Slashdot Mirror
Messenger Probe Sends Back Mercury Photos
arbitraryaardvark writes "NASA's Messenger probe flew past Mercury at a distance of 125 miles. The spacecraft took hundreds of pictures during the pass, updating photos from the now 30-year-old Mariner mission. According to an article at the International Business Times, the probe will eventually settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011. 'The images obtained by the $446 million MESSENGER mission (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) this week contain some of those unexplored areas. One image released Saturday was taken after Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury last week. In the photos released this week, scientists have observed unexplored cratered areas of the planet. On Monday, Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury yet, aiming for new discoveries. Among its goals is to discover if Mercury has ice water in its polar craters and to complete the mapping of the whole planet.' Meanwhile here on Earth, a joint EU/Japan probe with an ion drive is set to head towards Mercury sometime in 2013."
Leave it to the engineers at NASA: It's not enough that the probe is going to send messages back from an alien world. It's not enough that the world in question is Mercury, who was the messenger of the Roman gods. No. They have to make it an acronym.
Breakfast served all day!
submitted story was just:
NASA's Messenger probe flew by Mercury 125 miles away and took pictures, updating 30 year old pioneer 10 photos. Messenger will orbit Mercury in 2011. The ion drive European/Japanese ship doesn't launch till 2013. Wired Bad Astronomer. (y'know, with some some links in there.)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/phone_crater.html
NASA says that crater looks like it has a phone shape in it. The first thing I thought was "Damnit, someone put a copyright on Mercury."
-Vendal Thornheart
Because they are recycling the sound stage footage of the moon landing, duh!
First time I heard about sending a probe to mercury.. I would have thought that would be the least interesting of the planets round these parts. With operations as expensive as these, wouldn't they want to focus their resources on Mars or something?
To be fair, NASA has left it's fair share of craters as well. And doesn't NASA use the metric system?
Real engineers wouldn't care if it was called project 11-A-004. Likely the name came for manager/spin-people spending hours and hours in meetings and focus groups, costing tax payers about $5.7 million.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But really, I'm disappointed. How many millions of dollars and how much waiting just to see more photos of a vaguely spherical object with lots of cratering. This is not the 90s folks. They really need to make flashier pictures if they want to get the public interest.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, even NASA has problems with missions around this planet, during manned missions that should be held to a much higher standard.
(Not to mention problems with a mission that was just doing training on the ground)
But, the Mars Rovers, Apollo 11, and this mission are examples where NASA gets stuff very right.
(I hope I am not just putting gasoline and a lit fusee on the fire, like my dad is doing to that car there)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Its the 21st century damnit, and these guys are still in the 19th. They report it in miles. NASA has already converted over to metric. In fact they were converted over in the 90s (though obviously not all subcontractors were). The only reason you are hearing this in miles is because the public affairs officials think you are too stupid to understand kilometers.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I had a friend try and tell me that this, and the rest of our space explorations, is a total waste of money.
Personally I'd rather keep throwing things at other planets to learn about them (like MESSENGER, Spirt & Opportunity (Mars Rovers), or New Horizons (First mission to Pluto, launched prior to being "deplanetized"), as opposed to dumping the same funds into our war campaign in the Middle East.
This kind of stuff is a lot more... lasting even though its less tangible.
Am I the only one annoyed about the space news always being something like "xxx mil./bil. $ space stuff was lunched or did something"? I do not recall this kind of obsessive, "not once missed" remark on other type of news. With news like this there is no wonder that people make mistakes.
No kidding. You'd think for $440+ Million they could afford to put a nice color camera on that thing...
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
The war campaign in the Middle East has nothing to do with this (save that it's wasting perfectly good money which could be used to fund both lines of scientific inquiry about two thousand times over. That's not hyperbole - look up the numbers and crunch 'em - I'll wait).
Mars3, Russia 1971
Yeah, if only the US would adopt a sensible policy, like confiscating non-metric measuring equipment and levying huge fines on people who still sell fruit in obsolete "pounds", we'd be able to catch up to the high standards set by other, more enlightened countries.
It's the 21st century damnit, and people don't use the word "learnt" anymore.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Yeah, there were loads of really stable digital colour cameras of a suitable size to fit on the probe back in 1973. IIRC the cameras do have colour filters though, so photos could be combined to give a colour image if needed.
I wasn't saying there was any catching up to do. The post I replied to asked for another agency that landed something on mars. Mars 3 apparently landed intact and died of other causes shortly after.
200km, wow! As a point of reference, geosyncrhonous satellites on earth are 36,371 km high, and the best resolution earth imagery satellites are at around 500km.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Where's the damn color? I don't understand why after all these decades, it's so hard for them to take color photos. Just slap a damn Sony camcorder on there if you have to, and take some regular color pictures, to show what our own eyes would perceive if we were there.
