Detailed Panorama of Mars Released

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."

Comments

'Detailed Panorama'?

[atomicstrawberry]

TFA has some tiny images that barely pass as thumbnails. You can get the actual 'detailed panoramas' from NASA directly.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[complete loony]

Some more direct links:

Normal Colour Small, Medium, Omg.
False Colour Small, Medium, Omg.
Red / Blue 3D Small, Medium, Omg.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[boethius78]

They may be more detailed, but I still can't see any buggalo.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[rHBa]

The Omg(Normal color) link just crashed firefox. It's probably worth "right click"->"Save link as..." as they are pretty massive imgs

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[Jaruzel]

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.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[CSLarsen]

I would *guess* normal color. Mars is brownish red, as you can see. In fact, if you look at mars with a telescope on a good day you can actually faintly see that it looks reddish-colored.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[complete loony]

I believe thats called "driving by committee".

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[smooth wombat]

On each rover there is a color-calibration target which is used to determine 'true color correctness' (my words, not theirs). This article from Discover talks about how NASA determines what is the true color of each Mars picture using the color target. A picture of the target, an identical copy of which is kept on Earth and is compared against a picture from Mars in which the target on the rover is present in the picture, is shown in the article.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[Speare]

The problem is not "what color would enter my eyes?" but instead "what color would my brain register?"

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. But if you were standing there on Mars looking at all this stuff for a while, you'd probably have a different impression. Your eyes would "get used to" the color shifts and start remapping things to perceive them without the shift.

In cameras, this is called "white balance." The white target should look white, right? Well, anyone who has used their digital cameras to take pictures of a white birthday cake lit by candles, or a white wall in a room lit dimly with low-wattage incandescent bulbs has seen that white objects appear amber to the camera. Sometimes seriously orange. Forest shots look much more green/blue than you remember them. Many digicams have automatic white-balancing software, and they automatically shift the RGB colors until the average over the whole scene is neutral.

Your eyes would get a really reddish scene on Mars. Just like that automatic white-balance setting on your camera, your brain would get used to the reddish glow, until the white spot on the color target looked mostly white or subtly blushed instead of a ruddy red color.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[MasterC]

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.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[Speare]

Again, the issue is not "what wavelength is red" since that's simple to calibrate before launch time. Once a camera is able to accurately model a given shade as white or red or purple or chartreuse, the camera will continue to model that color pretty consistently until the electronics fail.

The problem is not the hardware but in deciding what to perceive.

Color is a combination of the incoming light, the surface characteristics, and the sensor's biases. We adjust our biases to counteract changes in the incoming light, so that the remainder tells us what the surface characteristics are.

The amount of light and reddish filtration in the Martian atmosphere varies with the Martian day, season, and weather. If the camera just records exactly what it sees, that's simple: every image comes out a bit different and anything that is white will look like some unique shade of rosy pink. Every day, the rocks and the soil would look different.

They shipped an expensive and heavy color calibration target all the way to Mars for a reason. Perceptual color calibration is done on an ongoing basis. The goal is to post-process the raw images in a way similar to what our brains do: to balance the lighting conditions so that white objects appear white, green objects appear green, and that soil under our left wheel does not freakishly change color every day.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

That must have taken a while to render in 3DSMax.

Slashdot (in)effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Spirit took over 1400 pictures, for a total of 500 megs of data

I am slightly surprised that the submitter neglected to link directly to this data, and that the 'editors' also declined to correct this oversight.

Re:Slashdot (in)effect

[WhiteSpade]

It may have been intentional. Sure, linking to the 1400 pictures would make sense since thats what the article seems to be about; however, I think it was wise to not link to 500 MB of photos on Slashdot's front page. Though NASA has some really nice servers that hold up well to the Slashdot effect, I think the editors want to give NASA a fighting chance.

Re:Slashdot (in)effect

[stevesliva]

That's less than 1/3mb per photo which is very smallby todays standards. guess NASA are using old tech cos of the time it took the rover to get there, or for reliability.

Or perhaps they're using a grayscale CCD imager with color filters and a low susceptibility to radiation-induced noise.

From "The Onion":

[Garrett Fox]

From "The Onion": Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars. "And the thousand or so daily messages of 'STILL NO WATER' really point to a crisis of purpose."

How sad! We should send some humans there to play with it.

all a matter of perspective

[macadamia_harold]

If you look to the left of the picture, you'll see the tracks from the rover's trip.

You look at them as "tracks from the rover's trip."

The martian people look at them as "evidence leading to the invading probe from earth."

Raw Pictures

[WhiteSpade]

For the curious, the links to Spirit's and Opportunity's "raw pictures" are here http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ ---Alex

Can you hear that?

[rHBa]

That's the sound of thousands of nerds changing their wallpaper...

I'll see your OMG...

[MelloDawg]

...and raise you a Really Frakkin' Big. (387MB TIFF >>>>>>>> 87MB JPG)

Also, this isn't the final image; just a preview in honor of Spirit's 1000th sol. Another panorama picture will be released that includes the rover deck.

I am VERY worried

[giorgiofr]

Where is K'breel, speaker for the Council? What shall we do, elder?

Re:Google Buys Mars

[Sqwubbsy]

Well, they already have their map ready

Nothing new here

[OriginalArlen]

The McMurdo pan has been compiled over the last six months or so. The raw data is always up on the web almost as soon as it arrives on earth (thanks to the enlightened attitude of Steve Squyres, PI :) and lots of people grab these and make their own images. There's even a dedicated software app: google for "Midnight Mars Browser". There are a couple of forums dedicated to this stuff which I shall refrain from linking to (Google around, if you're interested enough you'll soon find 'em) that produce really superb (so-called) "amateur" work, often before the official JPL releases.

Is it just me???

[hcob$]

Or does this look like what you've always imagined tatooine really looked like?

Re:Yes

[stevesliva]

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

McMurdo panorama != McMurdo crater

[Old Man Kensey]

It's called the "McMurdo panorama", for what reason I can't find out, but the images are of the "winter haven" region in Gusev crater. The rovers have driven only a few miles each since landing nearly 3 years ago (but that's an incredible achievement compared to anything that's gone before in planetary landings).