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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.'"
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.
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
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?
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
Good point. A 90 day guarantee...that has lasted 6+ years. Wish I could get the same for my next laptop.
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."
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.