One Mars Probe Photographs Another

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

[eldavojohn (898314)]

Yeah, I know how the probes feel, every now and then I'll run into one of my grade school classmates thousands of miles away from where we went to school.

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!"

Moo

[Chacham (981)]

Opportunity Mars rover: I can't believe it, it's like a dream. What's wrong?
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

[BWJones (18351)]

Wow, impressive resolution for such a remote platform. Of course the resolution of the current US spy satellites is about three times better (10cm optimal), but those things are the size of a school bus and regardless, it is impressive what you can see with 30cm resolution.

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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[symie5 (1001116)]

Wow, impressive resolution for such a remote platform. Of course the resolution of the current US spy satellites is about three times better (10cm optimal), but those things are the size of a school bus and regardless, it is impressive what you can see with 30cm resolution.

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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[mopomi (696055)]

Try 544 channels at ~18 m/pixel.

http://crism.jhuapl.edu/instrument/innoDesign.php [jhuapl.edu]

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[mopomi (696055)]

Ah. No, I'm thinking of CRISM, the spectrometer, also on MRO.

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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[NormalVisual (565491)]

Adaptive optics work great for telescopes looking out into space, since you have stars that are effectively point sources that you can use to tell you what kind of correction to apply. If you don't have a star nearby, you can use a laser to generate one in the upper atmosphere. It's won't be a point source, but it's still small enough to help you determine how to move the mirrors. How would one determine how to correct the image when looking down from space?

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[BWJones (18351)]

Google for "adaptive optics." There are no theoretical limits to what you can do with AO, to my knowledge. It just depends on the collector area you're willing to devote to the problem.

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

Re:Impressive resolution

[hubie (108345)]

The pictures are amazing, but not within the context of spy satellites. The MRO orbit is only 250 to 300 km above the surface, which isn't even considered a LEO orbit on Earth.

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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[JungleBoy (7578)]

About 5 years ago I attended a technical workshop at JPL in Pasadena, CA. One of the presentations I went to was on new features added to the GeoTIFF image format. It was given by a contract software engineer for the DoD. The part the made me raise an eyebrow was when he was discussing being able to create multi-petabyte geotiff images through virtuallization/referencing in the format. He made the off hand comment that the entire planet at 1cm resolution is about 1PB, and his geotiff extensions could handle

Full View

[dankstick (788385)]

High Resolution View [nasa.gov]

Re:Full View

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

Super High Resolution View [nasa.gov]

Depression

[joerdie (816174)]

This makes me sad. We now have so much equipment over there doing all this great stuff and no people. I wish there could be another space race. (without the threat of nukes.)

Re:Depression

[Rei (128717)]

This makes me happy. We're not wasting many billions of dollars on another "Gee, whiz, we went there!" action before we have brought launch costs down enough to make a Mars base sustainable in the long-run. Instead, we're using extremely effective robotic probes for the tiniest fraction of the cost as a stopgap.

Re:Depression

[caseih (160668)]

Wasting billions of dollars? You have a strange idea of where money goes. Those billions of dollars that if spent on a space race would ultimately increase the size of our economy (national and global) by up to three fold (if I remember my Econ 101 class correctly). That amplifies the affect of the money and really allows that money to now benefit many more people, that it would if we spent it directly on, say, some kind of welfare assistance. Of course it's the disparity that we should worry about. But still. It's not like our money goes into space with the rockets.

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[njchick (611256)]

That only works as intended is a very strong economy compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise, the taxes are increased and the business goes to better places, like China. You are left with companies that can produce Mars rockets, but cannot produce even simplest things for a competitive price. And please don't forget the internal debt.

Will this change Opportunity's plans?

[RobertB-DC (622190)]

Ok, I'll admit, my first thought on seeing the picture was Oh. My. Gawd. That's a picture of something we put on another *planet*, a little red dot in the sky. Then I started rummaging through the stock phrases about the future of Man and stuff like that.

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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[DerekLyons (302214)]

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?

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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[mopomi (696055)]

I'm not sure of whether they would have approached from a different angle, but they've already used the HiRISE images to plan their trek to where Opportunity is now (it's no longer in the spot as seen in the HiRISE image).

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[iamlucky13 (795185)]

Would they change where they send him to play? Probably not. Current planning has been conducted based on images taken my the Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor probes. The best images of the area from those probes are around 1/4 the resolution (1-2 meters/pixel) if I remember right. Still, they show the major features and led to the decision to try to reach the crater.

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...

