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Spirit Takes Snapshot of Earth
ControlFreal writes "On its 66th Sol on Mars, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has obtained its first full view of crater Bonneville. In doing so, Spirit achieved its primary travel destination, as set out in its initial itinerary. Furthermore, Spirit has now travelled more than 300 meters, thereby fulfilling its minimum mission success criteria. With this, and Opportunity halfway through its primary mission, and having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past, NASA has truly many an astonishing interplanetary succes story! See the overview at the Mars Rover site for more details." Another reader writes "Among the 'money-shots' from the Mars rovers would have to rank the 'pale blue dot' image released today--a view looking back towards Earth. The larger image also includes the horizon and Sun, which because the Earth is seen as an inner planet closer in towards the Sun from a martian perspective, is difficult to photograph without saturation by solar glare."
From all of us out here that dreamed of stepping on the Martian surface at one time or another, thanks for taking me there--at least in spirit.
Good job all!
...tizzyd
I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE :D
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Feels a little bit humbling... I feel so small and insignificant :-\
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
we all know the earth is flat and the "moon landings" were faked.
If you turn down your screen resolution so everything is bigger, you can see yourself waving.
[ Don't reply to this ]
Heck, and I thought it involved fairy cake. Turns out you need to travel to mars first. Oh well.
The news coverage of the exciting explots of these plucky extra-terrestrial rovers seems to have diminished. No pictures (well no original pictures) of aliens in the foreground of the Megabytes of images, no puddles, no golf-balls. Not very inspiring viewing.
I think the realisation that the missions were not going to be highly inspirational came when it occurred to me that the first rover landed on a plain and the chosen mission was to drive over to a crater and look in while the second rover landed in a crater and its chosen mission is to take a picture of the plain just over the rim.
Seems that getting there was the easy bit, achieving something meaningful has been a bit harder.
"Socrates, you are very convincing and I would believe you if only I hadn't heard of the Total Perspective Vortex That's where you see the whole infinity of creation and a tiny speck showing yourself in relation to it. The shock of one's insignificance is enough to kill most people."
-- Arthur Dent.
rm -rf / is the evil of all root
As I has seen masr last summer, it looked so big and red. I wonder when looked back from Mars, what color is earth.
I have seen pitcure from interplanetory orbit to take Earth and Moon in a single pitcture. Color contrast between them has impressed me a lot.
I thought this will also be a total failure, but I am really happy to know that I am wrong. Now, bush has another supporter for his *travel to mars* plans. PS : Have any of you read the Edgar Rice Burroughs fiction books about life on Mars. I really liked them. Now to know that they were all false....
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
Dang. They could have told us when to say cheese.
mysql://astronaut:@localhost.localdomain/astrobio failed to connect
User astronaut@astrobio.net has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections
It's not the astrobio's first time...
I doubt any image returned by space exploration in the next few thousand years will change our perspective on things as much as the Earthrise photographs from Apollo 8. Our first view of Earth from the Moon, and it showed so much. It was large and clear enough to connect with, it was plainly Earth with oceans and continents and clouds, and it was tiny - all of human history and culture, all our achievements, in that small spot. Now that's quite a culture shock.
But 'pale blue dot' images? It's just a dot. It might just as well be Venus for all the emotional impact I get from it. Maybe if we could see _two_ dots from Mars - Earth and Moon - then we'd get the same sense of smallness we got from the Apollo views, because that would establish identity at the gut level.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's totally cool that Spirit made it to Bonneville crater (I've been waiting!), BUT I can't help but wonder if it wasn't a little disappointing that there doesn't seem to be any exposed bedrock as over at the Opportunity site...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
As the advert says, find out at Sun.com/mars
It really makes you wonder if there is intelligent life elsewhere staring at us in the same way wondering if we are staring back.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
NASA has truly many an astonishing interplanetary succes story!
:(
Damn I thought it was going well
Before I get mail...
You Are Here
Earth as Viewed from the Martian Surface
by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
Consistently highly rated among those memorable 'money-shots' from the current Mars' surface exploration is a view looking back towards the Earth. On Thursday, the Spirit rover team released the banner image showing the Earth as a tiny gray dot in the martian sky near the horizon.
