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Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations
Nancy Atkinson writes "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover 'awake' at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. 'Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers,' said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. 'We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.'"
the sky image - those aren't stars, just "hot pixels"... and the pics are never, ever true colors. How come we can't get true color pics for our hundred million dollars?
Then, when they DO image something interesting, like this Martin crinoid, they won't talk about it!
Who decided she was female?
Then, when they DO image something interesting, like this Martin crinoid, they won't talk about it!
If there really was to be a cover-up, wouldn't it be easier to just not release the smoking gun pictures rather than release and deny?
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Trolling is a art,
Is that what we mere mortals call a 'storm'?
At first glance, one might think that observation of the Martian night sky would return insignificant scientific data. After all, how powerful of a telescope does Spirit mount? Certainly not even in Hubble's league. But they aren't looking to collect data about distant galaxies & stars.
The real value is information about the Martian atmosphere. By observing the "twinkle" of distant stars, the observations should return some useful information regarding night time atmospheric conditions. Maybe not as much as a dedicated purpose designed atmospheric station, but certainly more than we have now.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
well that image DOES look like a fossilized animal to me.
Sure, it does to me too, but that doesn't make it one. Take the famous Mars face photos. It looks like a face, under the right conditions of lighting and shading, but is otherwise an unremarkable piece of Martian real estate.
Trolling is a art,
the human mind has many types of intelligence: spatial, social, emotional, etc.
one of our most powerful is, in fact, our social intelligence. a rodent needs a good sense of smell to escape predators and find food. living in a social group, the biggest threat and reward for you comes not from the bushes: berries or fangs, but from your fellow humans: jealous potential murderer or coy potential mate
therefore, you have this powerful cognition machine sitting in your head hewn from millenia of evolution in human groups. well, use it. there is nothing wrong with bringing your powerful social intelligence machinery to bear on nonsocial problems. think of it as using otherwise wasted cpu cycles on protein folding or finding mersenne primes: you "use" your social intelligence by imagining a math problem as a social setting (cue that famous scene from the russel crowe flick "a beautiful mind"), or reimagining your relationship as captain of a cruise ship and all its engineering problems as instead a relationship with a woman and all of the attendant problems that comes with that
it is in fact, not some sort of weird mental trick i am referring to, it is in fact almost a subconcious and completely natural effort for most of us, this repurposing of social intelligence, since our social intelligence is probably our most potent form of intelligence. you look at clouds and bark on trees and stars in the sky and see faces and bodies, its effortless. this is because your mind is powerfully prejudiced and primed to process its world in terms of social cues and meanings first. yes, spatial intelligence is important for many things, like throwing a spear or building a hut. but none of that matters if you didn't see the backstabber in your hunting party or missed the social cues that the big man's daughter was interested in you. social intelligence is our most important form of intelligence: i am sure plenty of people can outrank barack obama on a traditional iq test. but iq tests test only certain forms of intelligence. barack obama's ability to recognize, manipulate, and use social networks to gain power (or any politician's such ability, its called charisma) is in fact a much more important form of iq than anything a traditional iq test reveals
there is nothing wrong with anthropomorphism. it is entirely natural, and in fact, useful. in fact, if you see something wrong with anthropomorphism, all you are doing is denying a powerful aspect of your own intellect to come to bear on problems of interest to you. or perhaps you are in fact impoverished in your social intelligence abilities, and your anathema to anthropomorphism is just a symptom of your own poverty, not a valid comment on other people's lines of thinking
so when the engineers and technicians talk about and react to events with the mars rovers in terms of a social relationship with another person, specifically, a woman ("she"), all they are doing is putting themselves in a frame of mind to maximize their intellectual abilities to process the issues that come up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That this rover landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 Martian days and we're now in 2009 still amazes me. To keep these rovers functioning for that long is an engineering triumph. Even with equipment failures, dust storms, broken wheels etc. the engineers at NASA manage to make the best of these rovers and learn more about Mars. If we're lucky, the rovers will still be working when we land there, one day. It's nice to see such human ingenuity.
Ships are female. Spirit is (kind of) a spaceship. There you go.
Such an amazing project, those little rovers are. With an planned life span of 90 days, they have now been running since...oh...2003? Wonderful work, NASA. Please keep the pictures and the science flowing. Can you imagine how long that data takes to get from Earth to Mars?
Or what about the communication path from the rovers to NASA? They use the Mars Odyssey or Mars Global Surveyor. Check this out. The rovers have a 250kbps link to those satellites. Unreal. Even with the satellite use, the data still takes TEN minutes to get to Earth.
This stuff is awesome. Just awesome.
