Slashdot Mirror
NASA Will Crowdsource Its Photos of Mars
tedlistens writes "NASA is asking the public to suggest subjects for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, its super powerful camera currently orbiting Mars. Since it arrived there in 2006, the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen more success than that lost lander, recording nearly 13,000 observations of Martian terrain, with each image covering dozens of square miles and revealing details as small as a desk. By letting the public in on the Martian photo shoot, scientists aren't just getting more people excited about space exploration. They're hoping that crowdsourcing imaging targets will increase the camera's already bountiful science return. Despite the thousands of pictures already taken, less than 1 percent of the Martian surface has been imaged."
Find Dr Manhattan and that cool floating ice scupture thing of his.
...NASA has heard of 4chan, right? I don't want to see thousands of "crowdsourced" pictures of the robot's crotch.
There's a similar thing going on for some time on ESA Mars Express mission, where public is invited to participate in obtaining, processing, etc. of images taken with a camera that was meant originally to observe Beagle separation.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/VMC/index.html
One that hath name thou can not otter
They've found desks on Mars?!
A little green man!
...
No... that's just a dog...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Since they are now claiming its possible to notice things as small as a Desk,
They need to send one of these up around the moon and prove the moon lander is there.
I don't know would be more annoying - finding out its faked or seeing conspiracy theorists reject it as evidence.
13,000 pictures of the surface of mars, and still no clear photos of the aliens. It's a coverup I tell you. The government doesn't want us to know the truth! They're hiding it until they can take these natural resources for themselves. It's the man taking away from us what rightfully belongs to all of us! If you let them get their way, well, just be left with these.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yeah, this would prove nothing, if the landing was faked, the reconnaissance would also be faked. If the landing was real, the photos would be real.
The only thing I will say is that the conspiracy guys have a point that there was sufficient motivation to fake the thing.
You have weird priorities.
I would be outraged to learn that the landings were fake and don't care what fringe lunatics have to say.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Why not buy a rocket, round up Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, put them in it, blast it off towards Mars, and have it crash land, scattering their corpses' body parts across the Martian plains, and take a picture of that. I bet I could find quite a few people that would pay good money to see that,...
If they've imaged 1% of the surface of Mars, then my vote for new pictures would be (drum roll..................!) the OTHER 99% Thank you - no applause, please.
Cheers! - Steve from MyBrotherSteve.com
If you are going to refer to something, please get it right.
The actual conspiracy theory is that we did indeed send men to the moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, et al). However, what we found there indicated the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, either artifacts or real living beings. This information was immediately classified at the highest levels. The photographic evidence of men on the moon was faked not because we didn't really go there, but because we found things there that NASA decided the public could not handle knowing.
That's how the conspiracy theory goes. So, finding that the moon lander is there neither proves nor disproves it. It would be evidence, but evidence of what?
Wouldn't the lander be near the stuff we weren't supposed to be shown?
Moon hoaxers can't agree on which part of the whole thing was faked. With tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on the project, I just can't really see how you could even conceivably not go to the moon. If I were writing a conspiracy script, what you're saying at least makes a wee bit of sense -- we got there and saw something bad and don't want to show our real vacation slides. But there's people who don't even believe there was a moon rocket! That the government somehow faked the launch or that it wasn't a real rocket that blasted off. Crazy.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
So, what, are we gonna end up with like 10,000 photos of the face on Mars, or the "pyramids"?
Bow-ties are cool.
Since they are now claiming its possible to notice things as small as a Desk
Good. That might go a long way in explaining where my supervisor has been hiding for the last month.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Kudos to the first person to find the Beagle2 (or the crater it made)
Sort of like finding Waldo on a much bigger scale.
They need to send one of these up around the moon and prove the moon lander is there.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to be better evidence than the presence of mirrors for laser range-finding placed there by the astronauts that a variety of institutions around the world have used to measure the earth-moon distance (and of course in the process verifying their presence) would be.
I don't know would be more annoying - finding out its faked or seeing conspiracy theorists reject it as evidence.
Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!
The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"
Oh and obviously if the conspiracy theorists are not satisfied with the existing evidence, they will never be satisfied, because they simply don't want to be satisfied.
The enemies of Democracy are
Remember there is a lot to cover. Mars has a similar land area to Earth.
Yeah, because nothing could have ever moved it either before they left the moon, or during the 40 years time since then. This conversation will be greatly enriched if you can address easy and obvious objections on your own.
