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Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit
dylanduck writes "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has slipped safely into orbit - unlike two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars. Remember Mars Climate Orbiter and the mix up between metric and English units? MRO is going to send back 34 trillion bytes of data, more than all the previous missions put together." From the article: "The spacecraft will use a suite of six instruments, including the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. This will image objects as small as 1-metre wide and should be able to snap pictures of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The instruments will track the planet's weather, geology and mineralogy, and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water."
NPR has an area on their website covering not only this orbiter but past probes as well.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
"34 trillion bytes of data" who on earth (or mars) wrote this? Dont we have mega/giga/tera any more?
For christ sake this is slashdot!
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Why is the new camera with a resolution of 1 metre better than the current camera on Mars Global Surveyor, which is able to deliver some images with a resolution of 50 cm? See here for example pictures with this resolution.
Man, that's a lot of data to be sending back. I just hope those funny little Green Men aren't going to be using up all the space bandwidth looking at porn from Uranus.
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Well, the Mars Global Surveyor did take a picture of (albeit farther away) of Spirit's landing site-tracks, heat shield, and parachute. You can't see the actual rover. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mgs_mer.gif
g s-images.html especially the Mars Odessey as seen by the Surveyor
This might be of interest to you. From the nasa website: "The Mars Orbiter Camera can resolve features on the surface of Mars as small as a few meters or yards across from Mars Global Surveyor's orbital altitude of 350 to 405 kilometers (217 to 252 miles). From a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the camera would be able to resolve features substantially smaller than 1 meter or yard across" Take a look at the pictures on this site: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/m
The Surveyor orbits at 235 miles above Mars.
I went to an English "Public School" and am now over 40. I only know my weight in kilogrammes. We went metric a long time ago!
If only we had. There are miles to go yet before we have fully.....
Orbiter enters orbit.
... marinated ... okay, the joke's falling apart now.
In other news Voyager has gone on a voyage, Mariner has
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and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water
This was the fallback mission in case it deorbited by mistake.
(My apologies to TripMaster Monkey)
Don't worry, he still owes us an apology for his sig.
I'm entirely not convinced that was from a spy satellite (to read 1-inch high lettering, the targetting and stability problems alone would be quite difficult to solve for such high resolution; you'd have blurring (from spacecraft issues and the person holding the book), mis-targetting, etc.). Given that:
All of the electronics have to be radiation hardened. This usually puts back the technology by a few years to even a decade compared with what one could afford without the rad-hardening.
Given that, the actual resolution is 20-30 cm per pixel (depending on distance from the surface). That's 10 or so inches. However, you can't actually resolve/recognize anything that's only a pixel across. The canonical requirement is 3+ pixels to be sure you're detecting what you think you're detecting. So, the actual resolving power is about 1 meter.
If the spacecraft (and camera) had been designed to orbit at a lower elevation, the resolution would have been higher, but as it is, it's pretty darn close to Mars' atmosphere and you don't want to orbit there. MRO's orbit is going to be about 320 km above the surface. Some satellites at Earth (I have no idea if they're "spy" sats) orbit at around 150 km above the surface--much closer. Many spy planes fly over the surface at only a few tens of km. With that and some amazing engineering to reduce smear, they could easily resolve very small objects.
One of the major issues with HiRISE is going to be spacecraft jitter (the spacecraft shakes, other instruments move, etc.). This could effectively limit the resolution by a few factors if it's not resolved. There is a high stability mode in which nothing is allowed to move and the spacecraft holds itself still while HiRISE images very important targets (future landing sites, etc.), but that mode is resource intensive and excludes some instruments from doing certain activities. What HiRISE is trying to do is equivalent to trying to take a picture of the street through a glass-bottomed car at 125 about miles per hour.
Another problem is context--sometimes the MOC images are uninterpretable because we don't know what's going on around them. With too-high resolution images, we'll just be looking at... well, noise, essentially. We can't really understand things without context to place them into. That's why we have a MOC-equivalent "context" imager bore-sighted with HiRISE.
All-in-all, this is the most powerful telescope/camera sent to another planet.
Ok here is a definitive list:
People weight: Most people use stones colloquially, lots use kg though.
Milk: Supermarkets sell in units of 1,2,4,6 pints (though they are marked in ml).
Some shops sell in 500ml etc but it isn't very common. Delivered milk is in pints.
All other food: Sold & marked in metric units.
Road signs: All in miles, mph, and yards.
Petrol: Litres
General distance: Miles
Clothes dimensions: Inches.
All science/engineering is done in SI units. God knows why you would use anything else.