Please, please, please...make a photo of those two moons on night/twilight sky, with barely visible ground/horizon
Ultimate romantic picture for all geeks throughout the world ;>
One that hath name thou can not otter
Seriously, who here wouldn't donate a few bucks to NASA in exchange for a "Night sky as seen from Mars Rover" desktop image?
Good, F%&king god, man. Did you seriously post a link from Richard C. "Art Bell's Best Buddy" Hoagland, "winner" (read: purchaser) of the Angstrom Medal, science "advisor" to Walter Cronkite during the Apollo missions, Mister "Face On Mars", glass tunnels on Mars? Did you seriously post that tripe on this site?
Do you believe:
You do know that this is /. and not the "News of the World" site, right?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So no playing
you can frame words that basically supports and rephrases exactly what i am saying as somehow refuting what i am saying?
whoosh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As the article says, they trail after a few seconds, since they can't track. So they can't take deeper images of fainter objects. Without the ability to track, they might as well point the camera straight up (or whereever) and check for meteors. Apart from getting information about how many strike the martian atmosphere, they could correlate counts with meteor showers on earth, to see how the same showers impact (or not) two planets at the same time - a unique opportunity.
Also, a lot of metoers on earth at least, are fairly bright. So they might get quite a good hit-rate with their cam. Although I don't know what effect the thinner atmosphere would have. It would be interesting to see if the thinner atmosphere made meteors burn brighter (as they'd be slowed down by "air", less) or less bright, due to the lack of gases.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As so many papers seem to be doing lately, the Daily Planet went under and merged with the Universe Gazette to form UniverseToday. No longer available in a pulp-based life-form.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
They don't take true color pictures because true color pictures are less useful to them. They can occasionally put something together that looks impressive to help spur public interest, but the instruments they put on sattelites and rovers are first and foremost there to get the information that scientists need and there's a lot more information available by looking outside the visible spectrum.
I think it would be interesting seeing a picture of Earth taken from Mars.. even if it was only a faint dot of light in the sky. I imagine the cameras could do this even if it isn't a great picture.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
*right conditions of lighting, shading and resolution.
Then, when they DO image something interesting, like this Martin crinoid, they won't talk about it! If there really was to be a cover-up, wouldn't it be easier to just not release the smoking gun pictures rather than release and deny? .
The same reason the original post appeared on /. but was marked "Troll": Information is hard to control but relatively easy to discredit.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Did anyone else read this title as, "Sprint Rollover Begins Making Night Sky Observations"?
I was thinking, "Now what? The phone companies won't let us use our rollover minutes after dusk? Sheesh."
If you're wondering why they don't make "true color" images, it's because "true" colors aren't scientifically useful. They choose the color filters very carefully to give them the most useful images for seeing certain things, not so that you can get "true color" pictures.
But then I read the second part of your comment and realized nothing I say will be understood.
Maybe its more complicated, but you'd think that with all the dust on Mars, someone would've figured they needed wipers or a cleaning mechanism for the panels.
They have taken a few, especially earlier in the mission. But bandwidth to/from that far is expensive, so they do tend to limit the spectrum observed to "scientifically interesting" areas of the light spectrum. For one, the red and green detectors of the human eye are too close together wavelength-wise for Mars use. It may have been useful for finding ripe fruit in trees, but not for exploring Mars.
Actually, they can approximate a human-eye view based on comparisons with earlier images, but I find the "scientifically enhanced" ones more interesting anyhow. You can see differences in rock types and dust types much more clearly.
I do wish they put all the color panoramas together in one spot on the NASA web-site, with both the "real" approximation and the enhanced. (Perhaps they do, but I haven't found it yet.)
Table-ized A.I.
I forgot to mention that there is a book called "Postcards from Mars" that has some wonderful color images (true, approximate, and false color) from the rovers. It is a bit dated in that it doesn't include some of the newer places visited, but still a very nice coffee-table book.
http://www.amazon.com/Postcards-Mars-First-Photographer-Planet/dp/0525949852/
Sadly, the cameras are so dusty now that they cannot take very good panoramas anymore. However, I was wondering if they couldn't clean up the images because the dust fuzz should mostly be the same for any given sun angle. In other words, subtract out the known noise pattern. It would probably have to be done by an amateur because NASA doesn't have a lot of spare funds for that kind of activity. Panoramas involve dozens if not hundreds of smaller images. An amateur cleaned up some of the earlier Soviet Venus lander images, and did a bang-up job. He even made some discoveries of unknown detail partially hidden by haze.
Table-ized A.I.
Until they get the other rover over to hook up the winch and drag the poor thing out of the muck.
Seriously, I don't doubt this is possible, and they are only waiting for the other team to give in and 'waste' the time driving over and hauling it's little bitty buddy to freedom.
Though maybe another wind event would solve this problem?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Just a rough analogy, but try to explain to a non virgin what it means to be sexually aware with another, what it really means. It's quite hard.
