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Space Science

Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures 284

Posted by timothy from the from-below-and-above dept.
Guttata writes " space.com has posted 1 of 2 images taken by Hubble last night, dubbed the best Mars globe photo ever taken. The second image will be posted at 4 p.m. ET. Cool!" aderuwe points to a report on the Hubble site itself. Finally, dpp writes "Space.com is reporting how astronomers using the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) here at the Joint Astronomy Centre have made what are thought to be the sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date. They'll be studying the spectra of the infrared light to look for the signatures of minerals that would indicate the past presence of liquid water, which could have hosted life."
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Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures More

Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures

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  • Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brahmastra ( 685988 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:38AM (#6804688)
    Europa looks like a far better candidate for water and life than mars. We should start sending probes to land on Europa as soon as possible.

    • Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:41AM (#6804711)
      All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

      Man, don't you pay attention?

    • Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kinnell ( 607819 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:56AM (#6804828)
      The trouble is that in order to search for life on Europa, you would need a submarine probe which can drill through several kilometers of ice. It would then have to send any data using a method other than radio, as radio waves don't propogate very well under water. No doubt a probe will be sent eventually (I believe there is one being planned), but it's technically a lot harder than sending probes to Mars.

      • Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rhadamanthus ( 200665 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:21AM (#6805039)
        Nevermind the possibility that introducing a man-made probe into Europa's ecosystem (if it exists) may be the demise of said ecosystem.

        ---rhad

    • Sound good, except for the fact that you're talking about huge orders of magnitude of differences in difficulty. Landing on Mars is like throwing a baseball at the house across the street, as opposed to throwing it to the next block over, bouncing off the north side of the house on the lot, and landing in the water dish in the dog house in the back yard. Slightly more difficult.

    • Life (Score:2)

      by MagPulse ( 316 )
      Finding Martians is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some bacteria living underground on Mars? What would that mean? That life doesn't require Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.

      I'm far more interested in either colonizing Mars [bbc.co.uk] or visiting nearby stars [discover.com] after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the pub
      • Why yes, that is true, O' Master of the Obvious. Conversing with aliens light years away and then building a interstellar ship and traveling there to meet them probably would garner more public attention than finding some microscopic bacteria fossils on Mars. Nice observation.

      • Re:Life (Score:2, Funny)

        by danila ( 69889 )
        Visiting nearby stars is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some habitable planets in other star systems? What would that mean? That we can colonize world other than Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.

        I'm far more interested in either travelling to Andromeda Galaxy or visiting another dimensions after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's a

    • Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Interesting)

      by assaultriflesforfree ( 635986 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:04AM (#6804903)
      It might be easier to look for life on Europa than Mars, actually. I got to have lunch with Freeman Dyson a few months ago, and we talked about some of the work (which I hope I'm not misrepresenting) he's done with the JPL on the life on Europa problem. As I understood him, a big problem is the cost of sending something way out there that can land, drill down, and send back some useful data. His team eventually decided that, 1) Water's way below the surface; that's where the life's going to be, and 2) It's going to have to collect light on the surface, and even there, sunlight's a little scarce. They envisioned these sort of gigantic solar collectors, almost like satellite dishes, protruding up through the surface where they could collect light. A neat feature is that anything that collects light also reflects it when observed properly, a la a rabbit in headlights. His idea was to just send a little probe and have it lined up so that the Sun, the probe, and Europa are all in colinear positions. If, as it comes into position, some glaring is obsreved on the surface, it might mean there's a good chance of life. Anybody know more about this? Am I completely off in what I've said?

      A close-up of Mars doesn't seem like it will provide the same insight, unfortunately.

      • [Life needs light]

        Nice idea, but just not true, making this a bad idea (even if detailed pics from Europa sure would be welcome). Deep submarine life does exist around sources of heat (deep-sea volcanoes etc.) without light getting there - such life would be more probable on Europa than these fantastic lifeforms.

