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The View from the Top of Husband Hill
chriscrick writes "After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. According to lead scientist Steve Squyres, 'What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go.'"
Is right here. Read on!
Mars rover Spirit climbs on top of husband....husband rolls over a minute later and lights a cigarette.
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The imagery that is coming back from the Mar's missions has been truly amazing. Very detailed pictures documenting this foreign landscape. I noticed this took 14 months to climb to the top of this summit. What is the average speed these martian rovers are crawling at?
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The picture linked is only a 90 degree field of view. The story mentions "horizon all the way around." The picture at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spiri t/20050901b/site_A_AD_ND_cyl_360-A592R1_br.jpg shows the full 360.
Surely those must be signs of life on Mars, no?
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The requested URL
That the surface of Mars is, like, red.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is clearly a fabrication by the bush adminstration to divert attention from new orleans and iraq
/michaelmoore
those panoramic views make great wallpaper for my multi-headed workstation.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But no matter how many times I look at these pictures (and others before them), part of me is always surprised to see red sand and rocky dunes that remind me of PEI and a dusky orange sky that looks just like that above any major city on a cloudy night.
what an awesome picture! does anyone know how long these rovers are supposed to stay operational?
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA04184.jpg
From the catalog page
This approximate true-color panorama was taken by NASA's Spirit rover after it successfully trekked to the top of "Husband Hill," in the "Columbia Hills" of Gusev Crater. The "little rover that could" spent the last 14 months climbing the hills in both the forward and reverse directions to reduce wear on its wheels.
This breathtaking view from the summit reveals previously hidden southern terrain called "Inner Basin"(center), where team members hope to direct Spirit in the future. The rover left tracks to the left point toward the west, the direction Spirit arrived from. The peaks of "McCool Hill" and "Ramon Hill," both in the "Columbia Hills," can be seen just to the left and behind Inner Basin.
The mosaic is made up of images taken by the rover's panoramic camera over a period of three days (sols 583 to 585, or August 24 to 26, 2005). It spans about 240 degrees in azimuth, and was acquired using 51 different camera pointings and three camera filters (750, 530 and 480 nanometers). Image-to-image seams have been eliminated from the sky portion of the mosaic to better simulate what a person standing on Mars would see.
Illegal? Samir, This is America.
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Wow, this looks very close to i picture I took during my cross-country trip a few years ago.
summer trip image
.
I wonder what the surface composition on these hills is? I know it has taken a long time to climb up to the top. Is this because the surface of Mars is slippery and the rover slides down as it tries to come up, or is the surface hard enough for an easy ascent? It looks like from the picture as if it is a mix of sandy type surface and some hard.
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The Wikipedia! The best karma whoring invention since Google.
-twb
Well. If that's true then it's working. I'm feeling diverted.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This fascinating book by the one of the creators of the Rovers as well as the principal investigator of the science mission is an absolutely fascinating tale of the tortured process leading to the birth of these explorers. He then documents the first 90 days on Mars with an almost day-by-day description of the events as they occurred. Highly recommended!
I don't see circuit diagrams. I don't see source code. I don't see blueprints. That site has almost nothing I want to know about Spirit.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
WHY HASN'T BUSH DETECTED LIFE ON MARS YET?! IS IT BECAUSE THERE'S NO OIL ON MARS?
Surely he could've at the least found some carbon-based life...
[Lameness filter is lame.]
(Actually, no, I guess it's not. If I hadn't been sarcastic in my post, I guess it would've done a good job of stomping out a lame Bush-is-evil whine.)
Fuck it
Spirit let two of her fingers get in front of the lens, ruining an otherwise breathtaking photo.
The shareholder is always right.
I get all philosophical at 2 am in the morning I guess... Seeing a picture from Mars makes me think how big the universe is and how short our lifetimes are. Then it all of the sudden seems somehow too trite and silly to worry whether I should buy a green or a blue car or what grocery store to shop at. In the next 100 years, I'll probably be dead and gone, so what is the point of it all...
To comply with the GPL full source code was shipped with the rovers.
All you need to do is go up to Spirit and retrieve the CD in the left front hubcap.
BTW: while you are doing this, NASA would be grateful if you could bring back a few kilograms of assorted mars rock.
I can see my house from up here!
Load up your favorite image manipulation package (Picasa works well) and pick a nice neutral color. There are several things in the picture that should be white. After doing this, the picture is way, way better. Then up the color temperature (there is still to much blue) and presto, a better picture.
!ERR: Signature not found.
Not much, I suppose. However, the worms finishing off his jawbone might let out a burp or two...
Well, there is clearly a city in the proximal valley of that picture. However, it looks primarily like empty parking lots.
ôó
Fries Electronics? Indeed! I've heard of "burning in a system", but this smoking hot DFI motherboard is more than I reckoned for...
We should send up humans that can travel a lot further than three miles in a year and a half.
The rovers have done well, no doubt. But lets get some boots on the ground.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just kidding, in case you are curious. But it does look an awful lot like Utah or Nevada.g
http://www.numoonus.com/BizTravel/SFOtoLAS/Dry.jp
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Wake me when they decend into "Wife Valley"
It looks just like the outback in Australia.