Here's mine on a note related to your dismissive reply. I've seen-many years ago now, with additional witnesses, a group of friends-a UFO, and up pretty close. I cannot tell you exactly what it was or where it came from other than an intelligently controlled craft (I cannot say if it was "manned" or not, just it maneuvered intelligently) of such a propulsion system as to be centuries perhaps or more beyond what we have today. It was that slick. It really happened. I became a non virgin when it comes to that subject. It had incredible flight characteristics, ability to go slow and hover, dead stop, then go off at such a speed as it was hard to even follow it closely, much faster than missiles I have seen or videos of missiles. This was witnessed at approximately 60 yards or so at the closest approach, perhaps 40 feet above the ground. No noise, no exhaust, no rotors and certainly not a balloon or anything like that.
Your entire world changes when you become a non virgin, with sex..or with this other subject. It becomes incredibly difficult to try and explain to the still virgins exactly what this experience does, and the implications, or how it makes you feel or how it alters your world viewpoint, even in how you take "virgins" opinions on a subject that they haven't experienced yet, and especially official government pronouncements*. It well and truly does make you "question authority" and the viewpoints of those who have no first hand experience.
It is somewhat saddening to see this subject always reduced to illogical absurdity on this board. Go outside at night and look up. Billions of stars/galaxies. Now really contemplate the odds of the earth being the ONLY inhabited planet, or perhaps the most advanced with any sort of life, the most evolved, with the highest tech.
The odds for that being true are absurdly small.
All I can say is, don't be so knee jerk dismissive, because frankly, and I can say this with 100% certainty now that I am a non virgin, you are wrong. There IS something out there, and my guess is, there are a variety of somethings out there. That they are occasionally seen here is a certainty, too many anecdotals to ignore now, and their stealth tech has to be orders of magnitude better than what we have now, so that is why it is fleeting and still sort of rare, they only appear when they (a very loose "they" as no adequate word exists) need to or feel like it. And even if I had managed to get a snapshot (this was the time well before digital cameras existed), the pic itself would have come out pretty bad, because the object was glowing and at night, it would have just looked like a weird blob of light, but to our still sharp young persons eyeballs, it was the most amazing thing to see. Simply..just...a once in a lifetime experience. It is something you never, ever forget, just like losing virginity/gaining sexual awareness, right up there.
*because this was so profound to me, I have made it a point over the years to try and find out more about the subject, and in some cases, from governmental sources "off the record". Not a huge effort, just whenever the opportunity arose. So far, the true existence of some sort of ET visitation has been confirmed to me by a well regarded civilian scientist at JPL, an air force officer who worked before retirement in the highest levels of telemetry and near earth sensing, some other pilots both in private aviation and in commercial aviation (they are scared witless of losing license so most never will admit to seeing rather odd craft, and just won't even report it officially), two different professional air traffic controllers, and some other DOD type folks. One of the more unusual cases I was told about involved one of those hospital ships they used off the coast of viet nam back during the war. A friend had gotten wounded, an army NCO, and was undergoing treatment there. A disk shaped cr
;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...A time-lapse video of the night sky on Mars, the stars rolling overhead...
Note: I did not say I do not believe in aliens, extraterrestial life, or indications of life on Mars. Nor do I disbelieve that our government agencies participate in cover ups.
My issue with the woo-woo AC is that he brought in Richard C. Hoagland, a fully discredited conspiracy nut that pitches the worst kind of BS to listeners of late night radio.
The AC's use of RCH is as bad as using Ed "Man is as Old as Coal" Conrad, or some scientific creationist nut, or Dr. Louis "Dragon's Tail" Turi as reference.
Do I believe that aliens have visited the Earth? Possible. But no proof has been offered. I have seen a few things that my mind was incapable of interpreting and I could swear I've seen ghosts and alien craft. But, the healthy skeptic in me tells me the simplest answer is that there is some explanation I'm missing that is more mundane.
But, note, even the AC didn't believe his shit enough to post under his own screenname.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Once they figure out how Spirit is stuck, they might be better off charging the batteries up in the event that the wheels or arm will need the power to work its way out of its predicament.
Have gnu, will travel.
Where's that douche that insisted that solar panels don't need to be cleaned?
I hope they are applying the lessons of soil traps to the next rover mission. Its wheels look bigger, but it's also much heavier. Thus, it looks just as likely to get stuck. It's also supposed to drive further than the current rovers can, meaning more chances to get stuck.
I'd suggest adjustable "(" or "V"-shaped "digging fins" on the wheels. You point them the way you want to push the dirt, and start spinning the wheel.
Either that, a little shovel at the end of an arm.
Table-ized A.I.
Did you see that site. I've seen more substantial claims from Scientologists. You're an idiot.