The history of such views backwards towards the home planet, Terra Firma, have captivated the imagination for a generation of astronomers. This glimpse from the surface of another planet offers an unrivalled perspective that stretches beyond just seeing our home as one of many planets, or the only pale blue dot in our solar system.
As Carl Sagan's widow, Anne Druyan , described this perspective image to Astrobiology Magazine, such earth views make "us look at this tiny planet, at the pale blue dot, and to see it in its real context, in its actual circumstances, in its true tininess. I don't know anyone who's able to really see that one-pixel Earth and not feel like they want to protect the Earth; that we have much more in common with each other than we're likely to have with anyone anywhere else."
The evocative phrase describing the Earth as a 'pale blue dot' was coined by Carl Sagan after seeing our planet as a single pixel. The view was taken from the departing Voyager spacecraft. The entire earth could be encompassed as a flicker of light. The first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that actually shows our home as a planetary disk was captured by the Mars Orbital Camera on May 8th.
One question that might be answerable from such a world-view is could a scientist on Mars identify from such a perspective that the Earth harbored life. In 1993, a team of researchers inspired by Carl Sagan, used an Earth fly-by of the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to catch a glimpse of how the Earth might appear from afar. For astrobiologists, Sagan's results were surprising.
Rather than seeing the Earth as an obvious candidate for life, the Galileo pictures gave surprisingly few clues of the biological potential of our own planet.
From afar, how Galileo missed the obvious signs of terrestrial life as we would have expected to see them, was at first disconcerting to the scientific community, because future missions aim to observe more distant extrasolar planets and detect what would be visible in the spectra--the 'pale blue dot' scenario.
One answer may lie in the fact that the spacecraft made its observations while still quite close to the Earth.
"The spectrograph was designed to look at small areas of Jupiter, so the field of view of the spectrograph was quite small," said Nick Woolf of Arizona, in earlier discussions with the Astrobiology Magazine.
"Also, since the surface brightness of Jupiter [the Gaileo's intended visual target] is far less than the Earth, the spectrograph detectors saturated except when the spectrograph was pointed at the darkest area of Earth - a cloud-free section of sea," Woolf noted. The cloud-free sea is considered very dark relative to the dominance of bright clouds in a global picture of Earth. Thus it should come as no surprise that Galileo was successful in only imaging a relatively dark and lifeless planet, mainly because its design was not intended to look at Earth, but to probe Jupiter instead.
A spectroscope that might detect infrared or visible light looking back on Earth or outwards to other planets might focus mainly on four gases that are found in Earth's atmosphere and linked to life:
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Brace yourselves for another wave of those not so funny mars pictures, featuring Marvin the Martian.
Sig it.
Wow. Technology at it's best :)
Go Sun!
Many of us have looked up at the night sky all our lives, some have bought or made telescopes to see even more. We've beheld some amazing and beautiful things as we gazed at the heavens. We've seen the bright stars in our sky that turned out to be separate worlds, but they still remained just little points of light as we rested comfortably on our unimaginably huge earth.
But now we see another little dot hovering above a brightening horizon.
That's our planet.
Our home.
Seen from the surface of another world.
We are now just the little dot in the sky.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I've noticed in some of the images of Spirit there is what seems to be a very shiny object at the opposite end of the crater:
Here (top right), here (top left) and here (middle).
Could it be a piece of Spirits entry/descent stage? In that last image it looks like an oddly shaped rock. If it is a rock, what could have made it so reflective?
Cique? How do you pronounce that? :-)
The place where the Thirteenth Tribe of Man lives "on a shining planet known as Earth."
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
when is the rover going to give us a picture of J'onn J'onzz old house? That would be impressive!
You have to love the "You are here" caption on that image of earth from mars.
Who says nasa scientists dont have a sense of humor.
bunny ;-)
Some reports said this thing was actually moving
Sorry about the silly offtopic 1st post but I just couldn't resist.
More seriously, I have been following the twin rover missions with great interest and I think it's absolutely amazing what they (And the JPL team of course) have achieved. I looked with great interest at the pic of our "pale blue (Even though the pic is monochrome) dot"
Even on the relatively tiny (In relation to astronomical standards) scale of a view from our nearest neighbour, it is truly humbling to realise just how insignificant our rock, in the greater scheme of things, really is.
Some of you might be interested in visiting a site that I visit on a daily basis to get and update on the latest images from Mars - photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov
Free Firefox news reader.