The surface is nearly colorless (gray), like the moon. So images in all wavelengths they look about the same. Particulate surfaces that are highly gardened by meterite strikes tend to be like that. Perhaps thermal IR or X ray florescence would show more variation.
an ill wind that blows no good
Where's the damn color? I don't understand why after all these decades, it's so hard for them to take color photos.
They probably didn't have time to take many images of the same spots through multiple filters. However, when the probe eventually settles into orbit in the coming years, they will be able to start such an endeavor.
Different filters are primarily to study chemical composition, but can also be used to make nifty color images (like this moon one).
In short, be patient. This mission has only just begun...
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, the moon copied Mercury because it had Planet Envy.
Table-ized A.I.
Also take a look at this image - the scattering of pixels in the top left part if the picture is not dust on your monitor but actual stars as seen by the spacecraft ! I wonder if it is possible to find out from this when the shot was taken and where the camera was pointing.
"the public affairs officials think you are too stupid to understand kilometers"
Unless you are...
- raised on the metric system
- currently in school and dealing with metrics
- are or were in the army (klicks ftw)
- are in a scientific field primarily using the metric system
chances are that yes, you are indeed too stupid to understand kilometers.
Now don't get me wrong - not saying you're too stupid to calculate how many miles a given kilometers figure would be... but just because you can do the math doesn't mean you grasp the concept.
If somebody tells me something is 350 miles away then I, for one, wouldn't have the foggiest how far that would be right that very instant. I have to calculate.. (350*1.5 is 525, add another 10%, 525+35...) 560. Okay, I know how far that is. Now that calculation takes place pretty fast, but it still needed to be done.
If somebody tells me something is 350 kilometers away, I know immediately how far that is*
So it's not that people are truly too stupid to be able to say how many miles a given kilometer figure is - it's just 'instantly' recognizable for people if it's in the unit they're used to
* to a limit, of course. I don't know how far 7800 kilometers is - I don't have any frame of reference for figures that large. Similarly, 45nanometer processes are lost on me in terms of scale.. I just know it's really, really, really f'ing small, and about 2/3rds the size of a 65nm process.
That would explain why you can't order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese there.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Well, they did have a little help hitching a ride on the NASA/JPL Cassini spacecraft and the Lockmart Titan IV Centaur. With all that they screwed up development of Huygen's radio transmitter ignoring the doppler effect between Cassini and the probe. This was fixed by NASA by redesigning the Huygen's landing. ESA still screwed up the entry losing half of the returned data. If you aren't impressed by the US program one wonders whose you are impressed with? China? NASA has an absolute armada of spacecraft throughout the solar system. No other nation comes close.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm afraid the SETI people will be quite disappointed when the first extraterrestrial communication they receive is from a copyright lawyer.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/phone_crater.html
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
That cause being one of the Decepticons perhaps?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
A similar hyper-color image of the Moon (that makes a nice desktop/background): http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060907.html
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I should note that the link I gave did not use color filters, but rather regular color photography, and stacked up several dozens in order to tease the color out. One advantage of filters is that you can capture more colors and wavelength range than the human eye can see. (Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use, unless you are a bird or a fish.)
Table-ized A.I.
Let's be serious here , I could have done better then Russia did by strapping some rockets and a transmitter to a camcorder and launching it from my back yard.
Nasa is very far ahead of Russia or the Soviet Union , or what ever they want to be called this month.
Insert russian joke here:
In Soviet Russia the probes probe you !
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
I don' think those dots are stars. They probably wouldn't show up on a photos like this, especially seeing as Mercury is probably *very* bright because it's so much closer to the sun than us. I suspect there is actually a bit of processing going on the dim the photos to make sure they're not washed out.
I think it's either just noise from the camera, or possibly the effect of cosmic rays hitting the camera CCD. This is something that effects anything leaving Earth's protective atmosphere, and causes astronauts (especially Apollo astronauts) to see random flashes in their eyes as the cosmic rays hit the receptors at the back of the eyeball.
A bit of explanation here:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mir_lights_030416.html
I'm too cool for a sig.
I noticed the video they made was made from about 4 images. In black and white. And the rest of the photos are in black and white as well. Is NASA still clinging on to the 60s? Why was the earth video so smooth, taken from the same probe? Why were the earth images in color? Why must all other planets out there be black and white? Normal, modern cameras can't even take black and white photos without a post processing filter these days - and I know NASA isn't using normal cameras, but still, Mercury isn't completely greyscale. It would be nice to see the different shades of color even if they were so called "false color" (NASA really is a color blind organization :-))
In my opinion showing all these photos in b/w puts the space mission presentation in a worse light than it would otherwise. I really don't understand why it is so difficult to snap some high resolution color pictures for us to view. Can anyone enlighten me? And don't give me the loaddown that science cameras are color blind and that the infrared is more important, as I really can't accept that it would be so hard to reproduce Mercury in colors in 2008.
