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Mars Lander Snaps the Most Detailed Pics Yet
An anonymous reader writes "The Mars Lander has taken its very first microscopic image of a piece of Martian dust (image). The particle, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is shown at a higher magnification than anything ever seen from another planet. The piece of dust is a rounded particle about a millionth of a meter across. This particle is one of the countless specks of dust that continually swirl around the Red Planet, coloring the Martian sky pink. 'Taking the images required the highest resolution microscope operated off of Earth and a specially designed substrate to hold the Martian dust,' said Tom Pike, a Phoenix science team member. 'We always knew it was going to be technically very challenging to image particles this small.'"
Kudos to NASA for doing this.
We've got an AFM in my lab, and it's easily the most troublesome piece of equipment that I have to work with on a regular basis.
It's slow, extremely sensitive to vibrations, and the tips have to be replaced frequently. What's worse is that it's not always all that clear when your tip's gone bad, unless you're calibrating between every image taken.
The fact that they got one to another planet, and had it work properly without human intervention is pretty darn impressive.
Phoenix seems full of some rather daring decisions by NASA. I'm still shocked that the suits approved their landing trajectory and location, which gave the craft about 50/50 odds of surviving the landing.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well, roughly 12 years ago I was in the data archiving business, and I remember that NASA generated 1.2TB of space data per day. This doesn't include engineering, life sciences, analyzers, contractors, etc... I can only imagine that this has risen astronomically (hahaha) in these last few years.
I've ready recently that NASA aims to keep about 40 petabytes of recent data online & nearline. If you put it all together, I'm fairly sure that "tons" is probably an apt measure - most certainly if we're talking drives, tapes, storage, and machines.
And if you don't believe me... then just google "ton of data" site:nasa.gov They confirm my suspicions!!
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.