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Phoenix Lander Photographs Martian Whirlwinds
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Sep 13, 2008 09:25 PM
from the taz-lives dept.
from the taz-lives dept.
Toren Altair recommends a story up on the Space Fellowship site that begins "NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has photographed several dust devils dancing across the arctic plain this week and sensed a dip in air pressure as one passed near the lander. The Surface Stereo Imager ... caught a dust devil in action west of the lander in four frames shot about 50 seconds apart from each other. 'It was a surprise to have a dust devil so visible that it stood [out] with just the normal processing we do,' said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, lead scientist for the stereo camera. 'Once we saw a couple that way, we did some additional processing and found there are dust devils in 12 of the images.'"
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Looks a lot like Texas to me... :) (Score:5, Funny)
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Crawford, Texas perhaps?
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Oddly it looks a lot like the pictures I have seen of the surface of Venus.
Taken by a Russian craft, I believe.
Rocks and Craters. (Score:2)
Okay, so there's ice on some of moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But otherwise, rocks and craters. Makes me wonder sometimes why we have a space program. If only there was a scum covered pond,
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Stop calling it So1, goddammit!
"Sol" is just Latin for "Sun"! So unless you're talking to a (very VERY old) Latin audience...
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How did that become "So1"? My god, am I inf3cted w1th ...l33t$p34k?? 444|-||-||-||-|... |-|3|_P!!!
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Unless we develop some sort of warp drive (which seems to violate the laws of physics as we know them now), we are stuck with either a generation
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I will suffice to reply with the quote from "Contact" by Carl Sagan:
"You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane," you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute
Sombody call Al Gore (Score:2, Funny)
A key factor in the whirlwinds getting stronger is an increase in the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.
Shit! now we have to worry about climate change on mars?
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Hmmmm....think I saw Manbearpig in one of those shots too..... ....maybe Manbearpig is from Mars?!?! That explains....well not a damn thing I guess.
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Global warming on mars would be a very good thing.
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Re:Sombody call Al Gore (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, no. And WTF does an anti-AGW statement have to do with a dust-devil on Mars?
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DamonLaut2004.pdf [stanford.edu]
and
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650 [newscientist.com]
But even if solar forcing in the past was more important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40 years. Claims that this is the case have not stood up to scrutiny (pdf document) [stanford.edu].
Direct measurements of solar output since 1978 show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend .
Similarly, there is no trend in direct measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet output and in cosmic rays. So for the period for which we have direct, reliable records, the Earth has warmed dramatically even though there has been no corresponding rise in any kind of solar activity.
Parent
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Hooray for Sol. Just in time for the latest hike in the price of gas. Solar keeps looking better, and more of our gas taxes better be going to this.
green text (Score:3, Insightful)
Kermit (Score:4, Funny)
Because it ain't easy bein' green!
Parent
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First you'll hear the wooshing sound, then you'll know.
Re:green text (Score:5, Funny)
It's Saturday night. The editors realize that the average Slashdotter will be having, well, coordination difficulties. And the kind editors want us to see the pics, so they're giving everybody a nice, big target.
Parent
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On the contrary, the average Slashdotter spends his Saturday cannonballing Red Bull and playing WoW for 10 hours. If anything, his coordination would be so good he could have landed the Phoenix lander himself.
thats not mars (Score:2, Funny)
I recognize that place, it is just outside of Phoenix.
Just lovely (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure, may be wildly optimistic, but, as the elementary school motivational posters say, "Shoot for the Moon- even if you miss, you'll land among the stars!".
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Space being huge and all, and the probability of getting hit by something solid is very small, I can understand that a spacecraft can go far. But I didn't learn much about the effects of radiation on hardware. An organism may suffer in space travel, but how well does hardware bear up after a few years, even with shielding?
Our earthly magnetic field is quite useful for deflecting some radiation, so would putting an artificial magnetic field around a spacecraft be enough to protect people? It would take a lot
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An organism may suffer in space travel, but how well does hardware bear up after a few years, even with shielding?
To answer your first question:
Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini....
Not everything goes perfectly, but sometimes you get very lucky.
V'ger? (Score:2)
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Even if my health was perfect and I was properly trained, I don't see how a 'manned' mission to Mars will happen anytime soon. Primarily due to the issues of space radiation [space.com]
I don't think the radiation issue is that bad but I am in favor of it because it is a good reason to send old people.
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The pictures (video?) have me somewhat bemused though. I know the air pressure is lower on Mars, so how fast is the air blowing to cause these Dust Devils? It would seem to me that either the air is moving insanely fast or the dust particle size is tiny. Any ideas/information?
*could* this affect Phoenix? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:*could* this affect Phoenix? (Score:5, Informative)
It has happened [newscientist.com] and they are good for the rovers believe it or not. The normal winds kick up dust that inhibits the collection of solar light, but these dust devils actually help in removing it. One of the reasons they've been able to go so long on Mars has been for the devils themselves--this is just the first time they've been captured on film.
Parent
Re:*could* this affect Phoenix? (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, this is NOT the first time. Spirit caught [boston.com] them before [boston.com].
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they are good for the rovers
Phoenix is too far north for it to do much good this time. From the UofA page [arizona.edu]:
The far northern latitudes on Mars experience no sunlight during winter. This marks the end of the mission because the solar panels can no longer charge the batteries on the lander and the frost covering the region as the atmosphere cools will bury the lander in ice.
Fujifilm 5000S (Score:2, Funny)
I've got an old Fujifilm 5000S digital camera which I'll donate to NASA so we can get some decent colour photos.
I'm sick of this B/W crap.
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Seconded. The quality of the images we get from NASA and the eSA are rivaled by those of Mathew Brady and his Civil War photographs.
Expect several lectures on the nature of filters, how digital cameras really work and how photographs aren't 'real science'. But don't expect to be satisfied with any other explanation.
Re:Fujifilm 5000S (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Each sensor is only 1024x1024 (Score:2)
I won't fall for the bait, since you know that all digital camera sensors (even Foveon X3 [wikipedia.org] with its integrated filtering) are actually monochrome, and it takes extra processing to generate a colour image. :-)
However, it *IS* worth pointing out that Phoenix's panoramic camera [popsci.com] sensor resolution is very low compared to the consum
Lots of Color (Score:2)
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Your post somewhat strengthens our point. On the NASA page you linked I had to scroll down a ways to find the first "approximately true-color image". The small handful of others were also labelled "approximately true-color image" as well as "false color image."
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You didn't figure it out yet? Color only exists on Earth.
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You know, I suspected that the first time I saw the moon landing images back in '69....
Mind you the "artist's impressions" are pretty.
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Mind you the "artist's impressions" are pretty.
Yes, they are. [alanbeangallery.com]
Re:Fujifilm 5000S (color fuss again) (Score:3, Informative)
If I am not mistaken, they have to take bunches of images in order to capture a single whirlwind. Color images hog more bandwidth and memory. There was some talk of automating the process in the rovers to automatically detect movement and only save and send those frames with activity.
However, another problem is that most probes use filters to capture color, and filters don't work well with moving objects because the target moves between filters. On some of the Phoenix color images you n
Tasmanian Devils (Score:2)
Conspiracy (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not a dust devil. It's a fast moving Martian.
Yet another government agency coverup!
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I'd turn on the microphone and start recording.
If I hear sputtering and shouting, i'll know where taz went.
Not in Kansas anymore? (Score:2)
As it turns out, there are places like home.
Spooky coincidence (Score:2)
The rovers have seen this as well (Score:5, Informative)
I think the movies captured by the rovers are much cooler:
Sol 1120 [nasa.gov]
Sol 486 [nasa.gov]