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One Mars Probe Photographs Another

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pictoral-history dept.

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."

5 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Depression by joerdie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)

    1. Re:Depression by Rei · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Pinkypants -- my favorite!
  2. Will this change Opportunity's plans? by RobertB-DC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
  3. Proof! by MindStalker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.)

  4. Re:Impressive resolution by hubie · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.