        • Interesting point. Some considerations that might be important are Europa's size. Being much smaller than Earth, it generates a lot less heat. As far as how that translates into vents on the floor of its oceans given all the other factors, I have no idea, but it's a question to be explored.

          Also, and I don't know the answer to this either, but did the life that exists on Earth around those heat sources evolve separately from all life on Earth? Or did it require some building blocks of life to sift down thro
          • Being much smaller than Earth, it generates a lot less heat.

            Europa is in a constant state of being squished and stretched by the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity. Because of that, Europa's size has little bearing on how much internal heat it generates.

      • Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:28AM (#6805089) Homepage
        Er... if I read what you wrote correctly, then Dyson was theorizing on some form of water life that can tunnel through a few kilometers of ice and extend a probiscus into near vacuum that would act as a solar collector.

        While that sounds absurd, I won't dismiss it out of hand. Instead I'll dismiss it for other reasons. I find it unlikely that no such structure has been observed from any of the probes we've sent out (Voyager 1/2, Galileo). They may not have been in the optimal position for such an observance, but you'd still think something would show up. After all, there's no reason to be camoflauged on the surface, right? No predators there.

        Second, I find it unlikely that any life on Europa will be garnering energy from the Sun. There's just not enough of it, and there's that several kilometers of ice issue. Too much energy expended to recover from sunlight. I'd think it more likely that there are some bacteria living near the rocky core off the magma/steam vents -- if there are any. I don't know if Europa is tectonically active or not. If it's not, then I'm going to vote for a dead world. I just don't see there being enough energy input to sustain life for a long period of time, especially given occasional disruptions like meteor impacts cracking the ice (which is probably fairly violent and deadly to any life near the crack).

        Of course, I could be wrong and there could be some really amazing life forms there. It's worth investigating, but it's going to be hard to do. Not only do you have to surmount the environmental challenges a previous poster mentioned, you also have to be 100% positive you don't introduce a foreign life form - which could either give you a false positive or kill off what's there already (low likelihood -- I suspect Europa's environment is too hostile to Earth bred bacteria, but we've been surprised before).
        • It's really beyond my understanding, and without some input from somebody who actually knows more intimately what Dyson was talking about, this might just be me talking out of my ass. Not taking sides or anything, there are just some assumptions I don't think are fair.

          However, I do know that the position of the probe has to be VERY specific, as in directly in between the sun and Europa. Otherwise, you see nothing unusual... it doesn't matter how big a collector (unless it's leafy green or waving a big fl
    • There's plenty of water on Mars. It's just not liquid. We aren't sure if Europa is solid or liquid under the surface; although, many believe it's liquid. That's assuming tidal heating due to living in Jupiter's gravity well.

  • post processing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:41AM (#6804715)
    in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...
    • Fire up Photoshop, Filter / Sharpen, repeat as necessary.

    • Re:post processing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:54AM (#6804811) Journal
      Many amateur astronomers now use CCD or other digital cameras to captured dozens (if not hundreds) of images in sequence, and use "image stacking" programs to combine many images into one.

      There are some very good examples online if you search. The image stacking seems to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence. The effects of the air are always changing and so they tend to average out whereas your target (Mars in this case) will remain constant.

      Here is a site that explains image stacking. [ccdastrophotography.com]

      I think they even do this with Hubble imagery.

      Another finishing trick is to snap some dark frames and subtract that out of the final image to remove effects of the image sensor itself.

      • Re:post processing? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Plutor ( 2994 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:14AM (#6804986) Homepage
        Yesterday's APOD [nasa.gov] was exactly this kind of image using the same kind of technique [astroshow.com].

    • Re:post processing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:58AM (#6804855) Homepage
      Marco--

      I know a bit about this. Basically, the idea is to correlate and overlap information from several individual exposures, while "dewarping" the variations caused by the target rotating during the scan. David Hilvert has written an open source tool that implements some basic methods for doing this kind of work; it's called ALE [dyndns.org]. Google for "Superresolution" for further information; everything that goes from the temporal domain to the spatial domain ends up using techniques like this.

