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Mars Express 3D Image Released
zoney_ie writes "As reported in BBC News Online, ESA (European Space Agency) have released an image of the surface of Mars, captured in 3D and full colour. Europe's Mars Express orbiter has been taking pictures of the Martian surface at down to 10m resolution. The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date! Full size image available on ESA's Mars Express Website."
As a NASA worker, I'd like to congradulate the ESA on their success with Mars Express.
Welcome to Mars!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!
"You never finish anything! Why don't you go and finish the Earth before you go running off to map some other silly planet?"
[ Don't reply to this ]
The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!
Uhh.. I'm sure you're not including military mapping. Military topographical maps are quite accurate. Of course once Mars has strategic military importance (or oil) these maps will be available only to King George and his friends.
Spot the beagle !
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I am pretty sure that many top secret government organizations have mapped the earth at a better resolution than 10 meters.
Or did you think the US bombed the chinense embassy on accident?
so, do they have any pictures of the Spirit rover, in those 3d pics?
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
I, for one, welcome our new Martian overlords.
In Soviet Russia, the image captures you.
Are any of those publicly availible (declassified)?
#710000? *snort*
People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.
"The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!"
There's nothing more comforting than knowing that we will soon know more about a planet a bajillion miles away that we've been on for a few days, than our own planet which we've been on for a couple few... errmm... years.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
In addition to the scientific value, that image makes terrific wallpaper, and it is scaled perfectly for my monitor.
Here
Dephine URL
Are these images copyrighted, or are they put straight into the public domain? It sure would be cool to play a realtime strategy game (Dune 2005? heh.) right on the surface of Mars!
They need to get this thing over that so-called face. This clearly has the resolution to reveal the truth that it's probably a butt.
a la NASA's "Blue Marble" images for Earth?
:)
That's one thing NASA has over ESA - they release a lot more material into the public domain... and this time I'm actually paying for it with my tax Euros, so I say they should release the images to us all
Earth is mapped, near real time, to about 1 foot with military satellites.
Well, let's think about this.
Considering we have publicly accessible aerial imagery down to 1m resolution (and you know the US military has sub-meter capability for their purposes) in selected areas, and 2m and 10m over the rest of the world, I'd say there is far more detail on Earth than Mars.
Further, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission/SRTM mapped some 85% of the Earth's surface. Much of the data that mission generated is actually redundant, with some areas being scanned 3 times. This makes that data even more reliable, although it's fairly coarse at only 1arcsec resolution.
And IIRC, the Russian EGNOS (?) data covers Europe-to-Asia with decent resolution.
Anyway, I'm not busting the submitter's chops for this comment. I think the Mars mapping is fantastic, and I wish those of us interested in amateur digital cartography (now *there's* a party conversation topic) had equally easy access to Mars data.
Video games should make more use of all the terrain data governments generate.
It's only ONE aspect of the Mars Express mission.
On the website we can read:
The Mars Express Orbiter will:
image the entire surface at high resolution (10 m/pixel) and selected areas at super resolution (2 m/pixel)
produce a map of the mineral composition of the surface at 100 m resolution
map the composition of the atmosphere and determine its global circulation
determine the structure of the sub-surface to a depth of a few kilometres
determine the effect of the atmosphere on the surface
determine the interaction of the atmosphere with the solar wind
Beagle2 failed but it was only 20% of the mission.
Iraq: war to save the U
did anyone else notice the part in the ESA disclaimer about if the picture contained any recognizable individual.... wonder what they know about mars that we don't....
If the full georegistered archive is made available I'll be pleased. Otherwise it will be just another data-source for ESA to make money off of.
Given all the taxes paid citizens of the ESA member nations it had sure better be made publicly available.
I am looking at the image, and I see what appear to be faint blue traces in the valley regions. Does this look like ice to anyone else? I am not sure what I am seeing, but it is definitely not just red sand and red rocks down there.
stuff |
Not meaning to say that the pic is fake, but why does it look like somebody made the thing in Painter?
Hmm, looks like they got an elevation model like a DEM from radar, applied some analytical hill shading and colouring and put that out.
:)
If the top part really is a photograph then the bottom bit has used it as a texture map.
