Slashdot Mirror
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.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
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?
Not Found
The requested URL
Well, the odometer on Spirit is 3.0 miles and Opportunity is 3.56 miles, so, about 0.21 miles/month or 0.000287480473 mph on average.
;-)
Or is that not what you meant.
This is clearly a fabrication by the bush adminstration to divert attention from new orleans and iraq
/michaelmoore
the Mar's missions
I'm too shocked to make a proper grammar Nazi rant here.
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.
Well, my reply was a bit of a joke. The _average_ speed is kept down by the fact that the rovers stop to take pictures, grind rocks, sleep, etc. The actual top speed while moving is 50mm/s or about 1/10 mph, still not a speed demon.
Wow, this looks very close to i picture I took during my cross-country trip a few years ago.
summer trip image
.
The Wikipedia! The best karma whoring invention since Google.
-twb
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!
It's taken such a long time because the 440 cubic inch V8 with the four-barrel carb that was supposed to power the rover threw a rod, and the thing has been running on solar panels ever since.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Pancam, the highest resolution cameras, have 1024x2048 pixel CCDs.
That's amazing. That same photograph just took my breath away.
It's wishful thinking, perhaps. but looking at the photograph and I imagine a place that once housed life. It might be the birthplace of life in our system and the seed planet for life on earth.
A dead planet once alive. Conservation of information.... the entire evolutionary record of that planet is in those rocks, that dirt. It's suffocatingly exciting.
And at once harrowing. It has no magnetic field to speak of. It must have had some form of one due to the clear volcanic/geological activity. What happened to it? When will the same thing happen here? If there was life there, did they just run out of time?
There are finite strictures on the amount of time ones birth planet remains hospitable to you. And if you don't figure out how to get off, how to survive in space and thrive, maybe you're doomed to die with your planet.
Some theories abound about why we haven't seen sign of intelligent life. my favorite espouses the notion that civilizations get wiped out by their own technology. What if the stricture is planetary? What if we don't see any intelligent signs because no species could survive the life cycle of their own planets?
It puts any interest in a next-gen ipod or the new google beta in perspective.
It's a great photograph. It fills me with that little kid feeling.... the one whe you look up a the sky and it feels like there's something there looking down at you, waiting for you to discover it.
un burrito me trampeó.
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.
NASA doesn't invent colours from nothing, but that's not necessarily the same as saying that their images represent what you'd see with your eyes if you were on Mars.
Both Mars rovers have cameras which are sensitive from the near-IR to the UV. The greyscale images are taken by putting a bandpass filter over the lens, and usually they'll take the same shot with 3-7 different filters.
Three of the filters correspond to roughly the same frequencies that the receptors in your eyes are sensitive to. So they can approximate what it would look like in person by assigning the three images taken using those filters to the R, G, and B channels in a digital image.
There is a bit more processing involved. Human eyes are more sensitive to green than red or blue, so the additional processing is probably to take that into account.
But anyway, the short answer is that generally the Mars images are as "true" in terms of colour as what you'd get with a colour digital camera here, setting aside that the three channels are taken at slightly different times.
There are a few exceptions, in that I believe sometimes they may substitute the nearest infrared band for red. If you have to pick one or the other, near IR is useful because it scatters less in an atmosphere.
Other NASA images (like from the Hubble) are made the same way, they just assign completely different spectra to the three channels (assuming they're using an RGB model, which isn't a given). For example, maybe they'll assign radio waves to the red channel, IR to green, and X-rays to blue. Again, they're not *inventing* colours, even though it's not what you'd see with your own eyes. It's like pitch-shifting bat squeeks down into the audible range so humans can hear them.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.