      --Dan
    • To better see the specific surface features, run the entire image through a simple Laplacian or scaled Laplacian, which is a frequency domain digital filter. That's just the start of it.

      I highly recommend "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods, ISBN 0201180758. Expensive, but gold.
    • I use Registax [astronomy.net] for this. It does stacking, aligning and wavelet processing. The best out there at the moment. A few years back AstroStack was king. There are a bunch of others as well...

      I took >A HREF="http://wastelands-observatory.factspot.com/p rocessed/08262003/">some pictures of Mars last night with my 8" SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain) and a $30 Vesta Pro web camera and the results aren't too bad. Each image is comprised of 200 stacked images. The seeing wasn't very good as the air was dry and the t

  • Something is closer... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by azzy ( 86427 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:42AM (#6804718) Journal
    ... and so we can see it better.

    Wow

  • Nice close-up for wallpaper (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:46AM (#6804745) Homepage Journal
    If you want a great Mars pic from last night for your wallpaper (suitable for 1024x or 1280x) today, get it here:

    wget http://hubblesite.org/db/2003/22/images/a/formats/ full_jpg.jpg [hubblesite.org]

    It's pretty slow loading, but wget will get it for ya.

    CB

  • space.com is not very well informed (Score:5, Informative)

    by BobTheLawyer ( 692026 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:47AM (#6804753)
    "Recent studies have hinted at liquid water on the dusty planet."

    presumably those studies aren't quite as recent as the one last week which found that Mars isn't watery now, and wasn't in the past:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3173167.stm

  • XXX! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One chance in a lifetime! See close up XXX pics of Mars's tight, open gorge and giant mounds! This won't happen again so don't miss out!

    Adultcheck Gold required.
  • Around the edge of Mars you can see a blue tinge...is the atmosphere there more like Earth's than we've been led to believe? Or does any combination of gases produce blue (no Taco Bell jokes, please)?
    • Depends on who you believe.

      You might like to look here www.enterprisemission.com and here http://www.mufor.org .

      There is a lot of talk that the first Viking photos showed a blue horizon from surface side. This did not fit with NASA thinking and so they were color corected to present the red sky we all know.

      Just my 2 cents. Enjoy.

    • Gas versus dust (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:04AM (#6804898) Journal
      The Martian sky looks reddish from the ground because of the dust content. From space (or Earth) we are seeing the upper atmosphere which is just gasses (CO2 mainly), and gasses scatter the blue light (look up "Rayleigh scattering").

      Actually, there are some on the fringe (but not quite into "the face on Mars" fringe) insists that the Martian sky *is* blue from the ground. They claim that NASA's color correction of the incoming images, dating all the way back to the Viking landers, is off. The URL escapes me at the moment, I'm afraid.

      • Re:Gas versus dust (Score:4, Informative)

        by Yet Another Smith ( 42377 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @01:26PM (#6806902)
        While I wouldn't 100% put it past NASA to do a little color-correcting (REAL easy to do with RGB imagery) it's entirely plausible that the Martian sky could vary all the way from an Earth-style high-altitude deep blue to a total-sunset deep red. The big governing factor will be the dust content of the air.

        The dust content, of course, will be highly variable from total during a dust storm, to fairly little. I'm not sure (and perhaps no one is) whether there are ever 'dust free' days on Mars, or if there is always some small amount of dust sufficient to keep some reddish hue 24/7/365. Or rather 24.8/7/580 or whatever (I forget the number of Martian days in a Martian year).

        But to expand a bit on Mr Birdman's explanation, all normal gasses (O2, N2, CO2, probably even H2S and H2O in gas form, but not in aerosol form) will look blue, due to the aforementioned 'Rayleigh scattering'. Basically light (and all other forms of EM radiation) is scattered if it hits any object that is near or larger than its wavelength. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, is scattered more by air molecules, so you see more blue light from the sky than red. This will happen in the upper atmosphere.

