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.'"

Comments

With one thing edited out that is....

[0.693]

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.

Re:With one thing edited out that is....

[Tablizer]

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?

Google Mars

[geekmansworld]

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

Gigabyte files?

[WaZiX]

And the site posted on Slashdot?

Bye Bye server!

Darn undiscovered discoveries...

[VidEdit]

" 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'" ...er, and discover them.

The Terrorists Win

[drooling-dog]

Oh, that's just great... Now The Terrorists will know where to put their Martian bombz.

Stress test

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrabytes of data, linked to slashdot...seriously what could go wrong?

Fake!

[suv4x4]

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!

meh

[Aqua_boy17]

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.

Re:Data!

[magarity]

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.'

free images of Earth and Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wrong title?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we had Terrabytes of Earth pictures. Wouldn't we have Marsbytes of Mars pics?

Re:1.7 Terabytes..... what a waste!

[spun]

What? What are you talking about, just look at her, she's got HUGE volcanoes, man! I'd motorboat the hell out of those mountains. She's got the deepest gash of any planet in the freakin' solar system dude! I'd totally hit the Valles Marineris.