The Phoenix Lander was extremely successful. It found exactly what it was sent to look for. I don't know any better definition of success that that. It was never designed to survive the winter... they are just looking to see if somehow it did. The writer should be a little less cavalier.
Of course the images are beautiful and all, but the range in that 1% probably represents the majority of terrain one would find on Mars. I wonder what exciting development they could possibly expect.
with each image covering dozens of square miles and revealing details as small as a desk.
Yes, the desk please. I expect John Cleese will be sitting at it saying, "And now for something completely different."
Loose lips lose spit.
Are they trying to suggest that only about 1% of Mars is obviously interesting to Martian scientists? There's really nothing else they know they want to look at? Okay sure, the PR could be a good thing and they might get some cool suggestions, but honestly:
- Pictures of the rovers
- Pictures of the canals
- Pictures of the mountains
- Pictures of the ice caps
Outside of that, everything is just "more red sand." Nobody really cares which small portion of the planet it is as long as they get cool desktop photos in a handy resolution (1680x1050, please). Do your own damn work and figure out what deserves to be photographed.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Well, until someone can refute the Lunar Laser Ranging data (and do it using actual science instead of wacky conspiracy logic), I'm still putting my money on the landing being real.
If you could fake the lunar laser ranging stuff ... well, you'd have made it to the moon, actually. And, you'd have installed retroreflectors exactly where they are supposed to be.
What with the known speed of light and all of the other physics involved in this, I consider that to be fairly irrefutable. Of course, that doesn't mean someone out there isn't going to try -- but it does mean they don't understand the physics they're trying to refute.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just waiting for the Google Mars upgrade.
It is? The ones I remember were more along the lines that they didn't go at all - look at the flag, it's standing up even though there can't be a wind if there's no atmosphere yadda fucking yadda.
Coathangers schmoathangers and chickenwire schmickenwire already. And a big hahahah to Mrs. Gorsky.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I suggest they photograph a Martian city.
Then keep an eye on the shipyards.
What Einstein came up with "crowdsourcing"? I put that up there with "core competencies", "stakeholders", and "rightsizing" as jargonny business babble. If I were an evil overlord, I would instantly put to death any underlings who dared utter those terms in my presence.
Yes, I think I need a hug.
Don't use the presence of laser mirrors as evidence, they can be as well placed there by unmanned probes (as Lunokhods, for example, certainly did)
As a matter of fact, don't even try too hard to convince those people - as you said, they don't even want evidence of any kind.
One that hath name thou can not otter
No, no, no. There is even link on the page you provided, leading to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme
Which also carried laser raging experiment.
Just accept that the reasons for conspiracy theorists doing what they do don't have much in common with the "big affair" at hand (other then that it's "big")
One that hath name thou can not otter
Brennan. He does things like that. All he needs to have had done will be to will have had invented a time machine. The timing is right given the startup of the LHC a few months ago (even if I haven't got the grammar of time travel sufficiently deobfusticated).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
With nice Google Maps integration:
http://suggest.mars.asu.edu
THEMIS isn't as sexy, as it's a lot lower resolution imagery than HiRISE, but it's been done.
How about some hi res images of the glass worms of Mars http://www.enterprisemission.com/can.htm
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
If you are going to refer to something, please get it right.
The actual conspiracy theory is that we did indeed send men to the moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, et al). However, what we found there indicated the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, either artifacts or real living beings. This information was immediately classified at the highest levels. The photographic evidence of men on the moon was faked not because we didn't really go there, but because we found things there that NASA decided the public could not handle knowing.
That's how the conspiracy theory goes. So, finding that the moon lander is there neither proves nor disproves it. It would be evidence, but evidence of what?
You're thinking of the 1989 movie "Moontrap", starring Walter Koenig.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097911/
even india's chandrayaan has confirmed the trip to moon was NOT faked, so you can stop this conspiracy bullshit
Well that's the problem with most conspiracy theory arguments, they can be answered in a couple syllables, ie. 'a stick'.
Just put a naked photo of Jessica Alba in the foreground.
That is like so last year already....
http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/17/apollo-landing-sites-imaged-by-lro/
I don't really get the point of this. The goal should be to map the entire surface of the planet using a system that maximizes each pass as much as possible. Crowd sourcing the poking around for interesting details is fine once you have those pictures, but people are only going to be interested in doing this for a short while. Having them work on low-res proxies for the short duration of their interest is failing to utilize their energy properly, imho.
What I'm saying is that if responding to user requests means failing to take as many useful pictures as possible, then that is a waste.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!