        If there's also dust, which will scatter red light as well as blue, you will see more red than blue. This is because the there is a higher intensity of red light in sunlight than blue, coupled with the fact that shorter wavelengths are getting scattered away and losing intensity before they reach the lower atmosphere where the dust resides. Aerosols in the atmosphere will act much like dust.

        Disclaimer: I'm pretty much going on memory here, and didn't google this to check my facts. I am especially unsure of my explanation of why dust and aerosols look red. There may be more to it than that.

    • Re:See The Blue Atmosphere? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jedi Holocron ( 225191 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:08AM (#6804941) Homepage Journal
      Opps...

      I actually should have sent you to The Color of Mars [mars-news.de] bit on this site.

      Thanks.

  • So... (Score:2)

    by caveat ( 26803 )
    ...whats the focal length on that lens? seems just a little longer than my 300. :P

  • Oh My God!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eric Savage ( 28245 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:59AM (#6804862) Homepage
    "proximity to the red planet not equaled in 59,619 years." and "Not until 2287 will the two worlds be so close again."

    So it too 59,619 years to get this close, and it will be as close in 284 years, meaning Mars will crash into the Earth in 285.35 years!!! We're doomed!

  • Have we become obsessive? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NaugaHunter ( 639364 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:00AM (#6804867)
    Science fiction has apparently driven us to obsession over whether or not Mars had life. While it may be interesting in a historical sense, can't we just move on for now? While the search for water is important, as it could influence the ease of colonization, can't we wait until we're there until we look for life?

    Don't get me wrong, I'd like to know. And if it's just a matter of looking at data we're getting anyway I'm not against it. It just seems sometimes that it sounds obsessive, especially once the press gets ahold of the stories. It would seem more useful to analyze weather currents, mineral deposits, and other such issues to find good places to land/build, and if there are any local metal deposits and the like.
    • Rest assured, all these and more experiments/observations will be performed if/when we get a decent probe on Mars. The problem is hype. We, as a society, need and want hype. If NASA declared, "We're spending $5B on a probe to examine wind speed on Mars," the general public probably isn't going to rally behind them with anything even remotely resembling enthusiam. They need a little "potential alien life" hype to justify themselves once in a while. Meanwhile, those "in the know" will understand the true
    • If there is life on Mars, what rights do we have to colonize it?

      Actually, I'd like to get people on Mars first too. We'd probably find life sooner with people there, even if colonizing takes a while. Just make very, very sure the planet isn't contaminated in the process.

      • Do dogs have rights? What about plants, to they have rights? Do bacteria? Do viriuses? Why should we extend rights to martian life that we don't extend to life forms on our own planet?

      • If there was life on Mars before but died out, it's mostly useful to know only in the sense that it might provide further insights to how life originated here, and gives a heck of a boost to the concept that there might be life elsewhere in the Universe.

        If there is any life past the, let us say for the sake of arguement, ameoba stage*, then it is only of effective consequence if it is somehow threatening. Yes, it will be important to keep an area 'untainted' to research how it developed and survives, bu
        • If there was life on Mars before but died out, it's mostly useful to know only in the sense that it might provide further insights to how life originated here, and gives a heck of a boost to the concept that there might be life elsewhere in the Universe. ...and basically to piss off the fundamentalist Christians.
    • Science fiction as a genre decideded that mars had life because of early science. The whole E.R. Burroughs thing got started because of the astronomer Lowell pointing out the 'canals'. While the popular obsession came from sci-fi, the general idea is older. Most of this speculation exists because mars has obvious geological features caused by some form of liquid erosion.

      Finding out that Mars has life is more important than than some silly historical obsession, or utilitarian colonization scheme. Findi

  • Exploitable mineral content (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yanray ( 686150 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:00AM (#6804868)
    Exploitable mineral content

    I want to find some Rare Earth Elements and excessive mineral/gem deposits. Showing pictures of a 300-carat diamond sitting on the surface of Mars will get us their a lot faster then looking for trace amounts of water.