Pretty, though
The resolution of Mars Express camera is circa 10m so it could be possible to spot Spirit if the pass is at the right time of day (Martian Dawn/Dusk and it can cast a 10+m shadow)
There could also be a possibilty of spotting Spirit or Beagles chutes if they have played out flat on the surface (and not been blown miles away by now)
I'm pretty sure this isn't a huge mission priority right at the moment because i'd imagine it taking a lot of analysis to find them in the pixels.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Picture taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express orbiter on 14 January 2004 under the responsibility of the Principal Investigator Prof. Gerhard Neukum
Hmmmm! It's time to kick A** and chew bubble gum!
Is it me or does it look like a painting?
So in little longer than Spirit has moved about 4 steps, Express has mapped the entire planet? Not bad...
As for the "better than earth" maps, I think they include the 70% of our planet that is under water.
The article says the image provided is at 12 m resolution.
Not sure where the conversion went wrong.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Wow... can't believe mods find my post +5 interesting... it's so easy to get modded up on slashdot when you're from NASA :)
:)
Hmm... maybe NASA faked my karma... tinfoil hat people, maybe you can explain?
Cheers,
Justin Wick
At 10m resolution, one or two pixels in the images will have some light from Spirit, yes. =)
But I think the joining forces around Mars link from the main page is very cool.
From the article:
Agustin Chicarro, ESA's Project Scientist for Mars Express, said: "This is the first time that two space agencies are co-operating on another planet with two spacecraft. It is remarkable to know that one is in orbit and one is on the surface, both taking measurements to complement each other."
The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty.
It would be cool if they mapped this high resolution surface in Keyhole.
It already has Mars, but it's very low resolution (and not very 3d.)
~Berj
what 3-d? I don't see any quicktime VR plugin.. I don't see any realtime model with a java plugin.. What a rip off, it's just another picture of a red rock. My god, how long are they going to drag this thing out!
Look at it, it looks like a poor render, it must be a fake!
(I joke...)
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
Right, so that image they put up is nifty and shows that they have been able to extrapolate altitude from the stereo aspect of the cam.
But for those of us who like to do our own 3D modeling, when will they release the whole-planet texture and heightmaps (a la NASA's Blue Planet, as mentioned by another poster)? I want to be able to load that stuff up and then make my own animations of probes/ships/etc., complete with landing and interacting with the environment.
Besides, without that data, how can I start to plan how to terraform the planet? And how can I decide the optimum location for my evil lair?
will the images be publicly available for download? i remember that the esa and nasa mapped earth with a stereo antenna from the space shuttle and that the data costs a buck load of money to use.
The rover woke up, stretched it's legs out, rolled off its landing pad, went ten feet then stopped for the day....sounds like just another day in the life of Star Jones.
Well it's maybe because they DO have a lot more material to release...
ESA probes/satellites are quite rare these days but it's good to see they seem to release the data because many scientists will use it.
Iraq: war to save the U
I'm all out of bubble gum!
Europ != US
We won't go there to steal their minerals. We also won't kill them pretending we are trying to 'free' them.
Well, now we know why Beagle 2 didn't survive...E MPM75V9ED_1.html
http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/S
Remember when NASA first put Hubble in space the system was out of focus? NASA didn't get back up there to fix it for a while did they? The Hubble in fact had a dual mission. The first mission, a secret government plan was to take high resolution images of planet earth. The lens system was just out of focus for astronomy purposes, it was perfect for earth bound pics. You didn't think the Hubble would get government funding just to take pretty pictures of stars and galaxies did you? The government never does anything for free.
... so I can make a normalmap out of it, dump it into Celestia and watch it bring my computer to a screeching halt.
Talk about fun!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
goatse.cx man!
Hmm.. Mars = big. Rez 10m of mars... Fullsize pictures. "Calling ISP to ask for bandwidth"...
---
Original source of the kick ass & chew bubble gum line: They Live!
Good that somebody is working together on Mars...but now somebody should make humanity work well with each other on this Earth !!
From the FAQ: "You may freely use the images you find on our site, as long as it is not for commercial use. You may not modify the images. If you intend to use any of the images on a website, please acknowledge that it originates from ESA. For more information, see our Terms and conditions of use."
However, in those terms and conditions, it goes on to say the following:
"The contents of the ESA Web Portal are intended for the personal and non-commercial use of its users. ESA grants permission to users to visit the site, and to download and copy information, images, documents and materials from the website for users' personal non-commercial use. ESA does not grant the right to resell or redistribute any information, documents, images or material from its website or to compile or create derivative works from material on its website. Use of material on the website is subject to the terms and conditions outlined below.
