One Mars Probe Photographs Another 146
sighted writes "In one of the more remarkable shots ever taken by robotic space explorers, the Opportunity Mars rover has been photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ." From the article: "Shown in the image are 'Duck Bay,' the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; 'Cabo Frio,' a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and 'Cape Verde,' another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater."
Happens Once in a Red Mars (Score:5, Funny)
We shake hands and take pictures of each other.
I wonder if the probes experience the same awkward silence after you've asked them how they're doing and feign interest about what they've been up to. I'll bet they both broke out, "Well, I'll let you go, you must be so busy and what with having the whole rest of the planet to photograph....but it was nice meeting you! And out here of all places! I mean with you an orbiter and I a rover, who would have thought we would have been assigned to the same planet?! It's a small universe afterall!"
Re: Photographing themselves (Score:2, Funny)
Look, they even used that cliched "MySpace angle" where you shoot the camera down from above.
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Moo (Score:3, Funny)
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: I just had a terrible thought: what if this is a dream?
Opportunity Mars rover: Well then photograph me quick before you wake up.
Impressive resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anybody know if the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter is limited to the visible spectrum, or does it have multispectral capabilities?
P.S. I am sure the Google folks will want these data to update Google Mars.
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I'm willing to bet US spy (esp. military) satellites can have much better resolution than 10cm...I work for a GIS company, and we often work with satellite imagery at 5cm resolution. I believe, by the way, the MRO does have multispectral
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http://crism.jhuapl.edu/instrument/innoDesign.php [jhuapl.edu]
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Here [msss.com]
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MARCI is for weather monitoring (it will be very useful for knowing where there are clouds and haze and avoiding targetting HiRISE there).
There's also CTX, the context imager, clocking in at ~6m/pixel.
Lots and lots of good data is going to come from this mission.
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By the way, I like your site (simple, well organized...very satisfying design).
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Thanks. I've tried to keep it simple with no ads to clutter the experience.
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However, all the heckling was bothering the hell out of me so I had to go back and double-check my sources, and I apologize; I believe I stand mistaken...the first 2-inch res imagery to which I referred was indeed aerial photography (frown), and a secondary image to which I referred as being awestruck by was a 10cm res image (according to a colleague)...my sincere apologies to BWJones. I am humbled.
Oh, and thanks, Wavicle, for pro
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How would one determine how to correct the image when looking down from space?
In the simplest case the same way your digital camera does autofocus: You pick a horizontal and a vertical line and adjust focus until you get the sharpest transitions along that line. Make it smarter and more expensive and cover the field and...
There's good reasons that adaptive optics are only ever mentioned in the context of looking upwards. They have little to do with physics.
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I am familiar with adaptive optics (IAAVS I Am A Vision Scientist), and am familiar with David Williams work, but to my knowledge: 1) No adaptive optics have yet been fielded in a space craft, certainly not a commercial imaging satellite. 2) The amount of space required for imaging at beyond 10cm resolution from space at
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There are plans for 40 and 50 cm birds (GeoEye-1, Worldview-1/2) but they haven't been launched yet.
If you're working with commercial 5 cm data, you're working with aerial photography, not satellite imagery, and 5 cm is on th
Re:Impressive resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see, 30 cm resolution at 300 km works out to be a microradian angular resolution. Hubble has a resolution of 0.1 arcsec, which is like 0.5 microradians, so I suppose if you put Hubble at MRO's orbit then it would see about a factor of two better, whereas a naively one might assume a factor of 4.8 times better given that the aperture sizes on Hubble and HIRISE are 2.4 and 0.5 meters respectively. That is probably a bit of apples to oranges because I don't know in what context the Hubble resolution is. The HIRISE says it is 30 cm per pixel at 300 km, but the Hubble number I found just states it as the basic telescope resolution without mentioning whether they are talking about an Airy disk size, Rayleigh criterion, or whatever. For what it is worth, both the basic Hubble (without instruments) and HIRISE both run at f/24, so their blur spots would be comparable, so if you put the same detector behind them, they would have the same resolution.
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Full View (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Full View (Score:5, Funny)
Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depression (Score:4, Interesting)
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And you , sir, have a strange idea of economics...
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A dollar spent on the space program is a dollar not spent on something else, nothing more.
GDP is all about getting people working productively. The more people are working productively, the more GDP. The higher the unemployment, or the more people who are doing inefficient support work, the worse off your GDP. Money is just a system of measure and exchange. If you spend money on a space program, then your product is knowledge, but there are other things that you haven't product. But there's no
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The size of a economy is the amount of wealth that its people have. You don't automaticaly increase it by trowing wealth out of the planet (of course, well done science pays well, but it is not your point).
