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Mars 3D- and you don't need the glasses
Anonymous Coward writes "Here's the story over at CNN about the new map NASA has of Mars - it's 3D. So, now we can get a feel for how water moved on the planet, just how large all those formations are, and when you want to take a Mars weekend vacation in a few years, you can pick that nice sunny spot beneath the 5 mile tall mountain. " Check out the NASA Mars Animations for eye-candy.
That, too.
If I wasn't browsing at -1, I would have missed this gem. Thanx... Must see if someone has tried to either make this work with Linux, or there is a similar project for Linux (It'll make all the MCSEs at work drool.... >;-). Either that, or I'll just have to give in and try Irix... somehow... ;-)
I'm glad to see images like that which do not depend upon those infernal red/green 3-D glasses. In order for the third dimension to pop up with those, you must have 'fusion', i.e., your eyes both focus upon the same point when you look at something. Many people, including myself, suffer from what is called 'strabismus' which just means your eyes don't fuse. I'm slightly crosseyed from a bad operation in my youth for lazy-eye, and am always frustrated with the 3-D mars (and other) pics... National Geographic recently had a whole spread with those images and they looked like green & red shit to me.
Technology such the Immersadesk/CAVE is great for folks like me because the 3-D nature of the images doesn't rely on your eyes' ability to fuse. And the cited Mars images used color being to represent the third dimesion, up/down, and this conveys lots of information to the viewer. Of course this assumes you are not seriously colorblind (I am slightly red/green).
Ah, for the days when we can wire right info right into the brain. Or maybe not.
Leigh
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I think we should start working now on grabbing that 'near miss' asteroid that'll approach in about 30 years. Put it in high earth orbit and make a space station/research center out of that. If we can process the metals up in orbit you've eliminated one of the largest costs involved in spacecraft. Plus the living quarters in the center might actually be shielded enough to survive a solar storm.
Right now most of our manned orbits are still dependent on the Earth's radiation shielding. Repairing the Hubble telescope has been the only recent mission that required an orbit outside this protection. Any manned missions outside the Earth's protection needs to have consideration of the radiation hazards. We were lucky with the Apollo missions.
http://pao.gsfc.nas a.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures/mola/mars3d.htm - pictures
and
http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/m ola.html - links to the EQ used.
in australia all mcdonalds are in paper wrappers
are americans still that behind and use plastic/foam ???
jeez
Please increase gravity. Thanks in advance.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Of course, real-time fly-bys and ultra-high resolution images would be much better. Anyone have any ideas?
Heh, no we are not almost there!
its not called EverQuest, the closed source pay
to play, Win32 only game.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Because we can. That's the motivation for a lot of human accomplishments. They want to go there because it's there. That's why they went to the moon. That's why they climbed Everest. Also, the people who go there first will be famous. Just about everyone knows Armstrong and his "one giant leap...". We can't just sit still. It's not in our nature. Most people are driven to defy entropy in any way they can. Well, that's my philosophical 2 bits for the day.
You can download from the nasa images website both the old picture, which appears to show a 'face', and the most recent one, taken of that same spot with a more powerful camera.
The more recent picture shows the 'face' was really just a play of light and shadows that would only 'appear' to be a face from the perspective that the first photo just happended to be at.
That mars ever had any life at all, intelligent or not, remains to be proven. In fact, mars may have been 'seeded' by ejecta from earth impacts that carried bacteria back out into space where the bacteria could be desicated and blown by the solar wind to mars. In those earlier times the bacteria may have flurished in some area which was then hit by an asteroid (the southern impact point?) whose ejecta included rocks containing 'martian' bacteria that was pulled back to earth by solar gravity, only to land on that antartic and give some scientists a chance for 15 minutes of fame.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
However, the most important things we learn by studying Mars and other planets are things we cannot yet foresee. Mars exploration can be characterized, for the most part, as purely scientific research right now. The practical applications will manifest themselves later on.
Didn't they discover large deposits of ice under the surface of the moon recently? If so, there's your atmosphere.
(One down side of colonizing Mars is the incredible storms generated there... I'd rather try my luck surviving a tornado here in Texas.)
I read an article about it in "Science & Vie" (french magazine) syaing it'll take about 200 years.
did you play SimEarth? or watch Total Recall (a very good movie)?
Uhh, sorry, Total Recall was NOT a "very good movie," at least from the perspective of terraforming Mars. One can't just pump in a huge amount of oxygen and expect everything to be hokey dokey in 10 minutes. Bad movie science in the extreme.
