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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."
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,
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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!!
...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?
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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
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?)
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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.
i know.
they could have at least landed near a town or a beach or something.
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And I see an old lady smoking a cigar... oh wait, wrong test.
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.
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."
4 gigabytes, announced today. NASA could've spent $50 extra and gotten the 15 gigabyte one, but budget cuts et cetera et cetera. You know how it goes.
Besides, this lander is about half the size of the 15 gig model, and weighs less, which is great for that heavy martian gravity.
Oh, mars has less gravity? Oops.
Hot, green-skinned, six-breasted Martian stripper girls. They're just walking around the place, hitting on any robotic landers that they see in the hopes of starting a very long-distance relationship. Watch out, because before long, mail-order brides from Mars will be the next hot thing landing in your inbox.
So of course they had to block parts out. We couldn't have government resources used to transmit pr0n, now could we?
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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.
How many breadboxes to a Volkswagen?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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?
Here's a fantastic quote from that page (this is regarding a photographic artifact that appears in one picture):
My opinion about the object is, that there are only 3 possibilities:
1. There is a turtle-like animal living on Mars.
2. There is a turtle-like robot operating on Mars.
3. The image was manipulated by someone to let a turtle-like object appear.
Mmm... turtles...
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
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.
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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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.
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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.
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!