Here is a link if the original site is /.
http://linux.iconrate.net/gallery/11-ml-02-earth-A 067R1.jpg
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
The view of earth would look like this , according to this slashdot story.
Nothing to see here
Why link to astrobio.net in the article instead of the jpl? The jpl has the bandwidth to handle the load from slashdot etc, it appears astrobio.net does not..
I am still astounded at the pictures that are sent back from Mars. I think the world is a little jaded at the monumentous task that was accomplished with this mission. This is historic stuff that should be in the press every day! If landing on the moon was big this should be justa as big if not bigger!!!
Stay tuned for new sig...
Is there a version of the Earth photo without the dopey "You Are Here" graphic?
I don't know why JPL isn't playing up the coolness factor of this a bit more, but in this panoramic navcam montage of Bonneville, you can clearly see the lander's heatshield to the left, glinting in the sun.
(Later on preview) Okay, now MSNBC is mentioning it.
I think I blinked.
Where is the food court? And more importantly, the arcade?
Inspired by danielroot's and kokogiak's Martian stereo wiggles I've made a few Mars Wiggles of my own. No funny colored glasses required.
Consider that the human life span of about 80 years is but an instant compared to the lifecycle of the stars/galaxies/etc.
And we spend a significant amount of that time destructively (fighting/quarreling/warring/killing/spiting). Feels kinda weird...even destruction is bad only from our point of view....who knows what's actually "good" or "bad". Our knowledge and lives are just insignificant specks in the vastness of the Universe.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I think that's even more interesting, and might draw people's interest as well.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Reminds one of Carl Sagan's words:
... Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Pale Blue Dot
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
I wonder how long it takes them to release to the public the pictures they DON'T want us to see?
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
Look at the picture of the crater. Do you see the white speck in the middle of the upper left quadrant? What is that? Whatever it is, it jumped out at me as soon as I saw the photograph.
"Never tell me the odds"
Although I don't expect the NASA-servers to go down that easily. ;-)
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Then again, with the number of dead spaceprobes around Mars it's perhaps not so surprising if they've spotted one of them. Now, if they could find the Beagle we'd be tremendously pleased...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
OK, I'm imagining it. I'm imagining sitting there on Titan and really kicking myself for going all that way for a closeup view of Saturn and then picking as my vantage point the one and only moon in the entire Solar System with a thick smoggy atmosphere so that I can't see a damn thing ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's a pity it's only a monochrome pic
speaking of pale blue: when the shuttle is in orbit it gets this really awesome looking pale blue light reflected from the earth. Does anyone know what that color is (nm, whatever)? I'd like to have one of my lamps put out that same color, or make one that does.
The image from Voyager was the same thing, some really tiny dot. Puts things in perspective and blah, blah, blah.
What I want to see is this image and then three or four ultra-zoomed in images in sequence, to see just how detailed the cameras are.
This is a good idea. Right?
The Huygens mission page at NASA
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I mean, how on earth could NASA position such a large arrow, big letters and a magnifier in space?
Seems that NASA has actually lost the edge in robotic space exploration. Remember this little gem of a story submitted by someone from Switzerland and posted by Michael(who else).
Neither my house nor the Great Wall of China
You don't need a lab to make mud.
That is one _very_ crappy image. I want my money back.
HAD
I remember that broadcast. There was something visceral as they read Genesis with the picture on TV, as fuzzy as it was. Publication of the true photo only amplified it, and I still get the feeling thinking about it, decades later.
IMHO what we need MOST at the ISS is a conference room. From what I've heard, EVERY astronaut or cosmonaut has come back to Earth with his/her world view adjusted by the experience. World leaders need to understand, that viscerally, that we all share this little island in space. (Unfortunately I suspect that some world leaders are so jaded and full of themselves that they'd see the vision and instead think "I want it ALL!")
I was similarly struck by a sequence during the movie, "Master and Commander." The scene began of people on the ship, then pulled back an up, until you began to realize that this was a tiny little ship on a huge ocean. I wished we could get a similarly powerful sequence of a spacecraft. Part of the effectiveness of the movie sequence was that the ocean was active, and that can't be captured in space.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past
I thought the mission(s) were concieved because we already had very strong indications of a wet Martian past. Is this just marketspeak for not finding anything, ie. mission failure? Every press release from NASA that I read talks about indications and strong indications, there is nothing substantial so far.