For a much better, and more entertaining discussion of terraforming Mars, I'd suggest the already mentioned Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
So when do we get the dataset so we can do 3d fly-throughs ??
I want the quake engine redesigned to handle spherical terrian and gravity, and I want to go play on mars. With distributed servers to handle the interaction of thousands of people playing on one contiguous world. Yup. That would be neat.
"At the current distribution of standards of living, the Earth is currently beyond it's maximum sustainable population."
Wow, by stating that as a fact you almost sound believable. Almost. People have been predicting a global population crisis for ages... Hasn't happened yet.
This is a historic moment. Too bad they didn't use the Quicktime for Linux library. They should pay their Quicktime guy twice as much.
Wow. The self-hatred behind that sentiment is nothing less than bone-chilling.
Pretty hard to do any "damage" to Mars, isn't it?
this kind of attitude is why great advances in society, technology, theology and really anything else get crushed.
someone says "hey, i want immediate satisfaction for what little part i put in" - in other words, you can't see the big picture
why look at mars?
mars *did* have water on it - why doesn't it now? what happened to that planet to, in relation to life as we know it, *ruin* it. nothing can live there now.
colonization isn't because there's not enough room on earth - we are inquisitive, at least some of us can see beyond our immediately material lives and wonder what's across that ocean? what's out in orbit around our sun?
if people hadn't gone to the moon and back, we wouldn't be driving the cars we do, we wouldn't be using the plastics, metals, and ceramics that are extremely common - computers surely would be further behind.
what's more of a challenge for an engineer - make me a computer than can sit under a desk, or make me one that can survive re-entry?
this isn't just about "launching rockets and taking pretty pictures" - we are epxloring, learning, teaching ourselves and expanding what we know of *life* beyond the pitiful day job existence that most people condemn themselves to for some idiotic reason.
i for one would LOVE to live on the moon, or mars, and see something so *completely unlike* the earth.
a good friend of mine, a female food engineer from kansas, just moved down to houston to work for Lockheed martin to figure out how to grow, process and package food in low / no-g environments - now *that's* interesting work - that's a challenge, that's doing something that will make a difference to the future.
even i don't get to do that - at the moment, i'm just a student and a web desginer. no one is going to give a rats ass about my pages in the future.
but - we are going to learn some pretty important things about growing plants in extremely controlled, regulated environments - and that's going to affect agriculture no matter if it is in space, or on earth.
wake up - realize there's so much more to life than what you know, and any of us could possibly realize. we are fortunate enough to actually know there are other planets, think about all the humans who *don't know what stars really are*
or didn't know just a couple hundred years ago.
"To paraphrase a very powerful theme from the Babylon 5 series, we know for certain that at some point in the future our sun will go out."
That, to my mind, was one of the dumbest bits of B5. Current predictions are for the Sun to survive another five billion years. If that's the reason for space exploration, I don't think we need to hurry that much.
Meanwhile, we average putting a person in orbit at a rate of certainly no more than one every five days. Meanwhile, Earth's population increases by a rate of ~80 million a year ~= 250,000 a day. Are we really going to be sending 1.75 million people a week to Mars? Seems like it would consume an incredible amount of resources doing so.
Space exploration can be justified based on its contribution to the knowledge of humanity, and the possible contribution it may make to helping with other problems. But I think it's foolish to trivialize a $15 billion annual expense ("just" 1% of the U.S. budget is an immense amount of money), and questioning whether space exploration should receive as much of the federal government's science budget is also a valid question. And, if most of that knowledge can be ascertained via unmanned missions rather than manned, is the psychological gain of having human footprints in the Martian soil is worth the expense, given the many other problems that one might be able to solve?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Anyone know what percentage is spent on debt interest?
Colonization of Mars offers the following tangible benefits:
Increased ease of supply to mining operations in the asteroids.
A surviving human civilization in the event of something happening on Earth (eg an asteroid collision).
It's a lot easier to do serious scientific surveys with humans than with automated rovers, particuarly when there's a 40 minute time delay for radio communications.
There are additional possible benefits such as the pressure to improve technology driven by interplanetary commerce and the necessities of frontier life, and a "drive" which will prevent "stagnation" of society, but I think the three above are adequate. An initial manned program won't cost that much, either, provided that fuel is produced locally.
Has anyone found that alleged "face on Mars" in any of the datasets/animations? Is it there? Let me know, maybe it can be analyzed.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
In addition, although the storms move very fast, the atmosphere is so thin that they aren't dangerous unless you're piloting an aircraft. Even a rocket powered landing vehicle shouldn't have any problems, and they shouldn't do any damage on the ground. Both Viking probes survived several dust storms.
Yep and Earth is flat or else we would tumble down all the way... Malin has some pretty ideas of his own. How a huge planet-dimentional strike would keep its "circularity"?..
Yes one of the chances of Mars assymetry is the fact that something quite big stuck Mars some time ago. Much like the story about Earth and its Moon. Recently some data resurfaced the chance that the Moon is part of that "hole" we see on the Pacific.
However this is a chance. Mars does not possess any secondary strucutures that would suggest remains of that strike. Phobos & Deimos are not fully to be taken into account. Several data suggests that these bodies are much more like to be captured asteroids from the belt.
Besides one thing that messes the study of Northern Hemisphere is the fact that many places suggest the presence of large water basins at levels much like those seen on Black or Caspian Sea. So that's still a big question.
Meanwhile Southern Hemisphere is no less "cryptic". It possesses a heavily cratered land that seems to sorround that huge hole over there. Some people suggest that it's all the other way round. Southern Hemisphere is higher because it took a lot of mass from a huge struck.
Actually, there probably is sufficient heat for geothermal power. Tharsis was created relatively recently. Indeed, the large size of the Tharsis volcanoes is a major reason for believing that there has been no tectonic drift for a long time, as the volcanoes have remained stationary over a hot spot in the mantle for an extended period, allowing them to grow to immense proportions.
But the crustal plates of Mars seem to have frozen. There probably is no volcanic heat (I forget the word for geothermal when not on Earth) to be tapped. I suppose we could drop enough asteroids to melt it down again...
Why colonize Mars? The moon is more hospitable in the short term. Work on that for a couple hundred years, before thinking about Mars...
Yes the atmosphere is very thin compared to Earth. But yet tremendously powerful to hold up a large concentration of micro-particles and even large dust particles. Viking have landed in regions were these storms are yet not too "wild". However in regions near the Equator and specially in Marineris these storms can become a mess for a landing expedition. Some people think that burst speeds can reach 500km/h. This is one of the reasons why landings are made on average latitudes, where such storms are less frequent and more mild.
When Pathfinder came down there was the risk of falling in one dust storm that had reached quite significative proportions. This took some nerves on JPL people even if we considered that Pathfinder would be less prone to wind effects during landing.
Meanwhile one of the first human probes on Mars, soviet Mars 3 seems to have failed due to the fact that it was caught on landing in a dust storm.
Survival of the Species
The same reason our distant to the nth degree ancestors left Uldavai. The further we expand, the less vulnerable we are.
So long as we are confined to a single planet, we are vulnerable to any number of catastrophes. Moving out reduces that vulnerability.
The problem with that is that it would (in my mind) actually be far MORE difficult to colonize the moon with any significant number of people.
The moon is basically just a hunk of rock, meaning we would have to continually ship water, food, etc... up to the moon to sustain life there. I know of no feasable way to generate an atmosphere on the moon, meaning the inhabitants would have to remain enclosed in some sort of structure, never venturing outside for a breath of fresh air. Not very appealing to me.
Mars on the other hand, has an atmosphere, water, and soil. We (oversimplified explanation follows) simply need to scatter the surface of the planet with plant seed and tree saplings, which will grow at a highly accelerated rate in the CO2 rich atmosphere. The oxygen given off by these plants will, over time, make the Mars atmosphere breathable. This atmosphere conversion process will also create a greenhouse effect, warming the planet and melting the ice to provide inhabitants with liquid water. The big obstacle at this point seems to be efficient transportation. But that is a problem worth tackling given the higher quality of life people will enjoy on Mars as opposed to the Moon.
Sure, the earth might accept more people, but :
a) they can't all live like the American do (wasting huge quantity of resources). If the 6 billion humans on this planet lived like them, the earth would be already dead
b) some people like space. Not everybody want's to live in 5 square meters in an overpopulated city
c) food is good, but we need mineral resources too. Earth reserves of metals are not endless, and we need more of we want to do keep our (western) life standard for the next decades.
Do you know that in some country people repair dead light bulbs ? Now go to McDonalds and look at all the junk plastic that is wasted... look at those big Chevy trucks that drink gas like a loaded 747... space exploration is going to be a necessity to this (sick)civilization (since most MTV couch-potatoes will probably refuse to move their asses to make their lifestyle more earth-friendly).
That's not bogus, that's Irix!