    Yes I understand that it is necessary to sustain life on Mars but your average investor/citizen of such an endeavor couldn't give a rats ass.
    • And this would be why trusting science to corporate interests is a *bad* thing. Because they're obsessed with the profit motive, they'll never do work which doesn't have obvious immediate benefit. Hell, with this attitude, we might as well just scrap the entire space program... there's no diamonds in orbit, last I checked.
    • I predict that the first time someone can prove there's ktons of gold ore (or the like) in one of those asteriods, industry will become very interested

    • Nonsense (Score:3, Funny)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) *
      At $5 a carat, is it worth a few hundred dollars to go up there after a gem that we can just grow back home?

      No, if you want people to travel to mars you have to provide a REALLY compelling reason to go there. I propose sending a probe to the surface of Mars whole SOLE PURPOSE is to be loaded with Metallica and Brittney Spears songs and use IP over radio technology to act as a distant P2P node. Then the RIAA with its vast resources will be quick to organize an expedition... the key then is to tie up all o

    • Re:Exploitable mineral content (Score:4, Interesting)

      by toddestan ( 632714 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @01:41PM (#6807042)
      I've heard that if all the gold in Fort Knox was sitting on the moon, free for the taking, it would still not be profitable to go up there and get it.

      I doubt Mars would be any different.
    • Exploitable mineral content

      Unfortunately this would not help either. There are significant proven mineral reserves under the ice of Antarctica but no one seems to be very interested in mining it because of cost issues. With Mars the cost would be several orders of magnitude higher, so don't have any hopes about that.

  • I'm not surprised considering it's the closest mars has been in 60,000 years.

    Why all the mars fascination among astronomers? I find that theres much more interesting stuff in the solar system. And no, I'm not making a Uranus crack. (Uranus crack heh ok I guess I am).

    But Venus, Jupiter, near earth asteroids, all this stuff seems so much more interesting than some dumb old red rock.

    Venus is close, and I bet that place is super crazy insane. Would it even be feasible to send probes to Venus, or is it jus
    • For those of you that can see Mars from the ground, that is. For many of the readers, the stars are something you only see when you leave the lights of the city behind. And anything that lives near the horizon.. well, some of us have forgotten what a "horizon" is, or think it means the building next to yours.

      I really want to get a telescope for my kid, but until I move away from the lights of the city I'm near, it's pointless. We can spy on our neighbors (at pornographic magnification) but we can't see
      • Generally true for stars and other deep space objects, but you can observe Mars from the middle of a brightly lit mall parking lot.

        Heck, I once located a crescent Venus in the middle of the afternoon when it was at its peak in brightness. It was odd seeing a crescent (through a telescope, of course) floating in blue sky that wasn't the moon.

    • Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:4, Informative)

      by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:11AM (#6804969) Journal
      I think it's more a fascination amongst the public, and the astronomers are feeding it. Mars is interesting because it's another place on which we could potentially walk around. You couldn't exactly go traipsing around in a polo shirt and Levis shorts, but you know what I mean. Carl Sagan put it best when he said, after the Viking landings, Mars would now always be "a place" as opposed to some abstract idea.

      And they have sent probes to Venus. There's even some ground based images from a Russain lander, but they don't show very much. The surface has been fairly well mapped by radar bearing probes from the US.

      href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/ surface_venus.html">The surface of venus.

    • Would it even be feasible to send probes to Venus, or is it just too hot?

      Yeah, according to Roman mythology, Venus was pretty hot.
    • I narfed that first URL. I'd swear it passed a preview.

      Here's a better one one without whitespace. [nasa.gov]

      Click on the Venera links.

    • The reason that there's not much interest in Venus is that the atmospheric pressure is 100 times greater than it is here on Earth, the temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and it rains sulfuric acid. Not the most hospitable environment for exploration, at least on the surface, although the surface has been mapped using radar (which is really the only way you can do it, given the planet's perpetual thick cloud cover.)