Or maybe this is just hedging for another mission, to finally determine if these indications are true?
Really. Let's all admit it finally. Those pictures from mars are as boring as hell!
Interesting attitude.
I, for one, find the pictures fascinating and awe-inspiring on many levels.
At first it was just an appreciation for the mere fact that NASA was able to get the rovers onto the Martian surface. When I think of how f***ing far away Mars is, and how they were able to hit the target, I'm pretty much in awe. Yeah, the physics are well understood and software exists to determine everything about the mission (I can download such software for my home PC), but actually doing it is still pretty amazing.
Then there's the whole rover itself. It's a semi-autonomous machine, thousands of miles from home base, and it can send back some pretty detailed images of the surface, drill rocks, sample the environment. Hell, sometimes getting cams in the other room to work properly can be a task. That they could do this, troubleshoot and re-program the machine from that distance, and do it *twice* gives me a tremendous feeling of well-being.
Then there are the pictures themselves. We're peering at a f***ing other planet, man! Never before in human history have we seen the Martian surface with this much detail and this much information. I know it doesn't mean much to many people, but this is the spirit of exploration, the pure f***ing joy of discovery that pushed our forefathers to new worlds, new medicines, new art. Pushing the bounds, ripping apart the g*ddamned envelope, reaching beyond our grasp, is what makes us human and differentiates us from some cockroach or mindless automaton.
Mod me as a dork, but I am happy to be alive at this time.
God will save those who embrace Him. All one has to do is answer the call. So there is a hint. In fact, there is hope.
It does make a person reevaluate everything. It makes you wonder what things will be like in another 10,000 years. By then, maybe we'll have colonies on hundreds of planets. Our descendants will find it hard to believe that we lived on a single planet for so long. Maybe Earth won't even exist anymore.
Can you imagine what it will be like if we see colonies on Mars in our lifetimes? Even if it is only five people, it will be unbelievable. To know that we are living in the generation that is recognizing the dream of ancient civilizations is no less than thrilling.
"Never tell me the odds"
Maybe because of porn thread yesterday, when I saw the term Money-Shots in the introduction, I immediately got a vision of appolectic Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they find out that not only is there life on Mars but their reproductive processes are similar to ours (with the same predillictions for watching them).
Spam of the 21st century: "Grateful, teenaged Martian sluts eager to thank you for taking them away from their dry, cold, dark homes."
Laugh - it's friday.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
A dot
;))
Lost in space
At least we are somewhere.
Since I am a dot on a bigger dot in the middle of huge dots and other dots
I must be dotty
(I feel fine
This is all about relativity of matter
We are infinitesimal specks on an infinitesimal dot amongst the infinite expanse of our universe. How ever did Zaphod Beeblebrox cope with such a horrific concept?
Then we all could have shot back with our laser pointers
Or mooned.
Either would have really brightend things up
Hunderds of thousands of bright laser lights
Or Hundreds of thousands of dead fish belly white butts pointed at the sky.
Any signs of intelligent life?
[sig]darkfus[/sig]
I know I'm going to take a lot of flak for saying this, but it seems NASA is misguided. The way things work, first you build a prototype, then you develop the prototype. The shuttle program was the prototype, the proof that we could build a reusable space craft. The follow up should have been focusing on a way to make space flight cheap, based on what we'd learned.
NASA shouldn't be planning a mission to Mars. It should be working on technology to make leaving the Earth's atmosphere cheap enough that it can be done recreationally and industrially by a variety of research labs, companies and private citizens.
People used to say 'if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...' fill in the blank with the cure for your favorite social ill.
The answer, of course, was that we had the technology to put a handful of people on the moon, but we didn't have the technology to put a thousand or even a hundred people on the moon.
For that, NASA needs to change gears. And they haven't.
Sagan's book "Contact" had an interesting bit about the psychological effect of having the wealthiest people in the world seeing, in person, the earth as a single, blue, borderless orb.
Why can't we work on mass drivers, revive the X11 and concentrate on making space flight a more accessable reality?