All material published on the ESA Web Portal is protected by copyright and owned or controlled by ESA or the party credited as the provider of the content, software or other material.
Users may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display or in any way exploit any of the content, software, material or services, in whole or in part, without obtaining prior written authorisation. In order to obtain authorisation to display or use any content of the ESA Web Portal, please make a request for authorization by clicking on 'Contact us'."
Damnations.
Turkeyphant
...reminds me of one good old computer game:
:)
Zak McKracken.
Not that there are martians, but it reminds me of artist's renderings of martian desert at 320x200, 4bpp
...especially in the 3D-image (look at the upper left region). Photo is propably taken during some early morning or late evening hours (shadows casted by the mountains) so it could be a possibility.
I have to say that I'm amazed with the claim that Mars is being mapped better than the Earth. I don't like the associative suggestion that somehow we know more about Mars than the Earth. We don't.
There's probably not a spot on the surface of the Earth that has not been visited by a human, while on Mars we can't even decide if the ground is muddy or not. We know so little about the red planet.
This is my sig.
you don't have to know how to spell to work for NASA.
:-)
No, but you have to know how to nitpick to be a true Slashdot troll.
But wow, look at what's going on on the ground. The new rover images are really remarkable.
I feel bad for the Europeans and the loss of the Beagle. Hopefully this won't dissuade European policy makers from continuing to explore the stars, and honestly, a friendly rivalry will help the space programs on all continents.
It seems better to have nations compete to build spacecraft to expore the heavens with than it is to have them compete to build more armies with.
This is my sig.
They want to make the most realistic levels ever made.
CNN has an article about Bush's sudden fascination with the space program and it points out how he never once visited the NASA facilities in Houston while he was governor there. Also the convenient timing of his announcement that just happens to coincide with the Democrat front-runners ganging up on Howard Dean is mentioned.
One of the first casualties of the cuts that are necessary to make Bush's 'vision' a reality has been the Hubble, as reported in New Scientist.
See also some concise reporting from the Economist that takes a cold, unemotional look at the question of whether or not we actually need manned spaceflight at all. From that article:
Excuse me for sounding like an 'incorrigible cynic,' but the guy doesn't exactly have a good record with telling the truth.I digress.
That paper has long held an anti-manned-spaceflight view, which I would say is a bit short-sighted in view of the vulnerability of Earth to catastrophic bombardments from above.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I think the point being missed here is that very few mappings have been done of Earth using *the same single instrument*.
A very good illustration of how important this became available when the Hiparcos and Tycho star-catalogs were produced by the Hiparcos satellite (also ESA).
When the resulting catalog were compared to ground based astrometric catalogs, every single one of them showed systematic errors of varying magnitude.
Even with the best instruments and the most careful technicians and scientists, systematic errors between instruments, methods and setups exist. When it comes to consistency, a single instrument in a single setup beats anything else.
I don't doubt that military "assets" exist which can image the birds in my garden playing soccer with breadcrumbs but they have never made a global map (even ignoring the two thirds which is water) with the same single instrument.
SAREX came close, but no cigar: the polar caps were missing.
I think ESAs claim stands: They're doing it better than we ever bothered to do it here.
Poul-Henning
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
I'd give you +5000 Insightful but I don't have any damn points.
Maniac Mansion 1, too... Heh. I was a kid when I played Zak McK on an Amiga.
It looks more like night frost to me. During the cold night, frost settles on the ground. Sun light melts it in the morning. It lingers the longest in the shaded valley floors.
That's how it works on earth, at least. Why not on Mars?
Recent polls say as many as 61% of Americans are against the idea of spending money on a mission to Mars (or the moon, or anywhere interesting, really). Fine. Who needs 'em?
:)
I fired off an email to NASA to see if there was a way I could bypass Congress and give them money directly (they take my money anyway, so why shouldn't I be allowed to add to it?). No response as of yet (sent it on the 15th), and I figure odds are any response I'll get will boil down to "What, are you crazy?" but the pessimist in me says this might be the only chance I'll get of seeing someone on Mars before I die and the malcontent in me would enjoy giving my elected "representatives" the finger.
If it's a stereoscopic camera, why is there only one picture? This ain't 3D!
Uhh.. I'm sure you're not including military mapping. Military topographical maps are quite accurate.
As others pointed out, Mars is a lot easier to map than the earth, as, well, there's not really anything to obscure orbital photographs. The Earth has lots of things, such as forests, jungles and water, which make maps hard. So yes, Mars will be mapped more accurately than Earth.
