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The Phoenix Has Landed
Iddo Genuth writes "Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the "Phoenix Mars Lander" touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving at its destination, the Phoenix will begin its exploration of our intriguing neighbor planet, in a mission to help astronomers resolve at least some of the many questions regarding Mars. The key question remains: can the Red Planet support some form of life?" Hella grats to our nerd brethren — you looked great on the Science channel. Yes I'm watching this live. Can't wait to see what happens next.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.
Can't imagine it's very live what with the lightspeed delay..
What are the chances of puttering around for a few hundred meters on earth and randomly finding a human skeleton?..
In my neighborhood? Pretty good.
That's what I'm hoping they dig up.
I'm hoping it finds Jimmy Hoffa. Or maybe the second gunman.
What?
A human skeleton? Not very high. But any skeleton? In areas that used to be underwater, you often find fossilized imprints of shellfish, etc, every few inches.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Ground stations no longer receiving signals because Earth was destroyed by a meteorite
That would really suck
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Great job, JPL & Arizona!
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Years ago, we put vikings up on mars. The more amazing in that they were nuke powered. Now, we fight about it all the time. Even phoenix would be better served had it been nuke powered. But now, about half of the ppl do not want human systems going, another group fights sending nuke power up, and another wants NASA dead altogether. Back in the 60's and 70's, we all came together on saying that ALL of this was important; Long term robotic probes AND human missions AND the environment (as we understood it). It was not one vs. the other.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned that the reason for human missions to the moon was because of uranium/plutonium. Yet, ppl were upset about what a waste human missions were without realizing that we could fire up new MUCH LARGER missions to mars and elsewhere and let them use plutonium. I never bought off on W's idea that the moon would be a good launch pad based on the hydrogen that is there. But if we have LOADS of plutonium, that is a different matter. We can easily rail launch missions combined with large amount of energy via plutonium without worrying about it being spread all over the earth's atmosphere. Hopefully, at some point, Americans realize that one idea does not need to preclude another. For instance, human missions do not need to prevent robotics from going (or vs. versa).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wikipedia has an estimate of the total number of people that has ever lived at 45 billion to 125 billion people.
It also provides a map of population density in the world. Another article provides information on the surface area of the Earth.
Approximately 29.2% of the surface is dry land. 13.31% of this land is arable, with only 4.71% supporting permanent crops.
148,940,000 km is dry land. (1.940 x 10^14 mÂ)
Assuming a buried person takes up 1 square metre.
Assume that there have been 120 billion skeletons buried all over the place (125 minus 5 billion still living).
Then you have 1.20 x 10^11 / (1.940 x 10^14 mÂ)
which gives 1.20 / 1.940 x 10^-3
or 0.000618556
6.18556 x 10^-3
So, you have a 1/1616 chance of finding a skeleton. Your odds will be affected by the cultural traditions of the local population, the local geology (limestone will dissolve bone). The natives might think twice about burying tribe members on farm land.
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Phoenix Mars Lander Touched Down 2 Hours ago
The best thing they could possibly find would be a mars bar. It would be too funny if some NASA guy threw one in so that it would pop out on landing.
Ha--it's taken a bunch of black-and-white photos of itself at odd angles. Are those for its MySpace page?
I made up a 3D image of the landing leg by combining two of the published pictures. You can clearly see a mount that formed that makes it look like the lander slid as it touched down. The first version is 3D if you cross your eyes, the second version requires red-blue 3D glasses:
http://img294.imageshack.us/my.php?image=phoenixlegstereoug5.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/24yyfix.jpg
I wonder why they don't have colour immagers!?
Usually they use filters to provide color for space missions. The first pass is a general survey. Filter-based color requires multiple images of the same spot, which will probably come later. Plus, they will probably use "science-friendly" filters before they use human-eye-friendly filters. Science before beauty. Just be patient...
Table-ized A.I.
Like many scientific imagers, the camera on phoenix (called the surface stereo imager http://fawkes3.lpl.arizona.edu/science_ssi.php ) uses a filter wheel in front of a CCD. They have 12 filters picked specifically for geological and atmospheric interest. Presumably three of the filters roughly correspond to red, green and blue, so they can take an image through each filter and then composite them into a single color image. I assume they've just been posting the raw images taken through a given filter first and will composite them once they've got a set in. Note that your digital camera works in a similar way (takes images through three filters and composites them, it may place a permanent color filter array in front of the CCD, or use three separate CCDs and a beam splitter rather than using a spinning filter wheel), except it does the compositing automatically. Since the imager on phoenix will not be used exclusively for making RGB color images, there's no reason to have the camera automatically take images through those three filters and do the compositing. Also, it looks like many of the images they've taken first are of the solar arrays - I imagine they wanted to take quick single filter images of each array and send them back first over their limited bandwidth to see that they really deployed, before taking and transmitting a color panorama.