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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."
Yeah, I know how the probes feel, every now and then I'll run into one of my grade school classmates thousands of miles away from where we went to school.
We shake hands and take pictures of each other.
I wonder if the probes experience the same awkward silence after you've asked them how they're doing and feign interest about what they've been up to. I'll bet they both broke out, "Well, I'll let you go, you must be so busy and what with having the whole rest of the planet to photograph....but it was nice meeting you! And out here of all places! I mean with you an orbiter and I a rover, who would have thought we would have been assigned to the same planet?! It's a small universe afterall!"
My work here is dung.
Opportunity Mars rover: I can't believe it, it's like a dream. What's wrong?
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: I just had a terrible thought: what if this is a dream?
Opportunity Mars rover: Well then photograph me quick before you wake up.
Have you read my journal today?
High Resolution View
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.)
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.
It's fantastic that eggheads can find that teeny tiny rover on all the face of Mars when on most nights I have a hard time finding the ignition in my car after I leave the bar.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.)
Think of the ratings if there were actual people there!
Is she sunbathing nude?
KFG
"Morning, Sam."
"Morning, Ralph."
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I'm willing to bet US spy (esp. military) satellites can have much better resolution than 10cm...I work for a GIS company, and we often work with satellite imagery at 5cm resolution. I believe, by the way, the MRO does have multispectral capabilities (seven-channel, from ultraviolet to near-infrared).
if the tracks had spelled out "When Can I Come Home?"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08813.jpg
Wow, I can view Mars in better detail than I can my own freaking house on Google Maps...
but it is more impressive that Opportunity is still working years after its original mission was expected to end. I know both rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, are showing their age, but still to continue to function two and half years past their "warranty" as NASA calls is so cool. In the time since they landed on Mars I've moved three times, changed cities, broke up with two girlfriends, changed jobs and done time for molesting a goat.
No, we can't do that. The Apollo artifacts left on the Moon are just too small. Even the mighty Hubble does not have the resolution necessary to resolve Apollo stuff.
The ESA lunar probe SMART-1 was in lunar orbit for a while, and it too was not able to resolve Apollo landing sites. But SMART-1 did capture lunar terrain in detail never before possible, except for the pictures taken on the surface of the moon by the Apollo astronauts. The terrain matched the Apollo pictures perfectly, so yeah we've been there. Not that *I've* ever had any doubt.
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.