically yours
Why is the landscape around Mars landers always so uninspiring?
It's due to an agreement between NASA and the Cultural Interdiction Wing of the Gyken-JAT Pan-Sapient Meld.
The CIW allows a probe to land now and then . . . as long as it doesn't stray near sites that would make Hu-Mans really want to go to Mars.
Such as the soaring mountains, yawning chasms, spectacular wind-carved rock outcroppings, and the planet's numerous brightly-lit interspecies brothels.
Stefan
The pictures are just the tip of the iceburg. If they are able to get Spirit over to some of those rocks, it'll perform tests on them that may detect signs of life. Now that's some tax money well spent.
Don't get me started on the real ways tax money is wasted.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Go have a look at:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/
Notice the dates on the files? Makes you wonder doesn't it? And why are they all modest? I want something bold and/or spicy!
And I see an old lady smoking a cigar... oh wait, wrong test.
Wow, such beautiful looking virgin terrain. The views are breathtaking, and the vast redness of the soil gives it a warm and cozy atmosphere.
It just makes the real estate developer in me itch for action.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
There is a decent article available at space.com with some more information from the press conference and the first color image as well.
nice and cool? I'd love 291 Kelvin right about now....it's freaking 257 Kelvin here
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
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.
Maybe they'll get a shot of Beagle 2 bouncing across the landscape...
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.
Half those images are bits of the robot itself.
If they wanted hi-res images of the robot, why not take them BEFORE they sent it to Mars?
Is Mars really THAT boring?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Mars should be OK. Just watch out for pics of Uranus.
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???
I believe under the black cersored block you will find either a KDE or gnome logo and NASA didn't want to deal with SCO lawsuits (despite SCO behaving as if they are from another planet)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
No argument here. I just REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want to see some cool extra-terrestrial pictures. These images are just making me itch all that more. Actually, those photos wouldn't satisfy me either. What I REALLY want, is to go there. Unfortunately, we have a few nuclear activists to get off our backs before we can do it cheaply.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Where are all the chicks with three boobs?
I give men fish.
Nasa has taken down the 8MB hires image off it's site due to bandwidth problems (/.ing aint helping im sure. I managed to get it earlier today and put a copy of it on my otherwise useless earthlink web area - Im sure that one will get hammered in short order too, so if anyone with a robust web server can get it and provide a better mirror, be my guest.
There's some color-corrected photos here that show this:
http://mars-news.de/life/
Basically, the theory behind it is that:
1) The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.
2) The atmosphere seen at an angle from the Hubble is almost always blue.
This latest landing only makes it the conspiracies flourish, because in 1997 and even in the 1970s when Viking landed, they immediately had color photos. Why was the color being hidden?
More links.
Also helps if you spell poorly.
It's basically a huge basin that has what looks to be an old river leading into it. If there was water, this is where to look, at least in a place where we could actually land. (The constraints are large: needs to be near the equator to get direct transmission to earth, low elevation to get maximum aerobraking, not too bumpy, etc)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH).
This has links to tons of great information, images, QuickTimeVR, 3d images, videos, history, and lots more about Mars and this MER Spirit mission in particular. I have been obsessively checking this page and branching out from there every couple of hours for the last few days.
Well, Canadians also spell it with a 'u' so there are some of us on the left side of the 'pond' who spell it colour.
$#!^ 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?
And if you look at earth from the moon while it is eclipsing the sun, it is red around the edge. doesn't mean the atmosphere is red here, just that red light is refracted at that angle from that point of view. If you see blue around the edge of mars I wouldn't expect the sky to be blue when seen from the ground, just means blue is being refracted or reflected towards earth.
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
If you look at the high definition photo, at the bottom-right is one of the dark rocks scientists have said may contain fossils, if you look at it you can see heavy indentations into it, this they believe, may be a fossil.
Also, up and to the right you'll see a smooth area, this is possibly from a hit millions of years ago, anyway, it's 'special' because it contains very finely ground rock, and if you look around the majority of the photo this does not exist, so it is believed this hole from a asteroid hit or whatnot has acted as a barrier and protected finer particules which NASA hope to scoop up and analyse.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
The caption says that
There's clear compositing artifacts in the image (where the subpieces don't stitch together smoothly), so I got to wondering: what's the previous record holder? And was it a single image or also a composite?Any pointers?
Emile Snyder
www.talentcodeworks.com
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
Hey gang,
Since this is what we have to go on, I thought I'd have some fun with the images.
Note how this big image curves at the bottom? This confirms that the panoramic camera takes multiple photos, and they're stiched together to make a composite (suspicions from the earlier thumbnail confirmed). Also note that the bad tiles also curve, which would be consistant with a bad tile. You can see what I think are airbag marks in the lower-right hand corner.
I have one that I've equalized, to get an idea of how things would look with a more earth-like atmosphere.
I took the same image, and enhanced the brightness and contrast.
If you're a conspiracy theorist, you're looking for land like this. Good luck! Doesn't look like any desert I've seen before.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
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.
Take your digital camera out and slam it against a wall hard enough to generate 40gs of deceleration, and see how many megapixiels it has left.
