Slashdot Mirror
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?
All that hard drvie space could be used for porn!
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!
" '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?
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.'
...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.
It's funny that freely available satellite images of Mars have greater resolution than freely available images of Earth.
Wow! The UA server crashed already,... and it wasn't even porn!
"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.
Here you go: http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/hirise
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
I thought we had Terrabytes of Earth pictures. Wouldn't we have Marsbytes of Mars pics?
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.
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