And, yes, most investiments pay off some amount (not all of them, like you assume), but government investments tend to pay much less than private ones, it is even usual that they have negative pay-offs (that's why communism didn't work). The main reasons that government spents benefits the economy is bec
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But the logic of increasing the size of our economy is flawed, see the following for a treatment of the issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy [wikipedia.org]
in practice, a space program is nothing like a broken window, the technology and science it produces well exceeds the cost, but the act of spending the money alone isn't where the economy derives its benefits.
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Not that I think of mankind exploring the solar system in person as merely vacation or a distraction for our collective societal mind. However, I do think that such purpose justifies the investment at least as much as the $billions spent every ye
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Will this change Opportunity's plans? (Score:5, Insightful)
But one actual question that comes to mind -- now that the Opportunity team has high-resolution pictures of their baby's room, will they change where they send him to play? For example, could they see that rock just south of the dark "Cape Verde" formation? And looking back, if they'd had pictures like these to work with, would they have approached the crater from a different angle?
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I would assume the Rover teams are using the best imagery to hand - and MRO is only one source of that imagery. We've been
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If you look at the path the rover took from Endurance crater to Victoria, it's pretty much a straight line. The goal for the last 6 mo
Taking pictures of the car... (Score:2)
-Isaac
Re:Taking pictures of the car... (Score:4, Funny)
Is she sunbathing nude?
KFG
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Considering how NASA is consistently at the short end of the federal budgeting stick, would the agency do better as a private foundation funded by sending out probes decked out like something out of NASCAR?
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Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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If they can do this maybe they will finally find Beagle 2?
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Haven't you seen the trailers? (Score:2)
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Proof! (Score:5, Insightful)
(Robot is proof of intelligence, and its on another planet, the sentences don't necessarily have to be linked.)
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If so, what was our planned operational lifetime? And will we exceed expectations?
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every day.
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I hope not. My body already sounds like a box of Rice Krispies...
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I'll give you partial credit for the "on another planet" part. No points for proof of intelligence, because there's strong evidence that the robot was built by humans.
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By eight o'clock I'm usually at about the 11th tee. Although I have to admit, God has probably been mentioned several times by then, one way or another ;-)
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You're not necessarily saying that the intelligence is on that planet, no matter how many people may infer that...
All in a day's work. (Score:5, Funny)
"Morning, Ralph."
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well done.
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More disturbing would have been (Score:3, Funny)
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Yeah, no kidding. That would be really creepy. It's a good thing they only spell out "When can I co".
Hey......
Virg
A Better Image IMO (Score:4, Informative)
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When I first saw it I thought back to Star Wars and the sand pits, but this is much, much bigger. How cool would it be if people could actually be there checking that out close up? I mean, any geek or aspiring space pioneer without a wife/husband and kids would probably gladly accept a one way ticket to see these things close up and to be the first human on Mars.
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The picture is just mesmerizing...
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Moon Probe (Score:2)
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The ESA lunar probe SMART-1 was in lunar orbit for a while, and it too was not able to resolve Apollo landing sites. But SMART-1 did capture lunar terrain in detail never before possible, except for the pictures taken on the surface of the moon by the Apollo astronauts. The terrain matched the Apollo pictures perfectly, so yeah we've been there
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--
"Stay The Course"
Captain Edward John Smith -- 11:38 April 14, 1912
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They'd simply argue that the probe's launch was actually just another routine launch, and with the state of today's CG capabilities, it would be a piece of cake to fake footage.
The only way to prove it to those people would be to actually send them there in person.
wow... (Score:4, Funny)
One Mars Probe Probes Another? (Score:1)
Oh - "One Mars Probe Photographs Another. . ."
My bad.
The picture is impressive... (Score:5, Funny)
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(yeah I know, old joke)
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That's nothing. I'm told Pioneer 10 has a fifty-year warranty which it is nowhere near the end of yet.
Repairs are on a return-to-manufacturer basis, of course, that's why it was so cheap
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OK, good to know what the progression is.
Lost European rover? (Score:1)
Going into the crater (Score:2)
Duck bay looks like a good place to try because of what looks like a little break (or slip?) in the scarp just below (in the picture) the location of the rover. I haven't seen any estimates yet of the slope in that part of the crater, nor of the type of material which will be found there.
I am sure there will be a lot of analysis done before they try. Lets hope it goes well. I wouldn't like to see Opportunity turn over while descending on a too steep slope.
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That's bad news for a solar-powered rover in the southern hemisphere.
I agree, though, it looks like the safest place to enter from a slope/scarp point of view.
The Rovers can handle quite a slope. Going down, that is. Coming back out? Well, not so much.
blatent rip-off of another guy's joke (Score:2)
Camera Mast Shadow-> .
more imprressive photo at Rover site (Score:2)
I've seen people on the ground in Google Earth photos when the contrast is good. So this is about the same resolution.
another advantage of the Reconnaissance Orbiter (Score:2)
Click here! (Score:2)
Errant Dog (Score:2)
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tentative beagle image (Score:2)