PCR allowed "DNA fingerprinting" to be useful by making DNA replication cheap so that you only needed a follicle or a drop of blood. Theoretically, you could have done DNA fingerprinting and DNA replication before that, but it would have been very expensive because you'd use up a lot of expensive polymerase in the process. So it didn't happen. This is one of the most underappreciated lessons from the history of science. The technological breakthroughs that matter most are the ones which make technology cheap enough for everyone to afford.
Take care of this, and Mars missons, when we're ready for them, will be far less costly. If there's water there now, there will still be water there in a decade or two. Not much is likely to change until Mars' moon crashes into the surface, but we still have a few decades before that happens.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
+1, Dork. But I like your style...
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
Yeah, and a huge group of Awesome Aliens partying it up on a houseboat with ton's of Miller Light would have been cool too.
(With thanks to Eric Idle)
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
In 1969, an American stood on the surface of the moon. In 2004, a golf cart travels 300 yards, and another finds what MAY have been mud.
Guess which one we're more excited about?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I'm not trying to take anything away from the awesomeness of the accomplishment. I'm totally for space exploration. But, if we could just land somewhere that doesn't remind me of Nebraska with no Corn, just dirt... I think it would really help the cause.
Imagine finding a cool man, with an area we can land right next to some Huge Mountain with some freaky shaped Outcroppings, then, picture the night sky almost completely taken up by a Saturn and its Rings.
Everyone on Earth would go Ape sh$t for that. I'd probably wet my shorts if I saw that.
And further, a smaller moon would have much less gravity, easier to land on. Plus, easier to conceive of a manned mission there because of much lower Escape Velocity.
I messed up with Titan (gaseous)... Just find some other rocky chunk of dirt.
If only they'd put 'Mostly Harmless' instead of 'You Are Here'.
Just out of curiosity, is Mars far away from us that the constelations look different?
I know that it's a relatively small distance, from a galactic perspective, but is it still enough to make some difference?
Anyone?
wbs.
Huh?
People just don't spend the amount of time they used to looking up at the sky's wonder and glory.
It takes a bit of experience to be able see what is dramatic. People are usually underwhelmed by what they see in a small telescope, they much less likely to be able to take in the magnificence of an unmagified image of the sky. I look at Alberio through my little 90mm refractor, and it's absolutely stunning to me. However for most people it's a yawn. The only sky object that uniformly gets a "wow" is the Moon.
If you're accustomed to looking at the sky quite a bit, you'll find that planets are dramatically different from stars: they look like little holes punched out of the sky. Once you've learned to really see planets, the idea of seeing Earth the same way will have more resonance for you.
Mars also has kind of a creamy color when viewed from Earth; it's a bit too faint to look as dramaticall red as it is close up. Earth is a larger planet and might be a bit brighter. I wonder if the picture were in color, whether Earth might be a pale blue. A tiny sapphire glowing in a reddish dawn might be a bit more dramatic. However, the delights of naked eye and low magnification sky viewing are subtle, sometimes in hints of color, or tiny but striking arrangements. It takes a certain number of hours to be able to even perceive them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sagan's ghost writer was quite good.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
...I see endless pictures of the senseless Madrid bombings, two hundred civilians killed by madmen for religious or pseudo-political reasons.
How strange a thing is humanity, which is capable of such horrors and yet can move rovers on an other planet and look up in awe at the pale blue dot that is Earth.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
That should have been x-33.
s /v enturestar_000105.html
I did a little checking up and apparently the x-33 was succeeded by the x-34, but both were scrapped due to problems and cost overruns. The decision was 'internal' to NASA and was not based in Washington. Lockheed, which was part of a joint venture on the deal, went ahead and used the technology to make its own single stage to orbit vehicle, the VentureStar. So that takes care of that. My apologies for the outdated information.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/busines
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I can see my house from here!
That's me waving in the corner!
Seriously. Where do you get this stuff?
They took it with an RC from MARS. Just admit how ballsy that is.
There are also images of Orion.
For some reason, I found these shots more emotionally salient. They are just stars, but there was something unexpectedly touching to me about seeing Orion in the night sky just as I see it here. The idea that I might see on Mars something that is so familiar to me in winters here on Earth resonated with me.
I guess I'm just as capable of realizing that Mars occupies the same space as me by making Mars more familiar, as it is by making Earth seem more alien.
I think I had my eyes closed. Could we get a re-shoot?