      That aside, the Soviets actually were able to put several landers on the surface of Venu
    • surface temperatures on Venus exceed melting temp of lead... It's not easy to build electronic devices that can survive on the surface when all the solder, gold interconnects, etc. melts.
  • Compare the photos by Hubble and by the UK ground-based telescope. It's like looking at PHP code vs. Perl code.

  • One thing that surprises me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:06AM (#6804917) Homepage
    ...with this once-in-a-very-long-time opportunity, why hasn't anyone put a manned mission to Mars together?

    All the science guys knew that Mars would be this close decades ago. I just wonder... what a wasted opportunity.
    • "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."

      It's expensive and dangerous and there quite simply is no political will to go to Mars, and politics, sadly, rules the minds of man.

      Personally, I love space stuff, but even I would like to see some more logical things done around Earth (orbital industries, commercial ventures, etc.) before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.

    • Re:One thing that surprises me... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ip_vjl ( 410654 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:28AM (#6805093) Homepage
      It's not like Mars is within walking distance now. Even with this pass-by, it would still be a very lengthy journey for a person to take. Too long for any technology we have now to support.

      And by the way, once they get there - they'll have to come back (since we don't have any way of setting up a permanent settlement) so they'd have to do that without the benefit of this close pass.

      • Though some silly news guy told me that if I loaded up my Ford Expedition and started driving, I could get there in 55 years. Though I'd prefer something a bit more economical with fuel, since I doubt that exxon/shell/mobil has expanded past the moon yet. Maybe a Geo Metro will get me there.
      • You should check out this book: The Case for Mars [amazon.com]. Everything you just said is refuted, plus a few more you haven't mentioned yet.

        When it comes right down to it we could have a sustainable base on Mars within 10 years. All that has to happen is for the US Congress to get off it's ass and tell NASA to do it.
    • Because using chemical rockets it's a year long trip each way. It would cost 100's billions to build and launch. And in order to have a landing today, they'd have to have started working in the '80's.

  • From the article: (Score:5, Funny)

    by RealityProphet ( 625675 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:08AM (#6804939)
    The south polar ice cap is currently melting and shrinking in size...

    Oh my God! This global warming epidemic is contagious!

  • Yeah, it may be the closest it's going to be for awhile, but I'd imagine that atmospheric conditions will affect the image Hubble gets of Mars' surface more than the distance to Mars.

    --
    Evan "Let's see who understands"

  • Keck observatory & optical interferometry (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheOrquithVagrant ( 582340 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:15AM (#6805003)
    I'd love to see how the images the Keck observatory, with its adaptive optics and 10-meter mirrors, and how they would stack up against the hubble images.

    Better yet, the images they could produce if the Keck optical interferometer was fully operational. I know taking pictures of things inside our solar system definitely is not what they're aiming for with the interferometer, but it would still be very interesting to see if a ground based "virtual 85-meter mirror" could produce better results than an orbital telescope like hubble.

    And STILL better - a space-based optical interferometry array! Imagine images of planets in OTHER solar systems with resolutions similar to the Mars pictures we're marveling at today... Interferometry is cool. I just hope I live to see a really big optical interferometer in orbit, and the images it will be able to snap.

    Better stop now, starting to ramble... :)
    • It's not quite as you would think. Keck has two telescopes to do interferometry. That gives it one axis to resolve. So really all you get from Keck is an interferogram showing how resolved an object is in one dimension, as interferometry is really just measuring the spatial forier transform of the wavefront you are sampling with the two telescopes. And the spatial frequency you are most sensitive to is that right around the sampling limit of the interferometer (with the width of your sensitivity range h
  • however, I *still* dont' see Arnold there...
  • Looking at the image [space.com], my brain tries to fit it to 'known' continents.

    The Terra Meridiani area looks like either the east coast of southeast Asia (Vietnam, etc.), or the Gulf of Mexico.

    Arabia Terra could easily be China.

    Hellas is in the right place for Australia.