Of course once Mars has strategic military importance (or oil) these maps will be available only to King George and his friends.
Well, until Bush invades the EU, I don't think there's much chance of that. This is an ESA mission, remember?
Unless you happen to be talking about a dead English monarch.
Unless military satellites are a hell of a lot more advanced than they let on, I doubt they have much capability to perminate several miles of water or thick jungles and forests. Mars, on the other hand, has not a lot obscuring it at all.
Besides which, I'd debate your assertion that the eart is mapped that accurately, in real time. Sure, satellites can map a particular part of the earth with such accuracy, but they don't keep cameras pointed at every part of the planet at the same time. That would just be unrealistic.
Who modded this guy informative?
Remember earth has quite a thicker atmosphere.
Unless you send a laser down to get the atmospheric disturbanced, you will not get much better. (I know the "inteligences" want you to
believe they could better, but you simple have
no change to get earth that good.)
after the astonishing blue-red 3D pictures taken by Spirit, i'm a bit dissapointed by these ESA pictures.
I was on the cusp of getting my 3D glasses out.
M r E pre must contact the creator....
you are forgetting that 70% of Earth surface is covered with water
This is quite true. Over the past 50 years there have been less than half a dozen deep submersible explorations of the deep ocean ranges. Every time someone has scrounged together resources to go take a look down there we find new lifeforms, new biological chemistries, and amazing new chemical depositions, and evidence of extraordinarily catastrophic submarine avalanches in our recent geologic past. It seems sad to me that we spend quite a lot of money exploring rocks in the sky and basically no money exploring 70% our own planet. Instead of dreaming about expensively hauling people up out of the gravity well to live in doomed colonies on sterile worlds with no ecosystems, let's start planning our own undersea cities!
Da Blog
In terms of topography we know Mars better than Venus. MOLA mapped the surface of Mars to an average resolution of 500m. The Magellan topographic data has a resolution of several kms. The vertical resolution of MOLA was much better to, in the order of 1m as opposed to 100m for Magellan.
Does the image look like a painting or ink drawing to anyone else? It's a conspiracy, I say!
Look at the high res image. There is a giant statue of a shmoo! Obviously, the Martians worship them, or are shmoon themselves. Of course, if they sent Al Capp to prepare the way, why do they keep shooting down our probes?
Look at how new those valleys look!
Virtually free of craters.
I suppose that determines their age, within some bounds, to some probability.
And eventually, we'll find out if the flat bottoms of the valleys are indeed accumulated dust/talus, or ? I notice that the wallpaper colors them rather whitish, as if they were icy. Is this just wishful thinking on the part of the wallpaper renderer?
Ummm, what would be the point in mapping the earth to this resolution when most of it is water? There are higher resolution maps of the major land portions so I figure that cancels out not having a 10m resolution map of a bunch of waves.
qualify this. how many sqr feet does the earth contain? - for how long? - what time frame? - what is the size of the area to be measured? what spectrum(s) are being used?
are you telling me that 500 square Megameters of data times 3.28 (1 meter approx 3.28 feet) of data is collected *realtime*?
it is more likely this occurs on very selected target area for a selected period of time within a specified range of the spectrum - but not the entire earth.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I see about 500, dude. I can't count them, exactly, as they frequently try to hide, or change into something else.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I wonder if the colors are realistic or "embellished" to match NASA's embellishment?
Venus has been mapped better than Earth since the 1994 Magellan mission. Were the NASA scientists just observing the custom of "Ladies First", or is NASA stealthily pushing a subtle feminist agenda?
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
And when it comes to consistency... a single instrument can make the most monumentally consistent error... it helps to have other instruments and methods to compare against here...
Yes, but having half a map done one way and half a map done the other gives you the worst of both: systemic errors AND inconsistencies between the two (making "big picture" observations and theories derived therefrom troublesome at best).
Far better to map the thing TWICE, with two different instruments, and use the two maps as a crosscheck against each other. CONSISTENCY and a corrective factor for systemic errors inherent to either instrument alone.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
1) he works for NASA and their standards are much lower than they would have us believe; or
2) he works for NASA, but in an unskilled position such as a cleaner; or
3) he is a fraud.
Incidentally, the fact that the post netted a rating of "+5 Interesting", illustrates that the Slashdot moderation system is little more than a badly flawed popularity scheme, much like federal election system. Either system will sometimes produce a winner that is intellectually bereft and has nothing of value to say.