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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."
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
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Shamelessy reposted with some edits from Metafilter... ....But what is that glint to the left side?
I thought at first it was just a digital photo artifact, but seeing as how the flash of white appears in several photos from Spirit's navcam on Sol66, my next thought was ALIEN BUILDINGS!!!
Okay, not really. My next thought was that it might be the lander's backshell or heatshield. So I looked up a map of the rover's intended route, and orbital images of the landing site with labels. Take a look at the photos, the maps, and the scales. Apparently the lander's heatshield had impacted a nearby crater; that's Bonneville.
Unfortunately if you look back at the Earth you're looking towards the sun.
While the cameras are probably good enough, the Moon isn't well lit and there's a lot of glare. It doesn't surprise me that you can't make out the Moon (although it probably is in the photo).
The Huygens mission page at NASA
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
When the press-conference of NASA was given about their revolutionairy findings, CNN was the only channel (at least here in The Netherlands) that paid attention to it. But as soon as it became clear that they had found indications for water, and NOT little green man, they immediately switched to other news. I think they only showed about 4 minutes of the press-conference. That shows how much (or lack of) interest the press and most of the public have in this mission. And I think it's sad, looking at the importance of it all.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Well, you could - for example - look at the photo of Earth and moon together that was taken from the European Mars Express half way enroute to Mars. You can clearly see Earth & moon as small spots in the universe. Very interesting photo, I think!
But from our nearest neighboring planet, we're just another dot in the sky.
Make that second nearest neighboring planet. I knew something looked wrong with that statement. =)
(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.
Mr Sagan probably said it better than any of us can.
Somehow, I doubt it. Just a little perspective. Based on the current position of Earth and Mars:
Distance from Earth to the closest star in Orion (HD 30652): 26.176 lightyears
Distance from Earth to Mars: 0.0000278306 lightyears.
So, the distance from Earth or Mars is 0.00010632% the distance from Earth to 30652.
Basically, we're so damned far from Orion that, no matter where you were in the *solar system*, it would probably look the same.
Incidentally, if you want to check this out for yourself (ie, look at the constellations from orbit around Mars), and you have a hardware-accelerated 3D card, I would highly recommend trying out Celestia, a very impressive space simulator
And that quote, for the un-initiated, is from Hamlet. Made famous in the geek community because Picrad liked it.
Oh you don't know who Picard is? Taco, remove his account, now!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
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.