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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.'"
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
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.
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.
With so many images in the public hands, there are bound to be some interesting "patterns" found that will generate gajillion conspiracy theories. Even with the Viking landers that returned only a limited amount of images, people found letters on rocks. With the rovers, people are finding skulls and lots of other doodads. With even more images out there, there are likely to be even more coincidental shapes found. The more patterns available to search, the more coincidental iconic images will be found. Maybe they'll find Elvis tap dancing with Jesus under a pyrimid. This raises a hugely important question: How do I buy stock in conspiracy books?
Table-ized A.I.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso