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Phoenix Lander Photographs Martian Whirlwinds
Toren Altair recommends a story up on the Space Fellowship site that begins "NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has photographed several dust devils dancing across the arctic plain this week and sensed a dip in air pressure as one passed near the lander. The Surface Stereo Imager ... caught a dust devil in action west of the lander in four frames shot about 50 seconds apart from each other. 'It was a surprise to have a dust devil so visible that it stood [out] with just the normal processing we do,' said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, lead scientist for the stereo camera. 'Once we saw a couple that way, we did some additional processing and found there are dust devils in 12 of the images.'"
Looks a lot like Texas to me... :)
A key factor in the whirlwinds getting stronger is an increase in the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.
Shit! now we have to worry about climate change on mars?
So... why's there an tag around everything from "dancing..." to "...images."?
I'll never get to go to Mars, but at least I get this. I'm loving the pictures that Phoenix is sending back. I enjoy seeing the differences and the similarities between the two planets. Just awe-inspiring.
http://transformativeworks.org/
I wonder what would happen if one of these little devils ran over the lander!?
Because it ain't easy bein' green!
My blog
That's not a dust devil. It's a fast moving Martian.
Yet another government agency coverup!
Um, spend a little time at this gallery or this one or this one or this one for gigabytes of very sharp, gorgeous imagery - some of it in extremely high resolution.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
I think the movies captured by the rovers are much cooler:
Sol 1120
Sol 486
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
If I am not mistaken, they have to take bunches of images in order to capture a single whirlwind. Color images hog more bandwidth and memory. There was some talk of automating the process in the rovers to automatically detect movement and only save and send those frames with activity.
However, another problem is that most probes use filters to capture color, and filters don't work well with moving objects because the target moves between filters. On some of the Phoenix color images you notice a rainbow-like tinge around shadows. This is because the shadows move slightly between the different color filters due to sun movement across the sky. Whirl-winds would be even worse in this regard.
And I don't think they want to send up a typical "human" camera because our color vision is limited compared to what it could be. These are scientific missions, not tourist stops, and so mostly use science-friendly color spreads. (Although its sometimes possible to tease out human-friendly colors via post-processing if one knows the scenery color profile well enough.)
Table-ized A.I.
How did that become "So1"? My god, am I inf3cted w1th ...l33t$p34k?? 444|-||-||-||-|... |-|3|_P!!!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I will suffice to reply with the quote from "Contact" by Carl Sagan:
"You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane," you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history."
Or to put it with my dry tongue: The books concerning undisputable physics laws did exist when Leonardo Da Vinci lived too, and they were as thick if not thicker and as numerous as books on physics today, and just as then today skepticism is the first barrier when expanding the understanding of reality. The problem I have with your thinking is, unlike scientist who refute theories based on analytic approach and cross-referencing laws, you seem to accept the skepticism as a god-given tool and universal law that allows anybody and anyone today to say things like "faster than light travel is impossible. This guy X proved it and experiments were done. Refer to the book Y, where Z is explained and which completely and irrevocably denies your concept application.".
But the Carl Sagan wrote it much better. Now, I did not say everything is possible, but it seems as we are sitting here saying "I did not say everything is possible", more and more things pop up that make us wonder what the fuck is Universe all about. It is HIGHLY improbable that a guy living in 1940s however smart he is, unless he is a prophet of a true God if he exists, can pinpoint a law of the Universe that is ABSOLUTE. Please. We do build our technology on these laws, but as it is said about Zodiac, they are not 'meant to limit what can happen but merely show what is possible.'
I am just as a realist as you are, but you are fantasizing. Your fantasy revolves around believing in the future that is already cemented, but this fantasy is not reality. Reality in fact shows us again and again that our understanding of laws of nature is flawed to a formidable degree. I do believe it is possible to precisely describe such laws, but it would be as much effort as describing what happens in one corner of a dirty swimming pool filled with tree leafs when you poke the water on the other end. Under heavy rain.