I am anarch of all I survey.
If you liked this, I suggest you take a look at the incredible
http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/
This cross-platform donationware gem fully automatically downloads the raw imagery, auto-stitches, false-colorizes,makes slideshows... And best of all: creates "virtual-reality" pannable and zoomable panorama's...
Everyone into these rovers should really check it out.
See you at the party, Spirit!
You must think in Russian.
He was cremated, you insensitive clod!
Go somewhere random
Even better plan-
Humans AND mass produced rovers.
One guy in a hut with a crate of baked beans drives hundreds of rovers around and sends back daily uploads.
Problems with the rover wheels? walk out there and fix it. no problem. Rover flips over? walk out there and right it.No problem.
Guy in he hut is hit by solar flare, meteorite, runs out of oxygen and dies? Ground control takes over the rovers and runs them remotely until they die. No problem.
I'd volunteer to be the guy if you want. I mean, it's not like that the rover fixer technician job requires you to be a trained geologist or anything.
Would have preferred to see the view from Chawla hill, but that's just how I'd do it.
You're assuming that because something reflects a lot of red light, it looks red to a human observer. That's wrong; color is not perceived that way.
Chances are that if you were on Mars at a time when both the sky and the ground filled with red dust and no man-made objects in view, things would look fairly neutral to you, with parts of the scenery even looking greenish or bluish.
You can think of human eyes having an auto white-balance built in, although it works rather differently from what is being used in digital cameras.
Slowing down rotation (having the year longer) shortens your orbit, and that's what happens - friction, magnetism etc cause the planets to slow down and in the end they will all fall into Sun.
Mars temperature is so low not only because of distance but also due to very thin atmosphere. Proper composition of the atmosphere creating enough glasshouse effect could keep it at Earth's level (and a lot of gas responsible for glasshouse effect - carbon dioxide - is deposited on ice caps of Mars.) And if you add possiblity of former internal, geothermal heat sources, that would bring Mars to quite livable temperatures. Add water (looking for it now), oxygen (temperature+water+CO2+basic lifeforms->oxygen) and you have a planet bustling with life.
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Well it's wikipedia. Very vague, very brief, very shallow, sometimes inaccurate information on lots of subjects. It's the place you to go for a brief overview of something you've never heard of, but don't expect it to give you the same information you'd get in a book.
That's what encyclopedias are, they're brief summaries. Otherwise they'd be 300m thick.
Anyone else noticed that there are 2 rocks in the forground that are just too nicely square to be natural? Guess the face could be real as well. ;P
...the rover finally responded to Nasa's question with "because it was there."
Are those sandpeople?
I believe one of the key strengths of something like wikipedia is that, being digital, you dont need to carry it with you, its easily searchable and so it can grow to mind-bogglingly large sizes until it encompasses the totality of human knowledge, allowing you to get both a quick overview or an in-depth treatise. See, for instance, an article on any well-known country. It will have a brief overview of everything with pointers to in-depth articles that focus solely on its history, or solely on its geography, etc.
And if they did, this is more likely what you would have seen:
http://thinkingspace.org/HillPanoramaRestored.jpg
Take it for what it's worth, but NASA has repeatedly admitted that they arbitrarily shift the color of the Mars shots to make them look more red. Why? Who knows. Trying not to confuse the public, I suppose, who expects the Red Planet to be not just red, but really really red.
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Hmm. That picture seems to show that there is an exposed 'joy stick'-like controller on the outside of the rover. I have to take this design decision by NASA into serious question. Didn't anyone over there consider the possibility of martians hijacking the rover and using it for their own evil purposes. The rover should be bristling with guns, not unprotected control mechanisms! I'm agape with astonishment!
Slowing down the rotation, as in the axis rotation, has very little do with the overall orbit. There is some degree of tidal forces in the Earth-Sun complex, but those are very small compared to the moon. If you mean slowing down the orbit speed, yes, it will get you closer to the sun. The effect is still quite small and any closing effect is very small. I would worry about the sun as a red giant or any large celestial body devastating the Earth itself or its orbit sooner than worrying about orbit decay.
Even the images that say "true color" or "near true color" aren't really that. From what I've read (and it was on the internet so it must be true), mars on the ground doesn't look all that different from an average arizona or nevada desert scene. In some Viking images from the 70's the sky is quite blue with white clouds. Same from pathfinder. Although during a dust storm the sky is definitely reddish, just like it is here (watched a dust storm roll across the Med from the sahara once -- made the sky a sick red color even though I was a thousand miles from the sahara). See, for example, http://mars-news.de/life/ or http://mars-news.de/color/blue.html
Does anyone have any good gimp filter parameters for making some better color images from the raw nasa ones?
Yes it is.
It's so freaking blatant, I'm pretty sure the first post was meant to be a joke...then again, he did post as AC.
Noticed something unusual with a couple of rocks? Look at the big rock on the middle left, then go right of that to a large cluster of rocks. The top left side of one of those large rocks has what looks to be a hard 90 degree angle cut. I don't even know how big that rock could be either. Might be the size of a patio paver or as big as a boulder. Now I know in the laws of natural probability that it's quite possible for this to happen naturally, but.... isn't that quite eerie since most of the surrounding rocks have relatively round edges?
"Not the Earth!!! That's where I keep all my stuff!!!" - The Tick
The color image in the link has poor contrast and is rather dark. Perhaps NASA did that to make it more accurate, but even news reports adjust the contrast of images to make it easier for viewers to see detail.
I often prefer the tweaked images that some Mars blogs create, because you can see more detail. As long as they have a disclaimer about tweakage, I don't really care. (Some ommit it, spanks.)
Table-ized A.I.
I always wondered about this. How could Mars have once have supported life, when it's so far out of the ideal temperate zone, the range where the planet is close enough to the sun to support life, but not so close it burns up?
If Mars once had a thicker atmosphere, it might have been warmer. For example, it may have once had a significant magnetic field, sheilding the atmosphere from radiation that would otherwise ionize it into space.
Further, some *existing* Earth microbes appear to be able to live in current Mars-like conditions under the soil.
Table-ized A.I.
This is clearly a fabrication by the bush adminstration to divert attention from new orleans and iraq
No, its the other way around. New Orleans and Iraq are to distract us from the giant pyrimids spotted in the distance on Mars. Spirit already grinded into a baby pyrimid
Table-ized A.I.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spiri t/20050901d/SQUYRES_3_Oblique_Traverse_full_size-A 591R1_br2.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
You need to get laid more often.
Celestial mechanics lately makes my head fuzzy. Thanks for setting me straight. I think I need to get back into "hard" science reading again and quit reading Terry Pratchett.
Great view, think I'm going to rasterbate it and hang it up. But does anyone else think some of the rock protrusions look a little TOO square? I always thought eons of erosion would leave the rocks a little more rounded...oh well
yes, it's small, but it clearly indicates the direction of changes - the planets aren't going to stretch their orbits any. Sooner Sun's temperature could change, resulting in climate changes.
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Mars is not outside the temperate zone, it's out of the temperate size.
Mars is not large enough to hold an atmosphere, which is essential for holding on to heat. During the summer near the equator, temperatures can reach 60 F even with the thin atmosphere. But at night, this plummets to around -120 F because all the heat radiates off into space.
With an atmospheric composition such as ours (and if it could hold onto it), Mars would be more like a cooler version of the Earth.
Another source of heat energy we have on Earth comes from our core. Our planet is still active, and as such we get heat energy from our planet as well. All current data shows Mars as being geologically dead.
So not only can it not retain heat absorbed from the sun, it also has no source of it's own heat.
A younger Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere and an active core (along with shallow oceans), so life could have developed early on. But over time, the planet lost it's atmosphere, water, and active core. In essence, it died. Though it probably took millions of years to do so.
It's unlikely planets move out of their orbits by that much without external forces. Read up on planetary motion and gravity.
Venus is what happens when the greenhouse effect gets really really bad. The planet is covered by a toxic haze of water vapor, carbon monoxide, and various other compounds. Venus could have been another Earth, if it wasn't for it's rotational speed (1 rotation every 288 days). That leaves the planet facing the sun too long. And since it had a decent atmosphere (and the size to hold onto it), what liquid water was there boiled into the atmosphere. Water vapor traps heat, so the planet got warmer, and so on and so forth. The volcanoes didn't help either. Now, it has an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth, and has a global temperature of around 900 F. Due to the atmosphere, there isn't much dynamic range.
If Venus had a 24 hour day, then there would be a good chance we would have a warmer sister planet Venus. If Mars was larger, we'd have a cooler sister planet Mars.
But that's not how it worked out. One died, one fried, and one stayed alive.
~X~
~X~
As you say, the best finds were accidental.
As Humans can roam over a far vaster distance, it makes the probably of many happy accidents far higher than what you can get with even a fleet of rovers. Furthermore, you almost never get "Accidental" finds with rovers since every foot moved is carefully calculated and orchestrated. We did get lucky with the rovers we had but mow much luckier might we have been with humans there?
Furthermore, consider the cost of the rovers. Say you could get it down to 200 million each (the cost of the second after the first was built). Well even ten of those things is two billion dollars, a point where you start being able to think of sending humans. And again a human could do a lot more than even twenty or thirty rovers, not to mention require FAR fewer people to an and control them. You just can't scale rover control as we have ti today much beyond a few rovers.
Lastly, humans can have an intuition about where to look that we just cannot get from sitting here on earth letting a committee drive a rover about. One human on Mars could find more interesting things in a week than the entire rover program has put together.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well if you think only "crackpots" can put together a human mission to Mars for under 100 billion, then there is no point in further discussion - I know you are wrong, and you know I am wrong, and never the twain shall meet. Your point would be valid if that single point were correct, which frankly I cannot begin to agree with and so I will never agree with any of your conclusions. Sorry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
oooh... fark was right, the slashdot people really do have a thing against them apparently.
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