I think they went with B/W images to actually get better results with the camera.
No. The NASA doesn't use cameras with Bayer grids (pixel-sized red, green and blue filters) as we have in normal cameras because they care about much more than just visible colours so they have an unfiltered camera and they rotate before its lens a bunch of filters that includes red, green and blue filters but also infra-red and ultraviolet as well as polarized filters. The pictures we see are in B&W because as of now they didn't yet put together pictures taken with different filters in order to produce true or "false" colour images.
You just got troll'd!
It's the 21st century damnit, and people don't use the word "learnt" anymore.
Ha! You clearly haven't heard of the recent 'abandoned' irregular verbs revival. "Learned" is so 2007, man.
You just got troll'd!
I think it's either just noise from the camera, or possibly the effect of cosmic rays hitting the camera CCD.
Considered out these supposed 'stars' consists in single pixels, and not a pack of 4 pixels as it should be due to anti-alisaing (if we can put it that way), the cosmic rays explanation sounds better.
You just got troll'd!
To be honest, I'm actually too ignorant to understand miles.
If you carefully study all the awesome pictures, one may realize that this must be the most boring planet. Ever.
Too stupid? Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
Many of us prefer "miles". It's a measurement we're familiar with in everyday life. We can relate to it.
Fata viam invenient.
Mariner 10 three flybys within two years of its 1973 launch. MESSENGER will take almost seven years. However it will have slowed down enough for orbital capture.
The great thing about NASA is they now release raw photos on the web within days. The ESA only releases occasional publicity photos from its Mars and Venus orbitors. They have a one-year embargo so the scientists can publish results first. That was NASA's policy too a long time ago. ESA might be doing interesting stuff, but nobody's going to hear about it.
Raw photos arent the best for scientific study. They have to have shape and lighting/color distortion corrected, and composited into larger photos or animations. NASA releases corrected photos a few months later.
Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use
Actually, it is made. The two approaches are for it to be greyscale and only represent e.g. UV or IR, or to shift the colour channels (for example, UV = blue, Blue = green, Green = red, with actual red light not being represented in the photograph).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
They looked so much like low res versions of moon pictures taken by Japan, can see why they're still trying to drum up hits weeks after the flyby.
I meant film that simultaniously captures multiple colors, not frequency-specific film. If I was not clear on that, I apologize.
Table-ized A.I.
Well to be fair, most of their audience will be American.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I see what you mean. The photo has a much warmer, fuller look about it than modern distorted colour.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Wouldn't cosmic rays get anti-aliased too? Why the hell would they corrupt their data with anti-aliasing in the first place??
Moderation: +1 pwnage
This list starts out slow but has some gems:
My guess is because American's cant divide/multiply by ten.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Why the hell would they corrupt their data with anti-aliasing in the first place??
Hahaha, damn man, you need a clue. If you're gonna capture a signal, if you're gonna do it properly, it's going to be "anti-aliased", that means components above the Nyquist frequency will be filtered out so that they don't "fold" back under the Nyquist frequency, therefore anti-aliasing is not "corruption". Besides, the reason why images taken with a digital camera are naturally "anti-aliased" is that captors that match to a pixel in the image are large enough to fill the grid, meaning they catch all the light in that area, and not just in one tiny point, which is why there's no aliasing.
As for cosmic rays, a single cosmic ray will hit only one electronic component, and if it's a camera captor it will manifest itself as a single white pixel, which is why it won't get "anti-aliased", because it will only hit one captor.
You just got troll'd!
are almost always "black and white" and color is obtained by rotating different color filters in front for several shots. The different colored shots are combined to get color images.
"False color" is used (most often) when the images are taken in frequencies human eyes can't see, and so the data are adjusted bring out signif features.
The lack of smoothness, and use of few frames, is probly cuz this was a flyby, not final approach to orbit. Flybys occur at much higher speeds, and there's less time, so fewer frames.
Actually, the darkside of Mercury (yes, it has one. No, Earth's moon does not.) IS grayscale (like the inside of a black cat in a coal mine at midnight...). Infrared isn't more important, for science, what's most important is viewing with the widest range of frequencies possible.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I don't really consider a cosmically sized face-plant to be a sign of intelligence.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
There was only limited opportunity to take (false) color shots, since the 3 color channels had to be taken sequentially
As you're obviously unaware of, every shot has been taken sequentially with the probe's 11 filters, included red, green and blue, sequentially, everytime. I love it when people make their assumptions sound like facts.
You just got troll'd!