I just saw some of the comments around here and tought how the lyric view of the future deals with one of the darkest nightmares of the past.
Mars is not a planet for a honeymoon trip. Nor it is a place to send a bunch of missionares to christinise the christians and civilize the civilized.
Mars is a piece of rock carrying just three words: RIP. And it would be better to take care about that.
It might be that from the distance we are from Mars we may not fully see the huge hecatomb that happened there. Yes you see channels in Mars. And these channels do exist. There is the probability that they are the result of a game of light on a chaotic atmosphere which until now could not fully stabilize.
Mars is a planet with an relatively unstable orbit. Apart of Mercury it is the planet with the most elyptical orbit. This orbit should have come stable long ago. However some data says that not only the orbit but also the "proper movements" of the planet are somewhat unstable in relation to some theories of celestial mechanics. I am not an expert on this field but I worked in other field that shows some correlation to these things. I have worked on other field of Mars that looks a little like a tale from the crypt: its geology.
Looking already from far away, Mars presents some strange "features": a landscape coloration that does not correspond to its topography, mega-storms visible from Earth and a strange assymetry on two hemispheres. Looking a little closer and you'll see things like gigantic volcanoes, an "irrational" canyon and huge craters. Make some measurements and you'll find that the mass of this planet is distributed assymetrically. Take a look at tectonics and you'll get a "it had plates/it didn't have plates". Look at topology and it looks that Marsquakes were mainly "vertical". Look at the geomagnetics and you'll get a mess in a place where poles don't seem to exist any more. Look at the atmosphere and you'll get a 100 year old question for the next 200 years: "What happened?"
Looking closer is even more wired. You see remains of huge water movements (Armageddon is child tale compared to it, even Cretacious). You see huge blocks of the crust that suddenly moved. You see canyons made in a few weeks or even days.
An even closer look may be scary. Yes you may start thinking about aliens. There are a lot of places in Mars which may suggest such things and there's not the huge need to look at them through the microscope. However there is still a question whether these aliens were intelligent. That's a big question that for the moment I think we shall wait to answer. My opinion is that out of some little features in a few places that we could think about artifacts. And this is just not the Fussy Face.
In fact the Face is nothing of a face. But it is something to think. Out of looking like a Face. At least this formation presents a thing not very well understood. It possesses a near double-mirror symmetry perpendicular to each other. Maybe it's a chance in a million. Maybe it is the thing we may start to look for.
However there are a lot of other places that present a lot of interesting things. But here I want to warn that all aliens, "intelligent" and "stupid" are possible. Apart of a scary peculiarity among some places in Mars.
But apart from these things, if you think that "Truth is Out There" you may bet it. It's there and Smoking Man also. But he is a little more gentle and more coward than the film...
We really need to go to Mars, and make the planet another home for us. It is my firm belief. Humankind needs to spread its spores.
you dont think that we have done enough damage to this planet so we have to destroy another planet too?
it's called everquest, all they need to do is change the scenerey
Unfortunately I believe Mars has too little mass to mantain an atmosphere of the necessary density. I think that the current theory is that mars had a atmosphere but a lot of the ligther molecules flew off into space since the gravity was not strong enough to hold them in the atmosphere. I think a similar problem will occur if we pump new N2, and O2 into the atmosphere.
Even if we are able mantain the atmosphere with continual infusions, the loss of the molecules will represent a continual drain on the planet's resources. This will probably require continual resupply to the planet.
It'll probably be better in the long run to create enclosed environments for habitation, preferably underground so that the radiation exposure is lower.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Here's a link straight to the 3d animation of Mars
k ellan.mars.mov
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9905/27/mars.map/
Not to mention if you shop at - say Wal-Mart and buy ten items. And sure enough you get eight or nine plastic bags to carry them in. Great.
Red Mars was brilliant, Green Mars was pretty good, Blue Mars gets lost in a political mess. Yes I do feel the creation of an independant Martian Government is very relevant and a fitting goal for the final book of this series, however the day to day intricacies of creation a consitution can bore even the hardiest soul.
money spent on mars is a drop in the ocean to what USA spends on NUKES/MISSILES/BLACKPROJECTS
ie. $800Million A DAY for stupid military
if NASA had that, we could do 5 manned mars mission per year and 1 satelite to mars every week no problem with that DOLLARS!!!
The day the world grows up and spends $0.000 on military against it self will be a good day. The onlymilitary we need is a mars base to protect us from aliens, just incase.
BUt this world is fucked any way, probly 1/2 invaded any way and controlling the us govt too.
