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Terabytes of Mars Pictures Released to Public

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bandwidth-fu dept.

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.'"

6 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Google Mars by geekmansworld · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does this mean we can look forward to a new, improved Google Mars?

  2. Re:Data! by magarity · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Exactly; there are hundreds of thousands of quite knowledgeable amateur astronomers who will pour over these images. What a great way to find interesting things more quickly and with bandwidth fees your only budget. But I missed the link for 'submit your interesting findings here.'

  3. free images of Earth and Mars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's funny that freely available satellite images of Mars have greater resolution than freely available images of Earth.

    1. Re:free images of Earth and Mars by FleaPlus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's funny that freely available satellite images of Mars have greater resolution than freely available images of Earth.

      Actually, I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, which blurs satellite photographs less.

  4. Re:Gigabyte files? by bdjacobson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And the site posted on Slashdot?

    Bye Bye server! This would be perfect for a torrent.
  5. Re:JPEG2000 by ben+kohler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    yeah but how big is that 500MB jpeg2k when uncompressed? probably bigger than 2GB.