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Terabytes of Mars Pictures Released to Public
Riding with Robots writes "The team that runs the high-rez camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, NASA's mission data archive. The team has also released 1.7 Terabytes of data to a user-friendly site that allows users to quickly home in on each image, most of which are a gigabyte-sized files measuring 20,000 by 50,000 pixels. Not all the images have been thoroughly studied yet: in the announcement, the camera's lead scientist said, 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'"
Pictures of the faces on the surfaces! It's a conspiracy. They didn't land a man on the moon, but there is Jesus on Mars.
Does this mean we can look forward to a new, improved Google Mars?
Let the Data mining begin :)
Wait, nevermind...
All that hard drvie space could be used for porn!
NOW we know what a home user needs Terabytes of storage for. NAS for everyone!
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Bah, obviously they're fake like the moon landing. They're covering for the real reason we went, to spy on the great Martian civilizations.
And the site posted on Slashdot?
Bye Bye server!
Let's get this out of the way so we can get some actual discussion going...
Torrent?
" 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'" ...er, and discover them.
Oh, that's just great... Now The Terrorists will know where to put their Martian bombz.
Terrabytes of data, linked to slashdot...seriously what could go wrong?
Those fotos are all fake: NASA setup a Mars stage on the Moon, and colored it red in Photo Shop. They used Total Recal as a referens!!
Such obvios scam, I can't believe youv fallen for it, guyz!
I personally think I'll wait for the Google street level view. Then maybe we'll be able to catch the 'Face' on Mars walking out of a porn shop.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Anybody have a mirror up yet?
...of pixels.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
A few terabytes of pictures, let's do this!
I SEE JOHN CARTER! I SEE JOHN CARTER!!
Ooh, and Ransom is over there with the giant manatee-things...
Ummm...someone needs to toss Arnie a oxygen mask, or something, his eyes look funny...
And what are those funny-looking explosions...ah, nothing, just volcanoes.
...we see some really interesting images pointed out indicating just about anything imaginable. :) If every hispanic sees Jesus in a tortilla or the bark of a tree, there's bound to be interesting things on Mars's surface too. I'd like to see someone hack into the sites hosting the images, photoshop some 'aliens' in there and over-write the originals. :) That'd be too funny.
That is modded as flamebait, which is is, but there is a kernal (kernel ? colonel?) of truth in it. Why does so much money go to planetary research ? Why not spend it on condensed matter physics or something people can do in a lab on Earth, and potentially make something useful ?
It's funny that freely available satellite images of Mars have greater resolution than freely available images of Earth.
if only nasa would follow an 'open source' attitude similar to FSF and GNU/Linux, we'd be on mars in a couple of years. The 'keep everyone in the dark' attitude may have served a purpose during the cold war ... but now seems a little dated. of course, releasing these photos is a start. however, they could have had that start long ago....
just my two cents.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
"You see, there are known knowns and known unknowns. But we didn't know about the unknown knowns until they were known. The face on Mars is a known known, but why it's there is a known uknown. So, there are 1.7 terabyes of data full of known unknowns that hopefully will become known knowns. But as to when we'll get the time to do that, that's a known unknown."
- D. Rumsfeld, NASA Spokesman
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
TV tells me Megatron is there, and TV never lies.
"Down Here" is not the same as "Out There" when it comes to scientific research. Besides, we spent $200+ billions USD turning Iraqi sand red with blood. Which red sand will benefit humanity in the long run, Martian or Iraqi?
I hope we can find him. NASA might have forgotten to edit out the giant space mansion that he shares with Xenu and Jimmy Hoffa.
Need more hard drive space. Need to find a certain vessel that's buried on Mars.
Beware of the shadows. They move when you're not watching.
we will have something like this for the Earth as well.
It's funny that the most detailed and complete maps I can access are of a planet 400 million kilometers away.
I thought we had Terrabytes of Earth pictures. Wouldn't we have Marsbytes of Mars pics?
I wonder how many people will try to look for sunbathing girls in here.
Google and NASA could get together on this, and have a feature in which registered users could pin intresting areas and send the location info to astronomers. Maybe the face on Mars' covered side was hiding a hand picking it's noze? Inquiring minds want to know!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I suppose Iraqi as long as they keep churning out the gallons of oil so little lei fong hoo in china can drive the 2008 hummer h2 threw the vast wasteland that china is becoming with all the pollution from thier "industrializing" economy ?
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Yeah but who's on first ?
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Why don't these things come straight from the fkg satellites to our televisions? Why do "scientists" have to vet the content for us? Is there something they are trying to HIDE???? As a disciple of Richard C Hoagland, I've learned to be VERY suspicious of NASA. What are they editing out that they don't want us to see?
And before you call me crazy and stupid, ask yourself WHY they have to "process" these images for us first??????111???
Now we can begin planning the full-scale invasion of Mars! We'll give them pesky green-skins what fer!!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Why not do both? After all, none of this scientific research really costs that much (at least when you're talking about unmanned probes, not manned missions) compared to the Oil Wars. A few tens of millions of dollars is cheap, really.
Besides, it's easier to find interesting information by just sending probes to other celestial bodies, plus it lays the groundwork for future manned missions which can be useful not just for science, but also industrial applications such as mining. After all, we're facing a severe copper shortage here on earth, so much so that here in Phoenix, people are risking their lives climbing up electric poles to steal copper wire and getting themselves electrocuted.
Condensed matter physics is interesting and all, but what are the near-term useful applications for it? The research facilities for things like colliders aren't cheap, either, compared to unmanned probes.
My professor that I am working under has been studying images here for the past few years. Whatever you might gain from these other images is not likely to be that much more than what was already publicly available. I personally haven't been doing any work on these, as I am just coding a side project for him, but from what he's told me, its not very useful to have these images without any kind of elevation model, using stereographic cameras or lasers and such (from a structural geology point of view).
Hmmm... one terabyte at an optimistic 2 Mbps is...
1 terabyte = 8.79609302 × 10^12 bits
(8.79609302 × (10^12)) / 2 000 000 = 4 398 046.51 seconds.
4 398 046.51 / 3 600 = 1 221.67959 hours.
(thanks google)
Well, maybe it'd be quicker if I just browse the site online.
The images are in the (unpopular?) JPEG2000 format; you'll probably need a special viewer to see them. See their FAQ from the google cache (since the site may go down...)
If you're using Windows, the FAQ claims that IrfanView will work -- but I never had any luck with it. Despite having 2GB of memory in my computer, I always got an "out of memory" error when attempting to load the ~500MB images. The plugin from Expressview worked for me.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
I for one welcome our new hoards of conspiracy-finding overlords.
Table-ized A.I.
I completely agree, especially when I read quotes such as "These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'".
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
That's correct.
I probably need a healthy dose of technical expertise, too. Anyone out there got a Planetary Geology CBT?
Dang! Waited decades since the first moonshot for easy access to NASA data, and now I discover I should have studied geology when I had the chance.
Oh, well. Maybe I can breathe life into the screensaver business...
I hope no one needs to call me on my landline for the next ... oh ... 15 years.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When I onMouseOver the graphic on the Arizona page, it switches a broken image. I hope NASA imagery works a little better than the grad students from ASU.
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They're also providing viewers for the images - if you're trying to look at Mars on a typical ~1 Megapixel monitor, you don't need to see much of the surface at a time. Perhaps a gigabyte download of the lower-res versions would help that work, and Bittorrent would be a good way to distribute that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I figure it will be tonight... Richard C. Hoagland will come on the radio show Coast to Coast AM and comment how great it is that they've released these images to the public that funded them and if not tonight, within a week will have found a rock that looks like a Martian refrigerator. Then he will find another section that is blocked out that he's sure NASA is covering up, and will want the audience to call, fax, and write to get them released...
Any takers?
I had a sucky sig.
I'm surprised they released it. National security and all.
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I can't wait for Richard Hoagland to get ahold of these. Then the real truth will come out! Imagine all the rocks which vaguely resemble man made objects he'll find.
50% low resolution published photos, 10% faked photos and 40% top-secret censored photos for military destination.
The intelligest men from the DoD and NASA are always liars making them clever against idiots.
This is the kind of thing you really have to respect the NASA people for - ESA sits on their data for ages and releases little dribbles when it suits them - NASA puts it all out there. I suspect their policy hasn't cost anyone a single publication.
We looked into using torrents as a distribution mechanism, and ultimately abandoned it for exactly the reasons you suggest. It just didn't look like there would be enough peers for each image to make it viable. So we turned to the jpeg2000 jpip protocol, which actually works quite well, and so far, the jpip servers seem to be handling the load even better than we expected. Of course, the irritating part is the lack of ubiquitous and stable client software that knows how to speak the jpip protocol, but if you can find a good client for your platform, it works well.
We're hoping to provide better client software with more supported platforms in the future, but we're not there yet. The IAS viewer is ok, but it's OSX and Windows only right now (although a linux port may be out fairly soon), but even if this viewer was fully cross platform, it's not really geared towards the kinds of features that we are looking for in an image viewer for HiRISE data, so we're hoping to build something better.
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Simple answer: because different people have different itches to scratch. Some people get itchy thinking about planetary research. Others get hives at the mere thought of condensed matter physics.
Wonder if the Martians are spending much time poring over maps of Earth? Probably have better things to do. Like looking for water. Ice water.
Some of these pictures(the browser size) would make good wallpapers. I already made one, even though they come in long strips, I just opened up The Gimp and cut 1280x800 out of it.
I'm still waiting for the galactic map .... then zoom out to our local galactic cluster ... maybe they can show projections of Andromeda's motion and the eventual merge. Who knows, earth may end up with new neighbors...or, then, maybe it will get pulled out of orbit and sucked into the center where we can find God needing a spaceship. ...its late...better make this one anon too...
NASA's got the full version of Terragen 2!
Life here began Out There.
I wonder if someone found a naked secret female astronaut with a alien and predator gang-nailing her by the lake mercury of nazuth?
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My name in romanian: Nerdius Hornius Maximus.
I really don't want to imagine thousands of knowledgeable amatuer astronomers puring over any photos. I they were to pore over them, that'd be a different matter
A question about Bittorrent... if a given torrent has 1 seed and 1 peer, does it simplify to the exact same as a direct HTTP download (given that neither are throttled, etc.)?
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No, it's still running the full bit-torrent protocol, but it's pretty efficient because it's spending almost all of its time sending chunks of data, not tracking overhead. So you don't lose much, and if a second receiver comes on, it ramps up really fast.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks