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First Pictures From Mars Phoenix Lander
Now that the solar panels have been deployed, the Mars Phoenix Lander has begun sending back pictures of the red planet to the hungry space geeks of earth. In just a few weeks the claw will deploy and they'll start digging a hole. The scientists expect to use the dirt to construct a little sand castle which they will defend with several GI Joe action figures, and a bald barbie stolen from their sisters. Oh, and maybe find water or bacteria.
I saw the pictures of a barren landscape and my jaw fell in total awe... I was never so excited about pictures of dirt.
oh my god... it's full of stars!
I'm working on my seeminly hundredth coffee this morning after reading and watching Mars stuff until the wee hours. Now you do this to me.
Expect a bill from my employer.
Trolling is a art,
Why are the photos black & white?
You are right, ACs posting stupid comments does get old. But the freedom to post anonymously is highly valued around here- so the best thing to do is just ignore them. Browsing higher rated comments makes this easier if you are so inclined.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Why does it takes weeks to deploy a spade? Surely if it landed safely, they just click the 'Deploy spade' button...
Is there a picture or something that shows roughly where it landed on the planet? I spent some time on their web site but couldn't find anything.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Those are some amazing shots. I was just looking at them with my 5 year old son. Hopefully by the time he is my age, pictures from Mars will have people in them.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
here looks like the start of a BSG Episode. It's almost as if Moore has directed it - I expected number Six to turn up any minute, laughing, and invading our computer systems only to begin a sneak attack on the 13th colony.
Oh wait... this is reality ? In that case, I have another beer - make that five please.... And some peanuts.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Here. The blue ellipse was the intended landing zone, the red the actual, and the green box was... umm... a Martian football field? I dunno.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Not that I don't appreciate NASA's false-colouring of images, but why is it that they never just send a visible spectrum camera up there?
Anyone know what the object in the back right field is? Sticks out..
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/phoenix/collection_16/SS000EFF896228773_10CA8R8M1_8877.jpg
Well, I'm a Canadian I know what glaciers look like and it certainly looks like the machine is sitting on top of one. Just my tuppence worth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But in the higher resolution frame you posted it looks like an artifact. The top few scan lines have noise before and after the one-pixel-wide white area.
it could also be the sunlit side of a larger rock.
I for one don't hope they find any signs of any kind of life whatsoever. Here's why:
https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/
An intricate argument but well worth the read. (Bugmenot has passwords if you're too lazy to sign in.)
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Let me know when a picture comes down with clear images of the little green men. Then I will get more excited...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The raw images often have quite a different color than the released images. NASA typically colors their images to match the calculated color of the martian surface, based on other sensor data than just the camera.
I wrote an article about this in 2004: http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/vision.html
Thanks for the lat/long! Now, the prime meridian on Mars, what's that near?
I had no idea the Air Force was involved in this mission. It's clear they are because of the green blobs in the right lower corner of the map which are apparently a golf course adjusted for lower gravity and reduced atmosphere.Invenio via vel creo
well have to Register "Registration is now required to read magazine articles from Technology Review." before we talk to the aliens. Then those fuckers will space spam us with their Miagra.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
While I can understand that they're looking for water and getting as much information for a future human mission to Mars, there's other places which could be more interesting such as Europa.
The mission to Europa was canned which is a shame.
There is a repeated error on http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/images.php: The caption used for many images should read Team Members Celebrate and not Team Members' Celebrate
(Unless they really meant to write Team Members' Celebration?)
Let's just hope there are no misplaced apostrophes in any of the wee beastie's code. Especially in the firmware update upload controller. That would be delightfully ironic....
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
I've always wondered why NASA doesn't take life to Mars and see what effects the planet has on it. Take bacteria, a small plant, I dont know, anything. Maybe if Mars never had life, we could bring life to it.
Those rocks look familiar, looks like the place I ride my dirt bike. WTF.. BRB....
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
The UofA website really doesn't work well with FireFox. Half the time you click on a thumbnail and don't get the the image to show, and the downloads just doesn't work at all.
I would have expected a university run show to do much better than this.
Just so peoples know... a color camera is not as good as a set of Black and White Cameras which only capture light from specific light spectrums... ie: think of it as 1 Red camera, 1 Blue, 2 Green and probably 1 pure Black/White camera, where camera == CCD.
Look up CCD for more details on what it is/does and why using 3 separate CCDs for imaging will get you the highest quality image.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This issue was discussed in a series of posts on the last Mars mission, that left me more confused than I was before: is the red color in the photo on the main page the real color of the Mars surface (or at least an accurate reconstruction of what a human eye would see with ambient light there) or is it something NASA arbitrarily adds to impress viewers with notions about "the red planet"?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Mars needs women.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
And its momma dresses it funny.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Oh yes! I heard about this. The great money tree of mars conspiracy... if it's all true then there will be plenty of money to go around.
OK, the poles look pretty much like the other locations where landers have taken pictures. Now what?
So far, from what we know of Mars terrain, it makes Nevada look exciting.
As far as space missions and human-friendly color images, the bottom line is that transmission of images is expensive. Thus, they don't use the human-friendly wavelengths very often. However, there are various mathematical ways to approximate such using the other filters plus some sample calibrations, and this is usually what we see in press-release images from most missions.
For example, the rover missions usually use infrared filters instead of "red" filters for that end of their range; but they can use that one to approximate the red filter with some adjustments.
I suspect they will do similar things with this mission once it gets up to speed. The preliminary color images are 2-filter approximations. If they do what the rovers did, they'll use 3 filters that don't match human eyesight but compensate with digital processing to give us "human" approximations. They'll be better than these early 2-filter approximations.
If you as a human are upset at this approximation; fish, birds and reptiles will be even more angry because they have 4 color cones instead of 3. (We'd probably have four if our mammalian ancestors were not nocturnal. Damned those mammal-squishing dinosaurs who made us hide in the darkness! I wish meteors on you for limiting our color!)
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/deja_vu_on_mars.html I had a rather strange case of deja vu tonight as the first images from Phoenix flashed on my computer screen. The image on the left was taken on 25 May 2008 on Mars at 68 deg North. I took the picture on the right on Devon Island, 75 deg North in July 2007. I'm just saying
Apparently they were able to image the thing from orbit while on its way down on the chute:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html
They mentioned giving it a try at a press conference, but gave it really small odds because the image size is much smaller than the potential landing range drift. Lucky hit.
Table-ized A.I.
...in NASA's case that's way much more than 3 filters. They are using about a dozen to by able to study other wavelenght too. linky
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
looks like soil polygons from the arctic ...
What causes them?
Are they proof of water?
For the record, it appears that it's only some birds that have four color cones. Budgerigars (parakeets for us Americans) see UV -- you can ruin a bird's sex life by putting sunscreen on its forehead.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
They called the dirt layer drudged up while driving in Meridani (Opportunity's site) "brine". But that's because it's a salty, slightly moist soil.
Not sure what that means for the polar region's dirt, but just tossing that out there.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'm interested in your explanation of why the above comment was "racist" -- unless you simply use the term as a synonym for "bad m'kay." And are you one of those Christians who think that homosexuality is a choice? You fucking homophobic moron.
No, homosexuality has a cause. It can't be genetic, because the fitness deficit is too big for that to be a realistic explanation. That leaves pathogens of some sort, probably a childhood disease that every now and then causes some sort of damage to the hypothalamus.
YA_Python_dev, please go away and hang out with your kind on the fundamentalist Christian websites or wherever your kind go to hate on gays. The rest of understand that it's a biological condition with an actual biological cause: it's not "the devil in you." Gays are normal people like you or me, who have to live with a condition that causes severe social and health problems for them, one that most of them would never wish for another person to be born with.
In all likelihood, this is an artifact caused by a radiation event that hit a few pixels of the CCD chip while the image was taken. These are often called cosmic ray hits, although most of the time it's due to the radioactive decay of something local.
Artifacts like this aren't very unusual, most raw data from any CCD camera will have these if the exposure time is long enough. The raw data from Hubble is littered with these. In addition, the reason it's a streak is that the charge often bleeds to some degree, usually along the path that chip is read out from in the electronics.
I'm actually rather suprised at how cagey the Phoenix team has been about responding to questions about this artifact. These things are well known, and there's no big secret about them.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Actually, some women are "tetrachromats". They have 4 cones, the additional one somewhere in the orange range. Our regular vision is also not strictly RGB, but our brains compensate by using the differences so it works out the same.
Actually, some women are "tetrachromats". They have 4 cones,
The evidence for such is inconclusive, at least having "usable" extra cones.
Table-ized A.I.
You are correct. There some question of the optic nerve handling the extra information. I was just recalling a rather long article in SciAm and thought it might be a good contribution to the discussion.
Ok, maybe you're just an atheist who can't count. Homosexuality has a fitness hit bigger than any known genetic disease. At 3% of the male population (your 5% to 10% numbers are widely quoted in the media but don't jive with the literature), it's simply too common to be genetic. At the wacky 5% to 10% numbers you quote, it would be even more improbable.
The most frequent genetic disease we know about with the same kind of fitness hit is sickle cell, which is as high as 1/500 births among African Americans. (Abount 1 in 34,000 births among everybody in the US.) And the genes that cause sickle cell have the benefit of fighting the most deadly killer in human history: malaria.
It order for homosexuality to be genetic, every male homosexual must provide a fitness benefit to his nephews and nieces somewhere on the equivalent of that provided by mother love to make up for the kids he doesn't have. Yet no one -- in any society, much less all of them -- has ever noticed any huge fitness advantage to gay uncles. It's not there.
More damning, we haven't found any genes that cause homosexuality. If the genes were there, we would have seen them 10 years ago. The chance that we would have missed it in the Hap Map (I hope to god that you know what that is with your "read a book on natural selection" shit) is negligible.
And yes, some gays have had some children (not as many as straight men by all accounts) throughout history. However even a gene with a 5% fitness hit will be weeded out over time (a 5% fitness hit would mean that a gay man would have only 95% of the children a straight man would have -- a wild overestimate compared to the conclusions of the only study I know of on this).
The idea that homosexuality is genetic does not jive with theory nor with evidence. There are simply no genetic diseases that common with anywhere near that fitness impact. Homosexuality genes would have shown up in genetic studies long ago.
If it's not genetic, there's not too many other things it could be. A pathogen is by far the most likely cause, and that's where the smart money has been for the last 5 years at least. If it were exposure to a chemical or some such, we would most likely have noticed by now. The most likely pathogen is a virus, a very common (perhaps unnoticed) childhood disease that causes this side effect in a small number of cases. There are lots of people (though perhaps not enough) looking into the causes of homosexuality.
And finally, your claim that gays are a race is silly and a terrible misuse of the English language. Say what you mean with words that mean it.
If you have any intellectual bollux at all, your next post will be an apology for the race-baiting, and be posted under your real username.
Shoulda' snuck a Mars bar in there so it fell out when the panels deployed.
Funniest. Prank. Ever.
No sig today...
Somewhat off topic. Sorry 'bout that.
... too old*
It is pretty easy to gather the data that show that Mars would be a very demanding place to live. Some folk like to say it's all crazy talk. I reckon it is useful to turn the question around and ask it this way; apart from Earth, where would be the easiest place for long term habitation? Assume we are talking about something that might be done in our lifetimes.
The Moon would come second simply due to its proximity to earth but the low gravity would mean we wouldn't really be talking about long term. Most other places are so hostile that building a rotating space station with serious levels of radiation protection is probably more practical.
So, if we are talking about colonising anywhere of the planet, I think it has to be Mars. There really aren't any other contenders. All you have to do is work out a sustainable logic for doing it. To me it's a no brainer. The last few hundred thousand years of our evolution have hard-wired us to be tempted by the benefits of exploration. We are an invasive species and it has paid off handsomely. Having filled the available space down here we can continue to expand up there.
But, if you want a practical, terrestrial pay-off for the investment then consider this. The folks on Earth need to cease being hunter-gathers completely and create a sustainable ecology. One excellent way to accelerate the development of technology to facilitate this is to create a crucible in which there is essentially no other option but to use all resources very wisely and to recycle damn near everything. Bases or colonies on the Moon and Mars would be perfect places for this to happen. They would be artificially created pockets of geographical isolation such as very often lead to bursts of innovation, evolution and creativity. There would be risk. It focuses the mind wonderfully. There are many who would love to be given the chance to take that risk. *waves hand... damn
Looks like a few 3d pairs have been posted to NASA's site and picked up here. Hope some more, wider views come out soon.
Since (normal) golf balls are not biodegradable, it's now a violation of MARPOL to drive off the flight deck. (Not saying it doesn't happen, but you can get in trouble for it.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?