I bet you can find an answer for yourself, but here's a hint anyway:
for a start think about how much of what you do is really neccessary and why is it that you do the rest.
erik
This is just so cool. I'm in the middle of reading "Blue Mars" now, the last novel in the very good "Red mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars" scifi trilogi.
And these images makes it so much easier to visualize the places in the book.
We really need to go to Mars, and make the planet another home for us. It is my firm belief. Humankind needs to spread its spores.
McDonald's went to cardboard containers for their burgers a few years ago.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Am I the only one who doesn't see a point in exploring mars? We can see as much of it as we want from here, and I don't imagine a rock who's surface temperature is below freezing year round would make a good vacation spot. Sure, at first it seems neat that we have the technology to send people there, but really, this isn't Star Trek. It's not like we are going to find aliens there or anything.
Those of us in the USA, think of how many of your tax dollars are going into people's pockets for doing nothing more than blasting rockets off the surface of the earth so that we can take nice pictures.
And if the point of exploring mars is to eventually colonize it, think again. Despite what some would tell you, the earth is still quite under-populated. There are tons more habitable but uninhabited places on earth, than there are on mars.
yes we can terraform mars, first introduce plants so they will produce oxygen and absorb co2, then an atmospher will be created, then... I read an article about it in "Science & Vie" (french magazine) syaing it'll take about 200 years.
did you play SimEarth? or watch Total Recall (a very good movie)? or read whole Foundation from Assimov?
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
One of the theories discussed is a massive asteroid impact in the Northern Hemisphere early in the development of Mars.
y 99.html
However, the Mars Global Surveyor site posits that because the depression is not circular "it was shaped by internal geologic processes during the earliest stages of martian evolution."
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/sci/mola/mola-ma
....we're going to have to leave at some point.
To paraphrase a very powerful theme from the Babylon 5 series, we know for certain that at some point in the future our sun will go out. If we don't move out into the stars, all that we've created, all that we are, will be lost.
At one point, that would have been "Western Hemisphere exploration ... why?"
... or they may be religious refugees, like many of the people who colonized the Americas wearing only the clothes on their back.
Most initial exploration (Columbus, Magellan, Lewis & Clark) has been underwritten by governments who foresaw the day when the benefits would outweigh the costs. It's an investment in our future -- in this case, mankind's future. I believe that if we wish to ensure the survival of the human race it is essential to expand beyond one planet (and eventually, one solar system).
The economic arguments are also persuasive, although the return-on-investment ratios are horrible to start and only get better a long, long time down the road. Mars and the asteroids have metals and minerals that human civilization will eventually require (once conservation, recycling, and substitution run their courses). Mars is an excellent headquarters for exploiting the asteroids.
The technological advances that we will gain by challenging ourselves will also be invaluable. We don't know what those may be, of course, but previous experience shows us that the most important advances aren't random: they are developed in response to a challenging need. Just like a high-jumper only improves by raising the bar, mankind needs to constantly find new challenges.
Finally, Mars will eventually be a cultural outlet for those hemmed in by human society on Earth, which will become increasingly urban, regulated, and lacking in personal space, privacy, and freedom. The first colonists on Mars may be sponsored by one or more governments
More information may be found at the Mars Society website.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Its called fsn. Look under the freeware section on www.sgi.com
Heres a real link to it: http://www.cnn.com/T ECH/space/9905/27/mars.map/kellan.mars.mov
Just me or is it really annoying how sometimes people post useful links as pure text?
That's water. If you can breathe water vapour, go ahead. You can make oxygen from it, true, but you need nitrogen and carbon to do anything interesting, and Mars is the only place that has these in sufficient quantities. On Mars you can make fuel, mater, oxygen, glass, steel and plastics without even having to find specific mineral deposits, just from the atmosphere and regolith.
ARGH!!! Tim Rue and his maniacal paranoid delusions have now made their way to Slashdot...
So does anybody know of a reason why the north pole is so low and the south is so high? My only explanation is that plate tectonics at work. It kinda looks like what the earth did a long time ago (pangea?) and will eventually look like just ummm crushed on the other side. Maybe Mars had the same think but instead of an east west movement Mars has a North South one.
I dunno I just found it strange.
-cpd
Sure, I think it will happen, and will be fun for whoever gets to do it, but there's just one thing.
We haven't even begun colonizing the Moon yet. Can't we concentrate on getting there first before we fly off to the planet of the God of War?
If nothing else, it would be good practice...
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I just started fooling with irix, I should have known they would have something like that.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.