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Detailed Panorama of Mars Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the red-planet-map dept.

dptalia writes "NASA has just released a detailed panorama of Mars taken by the Spirit rover. During the short Martian winter the rover didn't get enough sunlight to move, so it took these pictures instead. Spirit took over 1400 pictures, for a total of 500 megs of data. If you look to the left of the picture, you'll see the tracks from the rover's trip."

4 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:'Detailed Panorama'? by Jaruzel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So...

    If I were standing on Mars in my natty Gucci space suit, which has a CLEAR visor. Is the Normal or the False Colour image the vista I'd see?

    ie. is Mars really red?

    -Jar.

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  2. Re:'Detailed Panorama'? by MasterC · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The color calibration target that is on the corner of the rover (designed by a group including Bill Nye the Science Guy, if I recall) helps the scientists recreate the colors that entered the camera lens accurately, or to recreate the colors of the materials when ignoring the differences in Martian lighting conditions.
    Not quite. From a NASA story about the image:

    This is an approximately true-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 600-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 480-nanometer filters. This "natural color" view is the rover team's best estimate of what the scene would look like if we were there and able to see it with our own eyes.


    Those images are combined from three separate color channels or known frequency therefore no calibration is needed. In other words, they did not take a grey-scale image and add false color to make it appear true color but took three separate grey-scale images of known wavelength and combined them.

    And for what it's worth, the wikipedia article on color vision says the three types of cones in our eyes are most sensitive to 420 nm, 534 nm, and 564 nm.
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  3. Re:Yes by stevesliva · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm surprised nobody yet seems to have cropped down to that heavily tracked part of the image and made it more widely available. Guess it comes with the problems of working with even an 11.7Mb JPEG in an image editor unless you have a machine up to the task, which I won't till well into 2007.
    If you really want to see the hobbyist-created imagery (and sometimes real planetary scientist-created imagery) then browse on over to unmannedspaceflight.com
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  4. Interactive view by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I took the NASA image and converted it for interactive viewing (with a choice of five viewers, including Quicktime, Shockwave and Java).

    Interactive McMurdo Panorama, Winter on Mars