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.
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Mars has a very thin atmosphere so a parachute landing directly is going to be a hard landing, plus the danger of getting tangled in the chute after you land.
By slowing to a halt just feet about the surface with one burts, you get away from the parachute that could entangle you, but have nowhere near the complexity and weight of an expensive landing on rocket plume solution (Viking).
I have never seen this mentioned, but would guess also you avoid scouring, contaminating, or sterilizing your landing site with your rocket plume.
Letter To Iran
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
Probably quite a few... what many people fail to realize is how massive the numbers are for a relatively simple impact. Check out this article about dropping laptops. They dropped laptops in various bags from a height of 40 inches onto concrete to see what kind of shock loading the laptop experienced. The worst out of the bunch clocked in at a little over 200 G's!
n g_ 02-01.asp
http://www.codidirect.com/reviews/mobileComputi
55 G's really isn't that bad, when you think about it... and as long as you're mindful of the forces involved, designing an object around this is not that tough. Hell, laptop hard drives are designed to survive over 100 G's (while they are off, though.)
just a thought, if there was some kind of life on Mars NOW, how do we communicate with them? signals from Earth is probably useless but something physical and visual from the rover might useful.
imagine an alien spaceship landed on Earth, and just moves around and ignores any communication with it.
You have a funny idea of just how much money this cost and how much it is worth. The entire mission is under a billion dollars while the entire NASA budget is around $15b and, whether you can appreciate it or not, benefits humanity as a whole, albeit in an intangible way. Compare-and-contrast with other worthy endeavours: US military budget is something around $400b (more with the extra war spending). Wow. Glad we're not wasting too much cash on useless space exploration and instead putting it to work where it's really needed.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
work in monochrome. Actually all CCD's do. Your consumer camera has built in color filters attached physically to the CCD with a separate color per charge well. While this makes processing for you and the camera simple, it lowers the resolution and sensitivity than if you were using a single filter across the whole CCD and then later combine it into a mosaic.
The filter wheel also includes infrared and ultraviolet filters so that the camera can explore in those wavelengths as well. So it can still see more than what your consumer camera can.
And while its all fine and good the PCSAT has been lucky enough to work with off the shelf parts, if you're given a big budget and told to send something to mars (several months and a whole lot of radiation away..once you leave earth's somewhat protective magnetic field you're in a really dangerous environment) and you want to be really sure things work well, its best to get your equipment space certified and well proven, even if it sacrifices the cutting edge.
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I was reading on JPL's site last night (don't have link handy, sorry) that the vertical resolution was 4000 pixels. They didn't give a horzontal resolution. Given the picture is 3851 pixels high (cropped?), they might be right in some form.
Looking at the picture, I'm guessing a splice of four pictures, with a middle overlap - you can see two vertical splice zones, and two horizontal splice zones - the bottom horizontal splice zone is the hardest to see - look at the large rock just to the right of center on the image, but still to the left of the right vertical split. Perhaps this is how the camera works - take 4 pictures, beam back for post processing into a 4K X 4K pixel picture.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Actually, the color in these pictures is really very interesting.
What really stands out is that while all the soil and the sky are a dim, rusty red, the rocks in the pictures are grey-black.
That gives us a good start on considering the differences between the ubiquitous dust and the actual rocks. We'll obviously get a lot more information when the rover begins sampling.
For fun I carefully massaged the photo to suppress the massive red cast, so we can see all the colors and detail more clearly : here!
And the original for comparison (just resized) : here!
The rover and its pictures are all fine and good, but for over 400 million a pop, the question remains......
How will the rover improve nerds neverending quest for more porn??
Veramocor
for the tif version of this first color photo, head here. warning: 40mb!
i was watching CNN or Headline News and the NASA person they were interviewing said the compression ratio for this picture was 24:1, which is done by the rover before transmission. apparently, the ratio is adjustable and they are gearing up to take even better shots with less compression soon.
75,000 to 250,000 pounds of thrust hardly sounds like "a light push". Think about this for a moment. Given the same amount of propellent, are ION engines more powerful or less powerful than chemical engines?
(insert Jeopardy music here)
If you said "more" you'd be absolutely correct. If they were less efficient, then a slow burning chemical engine would last longer than an ION drive. If they were equally efficient, then what is the point of the fancy ION engine?
The reason the current engines work like they do is that there isn't enough energy available in the system to constantly power tons of propellant. In a nuclear engine, the power is there in the form of heat. All you need to do is find a way to convert that into propulsion. Given that 1 Watt = 0.00134102209 horsepower, we find that a small 10 MW reactor puts out ~13,410 horsepower. That's not too shabby. Increase the power (say like you'd get in a meltdown situation) and you can watch those horsepower figures skyrocket.
BTW, it seems I fibbed a little. Apparently NERVA does exhaust some radiation, so it *may* not be usable in launch situations. I'm still not convinced that it's a problem, but I'll have to do a little more reading to find out how much it puts out and if there is any fallout.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Mirroring content form the NASA server on *gasp* a NASA server!
Yeah, because Lord knows we use the same bandwidth in Greenbelt, Maryland that we also use in Pasadena, California.