  • also on the APOD (Score:3, Informative)

    by contrapuntalmindset ( 697143 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:25AM (#6805073)
    see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ The resolution is a bit better. For an even better image, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030824.html

  • The next step (Score:3, Funny)

    by not_a_george ( 687840 ) <introv8ed_underachiever@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:43AM (#6805260) Journal
    before we go probing around, we need to follow the (updated as of 2000) natural progression for visiting other planets
    1)if planet may contain life
    2)wait for Mcdonalds to build thier first mars location
    3)???
    4)colonize!

  • Mission to Mars (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @11:22AM (#6805705)
    If we could send up a probe with WiFi, and establish a P2P music download site there, I'm pretty sure the RIAA would have a man on Mars within the year to serve subpenas.

  • Hey! (Score:3, Funny)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @11:23AM (#6805725)
    You can see my house from here!

  • Why so excited? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by baz00f ( 520771 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @11:42AM (#6805933)
    I'm sorry, but if you look at the numbers here [space.com] you'll see that past perihelic oppositions of Mars to earth are just about as close as this one. Year 2003= 34.6 million miles. Year 1956 = 35.1 mill. = difference of 1.4%. Year 1971 = 34.9 mill. = diff. 0.9%. Year 1988= 36.5 mill = diff. 5.5%

    I doubt that such a marginally closer opposition distance significantly improves observations of anything.
    • Percentages go from 0 to 100 which of course looks insignificant. But when you consider the actual number of 500,000 - 2 million miles it's quite obvious why it's a big deal.

      2 million miles makes a HUGE difference in what you can and can't see.

      Ben

  • Which Begs The Reverse Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EXTomar ( 78739 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:29PM (#6806395)
    It is very well known where Mars would be in the sky and how to find it (right now you can't miss it anyway).

    An interesting question would be for this celestial event: How does Earth look from Mars? Since Earth is interior to Mars would someone one Mars look up and see the large cresent blue dot? Or would Earth not even be see able because we are positioned in the middle of the Martian day?

    It is always fun to apply our knowledge of gravitation to predict position of planets from Earth. We should by now have the knowledge to predict it from other vantage points.

  • Wot no canals? (Score:3, Funny)

    by C A S S I E L ( 16009 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:30PM (#6806411) Homepage
    The Hubble images are lovely, but I can't make out any of the canals. Perhaps the Hubble needs repairing again.

  • Look out for thread.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mattsucks ( 541950 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:37PM (#6806468) Homepage
    Now that Mars is at its closest point for thousands of years, we should expect the voracious thread to start appearing in our skies any day now. And us without any dragons to fly .... we're doomed!

  • Huge staplers live on mars?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by kaltkalt ( 620110 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @01:25PM (#6806898)
    I was looking at the large, detailed mars pic on the linked site and low and behold, a huge, living stapler with some english words growing on its side appeared and started to stomp around on the planet. I, for one, welcome our new stapler overlords.

    Wait, what's that you say? It was just a tacky, utterly-annoying pop-up advertisement hopping around on my computer screen? Oh. Fuck them then.

  • Mars Globe? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yet Another Smith ( 42377 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @01:31PM (#6806958)
    Hey this is a bit O/T, but I was looking at the space.com article, and really liked the fact that they had a 'normal' version of the picture, and then a version with major land features (hellas basin, Arabia terrain, etc). Ever since reading the RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, I've been interested in the geography of Mars. For whatever reason, I've had real trouble getting it in my head from the lat/long maps that I've seen. I'd really like to have a globe of Mars to help keep this strait. I know there are globes depicting the features of the Moon, but does anybody know if there are Mars globes available?

  • Amateur Astronomer Images of Mars (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fishbonez ( 177041 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @04:20PM (#6808449)

    Even the images now being produced by amateur astronomers are really excellent as a result of the close proximity of Mars. An archive [rowan.edu] amateur Mars images can be found at the International Marswatch [rowan.edu] site. Looking back through the archive, you can see how much more detail can be seen in the images as Mars has drawn nearer.

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