Making Tracks on Mars

An anonymous reader writes "In a remarkable series of orbital pictures, the Mars Global Surveyor's cameras have imaged the tracks of the Spirit rover on the surface. Individual debris pieces including the backshell and lander are visible with remarkable clarity using an innovative roll of the satellite."

Comments

Re:An Initiative roll?

[spectrokid]

Over the past year and a half, the camera and spacecraft teams for Mars Global Surveyor have worked together to develop a technique that allows us to roll the entire spacecraft so that the camera can be scanned in a way that sees details at three times higher resolution than we normally get," said Dr. Ken Edgett, staff scientist for Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif., which built and operates the Mars Orbiter Camera. The technique adjusts the rotation rate of the spacecraft to match the ground speed under the camera.

It is a line camera, X resolution is set by number of pixels, Y resolution by mars rotation speed and number of scans per second. If the satelite rolls opposite to mars rotation, it is as if mars rotates more slowly, therefore higher Y resolution. Price to pay is you end up rotating out of view, so smaller pictures, but more detailed ones.

Hubble HAS imaged Mars

[chalker]

Hubble has already imaged Mars. The resolution is nowhere close to these new images from MGS. They are images of the entire planet. Check them out here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/27/

Just wait for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

[MtViewGuy]

If you think the images from Mars Global Surveyor look awesome, the images from the upcoming Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should be nothing short of AWESOME.

Given that MRO will likely use a modified version of the same camera system used on the Ikonos imaging satellite (Ikonos can resolve down to 100 cm resolution from a 300 km orbit through Earth's thick atmosphere), the combination of the lower orbit and the very thin atmosphere on Mars means there are estimates that the MRO cameras could resolve objects as small as 150 millimeters across in the visual light spectrum! At that resolution, MRO could finally put to bed the controversy about the anomalous features on the Cydonia plain of Mars that some people claim are not natural features of that plain.

Re:Just wait for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

[mopomi]

HiRISE on MRO will be able to resolve about 30 cm/pixel, not 150 mm, with a swath width of > 6 km for the greyscale images. It is not a remake of the Ikonos, though it is similar. A slice through the CCD array (I don't remember the number of CCDs in the array off the top of my head--must be 20) of the camera is something like (lameness/HTML filter screws this up--ignore the dots):

........BBBB
PPPPPPPPRRRRPPPPPPPP
........GGGG

Where the middle layer three CCDs deep are the "Blue", "Red", and "Green" (approx.) CCDs, while the others are the panchromatic (really the same as the "Red" in the color portion of the array). Each of the CCDs is something like 1024 pixels across, with a 6 pixel overlap on each side.

Check out:

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/hirise

Re:Beagle 2, Viking's, Polar Lander, Mars landers.

[Tablizer]

I would be interested to see if the Viking landers are still visible

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mgs_mpf_viki ng_040107.html

Re:Terraforming or ecosynthesising mars

[radtea]

Unfortunately for this hypothesis, Venus has no magnetosphere, experiences much stronger solar wind than Mars, and has no shortage of atmosphere.

So Mars' lack of atmosphere is likely due to a combination of factors, with the lack of magentosphere being perhaps necessary but hardly sufficient. The question for terraformers is whether or not it is possible to create and sustain an environment like the one we have on Earth via biological means.

It is worth noting that in the absence of life, Earth would be a lot less habitable than it is. That is, life on Earth has created conditions that are suitable for life on Earth. Or more correctly, life on Earth has found relatively open evolutionary niches due to the actions of other life on Earth. The most obvious thing like this is oxygen, which would weather out of the atmosphere in a few million years were it not a waste product thrown away by plants.

--Tom