One Mars Probe Photographs Another

sighted writes "In one of the more remarkable shots ever taken by robotic space explorers, the Opportunity Mars rover has been photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ." From the article: "Shown in the image are 'Duck Bay,' the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; 'Cabo Frio,' a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and 'Cape Verde,' another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater."

Comments

Impressive resolution

[BWJones]

Wow, impressive resolution for such a remote platform. Of course the resolution of the current US spy satellites is about three times better (10cm optimal), but those things are the size of a school bus and regardless, it is impressive what you can see with 30cm resolution.

Does anybody know if the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter is limited to the visible spectrum, or does it have multispectral capabilities?

P.S. I am sure the Google folks will want these data to update Google Mars. :-)

Re:Impressive resolution

[hubie]

The pictures are amazing, but not within the context of spy satellites. The MRO orbit is only 250 to 300 km above the surface, which isn't even considered a LEO orbit on Earth.

Let's see, 30 cm resolution at 300 km works out to be a microradian angular resolution. Hubble has a resolution of 0.1 arcsec, which is like 0.5 microradians, so I suppose if you put Hubble at MRO's orbit then it would see about a factor of two better, whereas a naively one might assume a factor of 4.8 times better given that the aperture sizes on Hubble and HIRISE are 2.4 and 0.5 meters respectively. That is probably a bit of apples to oranges because I don't know in what context the Hubble resolution is. The HIRISE says it is 30 cm per pixel at 300 km, but the Hubble number I found just states it as the basic telescope resolution without mentioning whether they are talking about an Airy disk size, Rayleigh criterion, or whatever. For what it is worth, both the basic Hubble (without instruments) and HIRISE both run at f/24, so their blur spots would be comparable, so if you put the same detector behind them, they would have the same resolution.

Re:Impressive resolution

[JungleBoy]

About 5 years ago I attended a technical workshop at JPL in Pasadena, CA. One of the presentations I went to was on new features added to the GeoTIFF image format. It was given by a contract software engineer for the DoD. The part the made me raise an eyebrow was when he was discussing being able to create multi-petabyte geotiff images through virtuallization/referencing in the format. He made the off hand comment that the entire planet at 1cm resolution is about 1PB, and his geotiff extensions could handle it.

Re:Impressive resolution

[symie5]

I'm not "leaking" anything sensitive, so no worries about my job. :-)

However, all the heckling was bothering the hell out of me so I had to go back and double-check my sources, and I apologize; I believe I stand mistaken...the first 2-inch res imagery to which I referred was indeed aerial photography (frown), and a secondary image to which I referred as being awestruck by was a 10cm res image (according to a colleague)...my sincere apologies to BWJones. I am humbled.
 
Oh, and thanks, Wavicle, for providing the heckle that made me run and check again. (yet another frown)

Depression

[joerdie]

This makes me sad. We now have so much equipment over there doing all this great stuff and no people. I wish there could be another space race. (without the threat of nukes.)

Re:Depression

[Rei]

This makes me happy. We're not wasting many billions of dollars on another "Gee, whiz, we went there!" action before we have brought launch costs down enough to make a Mars base sustainable in the long-run. Instead, we're using extremely effective robotic probes for the tiniest fraction of the cost as a stopgap.

Will this change Opportunity's plans?

[RobertB-DC]

Ok, I'll admit, my first thought on seeing the picture was Oh. My. Gawd. That's a picture of something we put on another *planet*, a little red dot in the sky. Then I started rummaging through the stock phrases about the future of Man and stuff like that.

But one actual question that comes to mind -- now that the Opportunity team has high-resolution pictures of their baby's room, will they change where they send him to play? For example, could they see that rock just south of the dark "Cape Verde" formation? And looking back, if they'd had pictures like these to work with, would they have approached the crater from a different angle?

Proof!

[MindStalker]

Finally Proof of intelligence. On another planet.
(Robot is proof of intelligence, and its on another planet, the sentences don't necessarily have to be linked.)

Re:Taking pictures of the car...

[mcmonkey]

Interesting how the some of the most popular photos from these missions are pictures of other man-made objects.

Considering how NASA is consistently at the short end of the federal budgeting stick, would the agency do better as a private foundation funded by sending out probes decked out like something out of NASCAR?

Re:Moon Probe

[mh101]

I don't think even that would convince everyone.

They'd simply argue that the probe's launch was actually just another routine launch, and with the state of today's CG capabilities, it would be a piece of cake to fake footage.

The only way to prove it to those people would be to actually send them there in person.