[isaac (2852)]

Interesting how the some of the most popular photos from these missions are pictures of other man-made objects. Think of the ratings if there were actual people there! Nasa could fund their mission on the ad revenue...

-Isaac

 

Re:Taking pictures of the car...

[kfg (145172)]

Think of the ratings if there were actual people there!

Is she sunbathing nude?

KFG

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[Daniel_Staal (609844)]

On Mars, that'd get you a real killer tan...

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[mcmonkey (96054)]

Interesting how the some of the most popular photos from these missions are pictures of other man-made objects.

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?

Wow!

[east coast (590680)]

It's fantastic that eggheads can find that teeny tiny rover on all the face of Mars when on most nights I have a hard time finding the ignition in my car after I leave the bar.

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[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

It's fantastic that eggheads can find that teeny tiny rover on all the face of Mars when on most nights I have a hard time finding the ignition in my car after I leave the bar.

If they can do this maybe they will finally find Beagle 2?

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[dan828 (753380)]

The already did that a few months ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4542174. stm [bbc.co.uk]

Haven't you seen the trailers?

[blueZ3 (744446)]

We all now know it was smashed by a Transformer :-)

Proof!

[MindStalker (22827)]

Finally Proof of intelligence. On another planet.
(Robot is proof of intelligence, and its on another planet, the sentences don't necessarily have to be linked.)

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[ivanmarsh (634711)]

Perhaps it got to Mars the same way we got to Earth.

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[mcmonkey (96054)]

Perhaps it got to Mars the same way we got to Earth.

If so, what was our planned operational lifetime? And will we exceed expectations?

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[geekoid (135745)]

"And will we exceed expectations?"

every day.

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[trongey (21550)]

Finally Proof of intelligence. On another planet.
(Robot is proof of intelligence, and its on another planet, the sentences don't necessarily have to be linked.)

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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[sighted (851500)]

That's an interesting observation. I don't know if there was ever life on Mars before, but there is now (at least in proxy). That rover is probably the only thing moving on that plain, perhaps ever. It reminds me of the end of The Martian Chronicles, when the family looks into the canal to see the Martians, and their own reflections look back at them.

All in a day's work.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

"Morning, Sam."

"Morning, Ralph."

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[geekoid (135745)]

excellent reference.
well done.

More disturbing would have been

[WillAffleckUW (858324)]

if the tracks had spelled out "When Can I Come Home?"

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[virg_mattes (230616)]

> if the tracks had spelled out "When Can I Come Home?"

Yeah, no kidding. That would be really creepy. It's a good thing they only spell out "When can I co".

Hey......

Virg

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[WillAffleckUW (858324)]

maybe if it had an Intergalactic Parking Ticket ... now that would have been fun ...

A Better Image IMO

[sasserstyl (973208)]

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08813.jpg [nasa.gov]

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[Bob_Villa (926342)]

That is amazing! I just wonder how something like that could have formed. Was it from a massive asteriod impact or something else?

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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[ZeroExistenZ (721849)]

That is amazing! I just wonder how something like that could have formed.

It looks to me as if the surface is more solid then the sand in the crater (the pattern in the middle looks like loose sand being blown around) and winds moving sand from under the edges of the crater making this jaggy outline by the underground being rendered too loos to support the surface, and having it break off.

The picture is just mesmerizing...

Moon Probe

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

Would be nice if they could get such a probe to the moon and then we would be able to show people that the Eagle really had landed.

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[PreacherTom (1000306)]

Actually, I do believe that you can get imagery of the moon landing from terrestrial observatories.

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[Ars Dilbert (852117)]

No, we can't do that. The Apollo artifacts left on the Moon are just too small. Even the mighty Hubble does not have the resolution necessary to resolve Apollo stuff.

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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[bill_kress (99356)]

Sometimes I think it's more appropriate to allow people to wallow in their own stupidity.

--
"Stay The Course"
        Captain Edward John Smith -- 11:38 April 14, 1912

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[mh101 (620659)]

I don't think even that would convince everyone.

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...

[Simon Thulbourn (854757)]

Wow, I can view Mars in better detail than I can my own freaking house on Google Maps...

The picture is impressive...

[Hamster Lover (558288)]

but it is more impressive that Opportunity is still working years after its original mission was expected to end. I know both rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, are showing their age, but still to continue to function two and half years past their "warranty" as NASA calls is so cool. In the time since they landed on Mars I've moved three times, changed cities, broke up with two girlfriends, changed jobs and done time for molesting a goat.

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[SamSim (630795)]

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