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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.
If you turn down your screen resolution so everything is bigger, you can see yourself waving.
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Dang. They could have told us when to say cheese.
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
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?
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.
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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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...
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.
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.
That would depend on how long it takes them to edit out the Martians laughing at our puny attempts to look at their planet.
You can imagine them all standing around spirit and saying stuff like:
Martian 1: "Look! It's moving!"
Martian 2: "Where? I can't see anything..."
Martian 1: "It's slow, but it is moving, can't you see?"
Martian 3: "Geez! Haven't you guys got anything better to do than poke around with that thing?"
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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.
...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.
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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