...this is /., you forgot to include "...and George Bush and the Republicans are wrecking it all!!!!" (insert Dean manic scream here)
Wait, what was your point again?
-Styopa
It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a... Spacecraft?
What your seeing is the result of a slow exposure camera watching a objecting moving across the sky. It's probably the Mars Odyssey orbiter which the Rovers both use as a communications relay. You can simulate that on earth too, wait for the ISS to fly over your house, point your camera at it and leave the shutter open for a few minutes.
And a quick look at NASA's website shows that NASA think's that it's the Viking 2 orbiter, so I was close :-)
I forgot to convert from radians to degrees. The actual Earth-Moon separation as seen from Mars now is about 4 arcmin, not 4 arcsec. Still not resolvable in this wide-field image, but I thought that my trifling factor-of-60 error was worth a correction :)
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So Spirit is going for the martian land speed record? It might already have it, if Opportunity is a little slower.
What?
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
As someone who lives in Nebraska, I can tell you these pictures are far more exciting. I mean, there's HILLS on Mars!!
YAKKO'S UNIVERSE (Episode 3)
Music and lyrics by Randy Rogel.
Yakko: Everybody lives on a street in a city
Or a village or a town for what it's worth.
And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth.
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space.
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race.
It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not.
And we're part of a vast interplanetary system
Stretching seven hundred billion miles long.
With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth's the only one
That has life on it, although we could be wrong.
Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids
Including meteors and Halley's Comet too.
And there's over fifty moons floating out there like balloons
In a panoramic trillion-mile view.
And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars
In a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
It's sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other
And still that's just a fraction of the way.
'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky
Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars.
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends
Which is maybe just inside a little jar!
YW+D : It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
* Though we don't know how it got here
* We're an important part here
* It's a big universe and it's ours!
* - In the original script, these lines were:
YW+D : You might think that you're essential
Try inconsequential
It's a small world after all!
Oh yeah? Well just think how the how the Hubble Space Telescope feels.
I saw a headline something like that at space.com, and was thinking, "Oh no, spirit bumped its flash brain and is seeing stars again."
Table-ized A.I.
Planets on an inside orbit can not be seen in opposition, so their true size doesn't show in a shot like this. Like Venus and Mercury are always in crescent phases seen from Earth. Venus and Earth about equal in size - I wonder how the Earth would look from there (if you could see through the clouds) - it would be a lot closer too...
Don't go down the crater I reckon it's got the martian equivalent of quicksand at the bottom (I also reckon that's what happened to Beagle2), although if NASA could get Opportunity to pop over and take some pics of it sinking that could be worth a laugh....
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On a related note, I'd love to see some details such as this (i.e. view from Spirit, etc) integrated into it. I wonder how much space (no pun intended) to integrate GIS data into it? I'd be kinda neat to fly from Alaska to the Spirit rover, and since it is unlikely I'll get to do that for real, this is the next best thing.
-cp-
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets!
All this commotion for a dead pixel on the CCD???
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I know you're joking, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. Titan's atmospheric pressure is only 1.5 times that of Earth. It's definitely no Venus. Here is a page with some info on Titan, including artists renderings that depict a spectacular sky.
Or, perhaps, somewhere next to Uranus.
You said that just for the joke responses, didn't you?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
...over at livejournal. They would have given you warning, I'm sure! Spirit's is here and little sister Opportunity's is here. They link to the blogs of other space probes and sats as well, including the Voyagers (who don't say much).
Yes, I mean the rovers' blogs, not the rovers' engineers' blogs.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I guess in a slight pun sort of way.
But hey, it was totally apropos, so you have to use it..
It's like.. When I'm in conference with the development team. There are EJB developers, and Web front-end developers.
The EJB's are the "back-end". So, everytime somebody says... "I'm having problems with my back-end". I typically reply with something like... "Yeah, I was having problems with the back-end last night... Nothing a few Pepto's couldn't take care of though... No worrys."
Or, if I'm in all male company... I'll respond with... "Yeah, your mom is having backend problems today... after I finished with her last night!!!
Is the sucker still operable?
No, Viking 2's orbiter ran out of fuel in August 1980. Have a look at this website for more information.
What if the little green men hacking on the rover are insulted by the "You Are Here" caption?!
what that huge arrow thing is heading right toward the earth! It makes the earth look tiny. I hope that isn't the mothership.