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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."
I worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit) this February at JPL and we had images like the posted one available almost as soon as the rover landed, of course you couldn't see the tracks back then...I don't have a link handy to any of the pictures from then I remember that we had a wall-sized poster where scientists used to guess where the rover would land. Some days later, once the rover landed, there was another poster with various points of interest (lander, parachute etc.) marked on it. So we have had images (also from the Mars Global Surveyor) like these for a long time only they weren't available to the public. If anything, these images bear testimony to the quality of the camera on-board MGS.
On the one hand, Mars does have a much thinner atmosphere, and I have no idea how low the Mars Global Surveyer orbit is.
On the other hand, *anything* we ship to Mars is a design compromise in terms of weight and size. So I'm sure the camera is sophisticated, but isn't this one of those times when size matters, especially on the objective lens?
I've found my house on Terraserver, and I couldn't see features as small as this picture gives us. Makes me wonder what spy satellites can do, what commercial imaging satellites can do, and what DHS wants to let us have.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
have they ever tried doing this to look for the remains of the Apollo missions and other luna missions?
Any estimate on how long it will take the tracks to erode until they are no longer visible, given the average winds in that area? Unlike the tracks on the moon, these shouldn't last too long (relatively speaking).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
My first thoughts about this were about re-calculating and re-imaging possible crash zones.
What would happen if hubble could image on mars? I suspect the optics are not designed to image something like mars, and wouldn't be effective?
Otherwise surely we would have close to 1m resolution of mars?
Am I missing something? Or is hubble too busy?
are visible in this image from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. North is up in this image I think the images released are not the full resolution, or if they are then they at least with less compression (unless they transmit them compressed - which would be an insane idea) it should be clearer.
I would guess that they transmit all data back in raw, with lots of error checking.
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A little article with two boffins talking abour terraforming mars.
They harp on about oxygen levels. I started to wonder - what gas other than nitrogen would be good to compose the other 80% (assuming we reach earth density - could we have a 1/5 less atomosphere than was 99% 02?
So I think (although mars contains nitrogen - composition) the matter is how to make nitrogen and oxygen and enough co2.
Nitrogen in the air is vital for plant life also, so I think a valid nitrogen cycle, water cycle and healthy o2/co2 ratios would need to be established.
Would they find thier own levels, or will it be *bloody* hard to establish a balanced eco system?
Any other thoughts on mars ecosynthesis?
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Probably not. They knew exactly where to look to see the rover, and they also were able to take many pictures of the same area at different sun angles (shadow lengths) to get one with enough contrast to show the tracks. Because the width of the rover's tracks is just at the pixel resolution of the orbiting camera, a little luck/persistence was required to get those shots, I imagine.
I, too would like to know where the Beagle2 lies. It is about as small as one pixel from an orbiting camera, so they'll need to find some other evidence (ejecta from an impact crater, etc.) to find it. It's very likely Beagle is the crack of a rock, for example.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
But can you see the carcass of the little bunny that NASA cruelly murdered?
Couldn't they use the same techniques to find the other landers that have either crashed or soft landed successfully and died (Viking, one of the Russian Mars probes).
I would be interested to see if the Viking landers are still visible, or if they're now covered in martian dust? Maybe it'll be a better job for the MRO when it gets there.
The image shows shows spirit on the crater rim, that's something like sol 90 iirc (spirit is now at sol 260). So why did it take so long to get the image? Were they stored on-board for months? Were they processed for months? This is not a flame, I'm genuinly curous :).
Anyway, I hope that Mars Express will give it a try, too.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
nd then there are the smaller details: look up and consider how the sun, and the the moon have the same relative size
Um. So? Millions of years ago they didn't have the same size, as the moon was closer to the Earth. Millions of years from now they won't be the same size, as the moon is steadily moving further away.
no tree has more than 5800 yearly tree rings (and there is no reason they can't - these old trees were cut down, still living, in this century).
You can extend it back a lot further if you look for more than one tree. You find a live tree going back, say, 4000 years. The you find an old stump whose later rings match up with the earlier rings of your tree. Then maybe you find a petrified log whose later rings match up with the early rings on the stump. We have tree ring data going back 10,000 years. Here's an example of a study going back 7400 years.
Also, we have ice cores and varves with annual layers going back tens of thousands of years.
And please don't disappoint me by quoting some rubbish from the ICR or answersingenesis.
I'm thinking that the heatshield impact should have dug a pretty nice divot out of the ground, which might make a pretty good opportunity for examining deep layers of soil on the edge of a large impact crater.
Possible to find all sorts if interesting things in there... almost as good as the crater itself. (presuming that the rover can get out on the other side, that is.)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
NASA was able to get a really good initial fix on the positions of the rovers using doppler measurements of the tones the spacecraft emitted on descent.
For example, from the journal of Michael Watkins, manager of the navigation team:
But we're also still working, and for Opportunity, the Navigation Team wants to get our first solution for the position of Opportunity as quickly as possible to help assess the condition of the rover.
Ten minutes after landing we get it - it's about 10 km further downtrack (to the East on Mars) from the last targeted point (which was about 10 km from the original target), due entirely to low atmospheric density on Mars. This is similar to Spirit, and well within specifications, and it looks from our maps to be an awesome landing site for the scientists. But we'll have to wait and see the first pictures...
This picture shows you the relative accuracy of the navigation. The big blue estimate ellipse is based on doppler data from the approach to Mars. The black ellipse is based on doppler data from the rover's status tones prior to chute deployment. And the white dot is the estimated position based on doppler from surface communications.