Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures 284
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."
Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Funny)
Man, don't you pay attention?
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:2)
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:2, Informative)
perhaps you've heard of him?
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Insightful)
---rhad
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:4, Informative)
First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.
Second, we already have an example of bacteria surviving on a space probe. Some Streptococcus mitis survived Surveyor 3's trip [nasa.gov] from the Earth to the Moon and the two and a half years of exposure to vacuum, temperature extremes, and radiation between when it landed in April, 1967 and when the Apollo 12 astronauts took some parts of Surveyor 3 back home in November, 1969.
Given our very small sample size of spacecraft returned for analysis and the fact that one showed surviving bacteria, I don't think one can qualify the risk of bacterial survival as "very low." When dealing with a situation in which a single bacterial spore could compromise the ecosystem of an entire moon, it pays to be cautious.
Never underestimate the bacterium -- it's been through more shit than you can imagine
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:3, Informative)
First, it's an interplanetary trip -- there's a big difference.
Right, more radiation, no?
Something else to note is that this bacteria survived inside some foam inside a metal? camera casing. Nothing living was found on the outside of the gear - so if applied to Europa, as long as the vessel is very well sealed, it might be OK.
Realistically, though, whatever we try to put down there might just implode on the first trip out.
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:3, Interesting)
Life (Score:2)
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
Re:Life (Score:2)
Re:Life (Score:2, Funny)
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:Life (Score:4, Insightful)
You see, that's exactly the catch. We haven't yet encountered those advanced alien civilizations and it might be that we will never ever find them. So for the time being we have no conceivable way to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and need to proceed gradually and step by step. That's why we needed Moon landing, that's why we needed Fon Braun's rockets, that's why we need to travel to Mars. And since we cannot be sure which attempts will be fruitful and which will not, we need to try everything and diversify. Personally I think that at present almsot all space exploration is waste of time and resources, because in my opinion nanotech and AI are much more important, since they might actually allow us to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and jump straight to intergalactic travel. But I am not so sure as to insist that we stop our space programs, because I may be wrong and space might be important even in short term.
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:5, Interesting)
A close-up of Mars doesn't seem like it will provide the same insight, unfortunately.
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:3, Insightful)
[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.
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:2)
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
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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).
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:2)
Re:Search for life in Europa instead (Score:4, Funny)
That depends on if you're searching for intelligent life or not.
post processing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:post processing? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:post processing? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:post processing? (Score:4, Interesting)
As you expose longer, you add up light from your star as it's "jumped around" to lots of positions. The result is a smeared-out image; adding multiple exposures will not help at this point, as you said.
A technique called "speckle interferometry" was used at Keck to take advantage of short exposures to get around seeing. Also, the first order adaptive optics correction, "tip-tilt," simply compensates for the image jumping around on these timescales.
Another way that multiple short exposures helps is that seeing is variable; some instants it will be good, then a second later it's poor. So you can take a couple of hundred 0.1 second images, take the 20 with the best seeing, and then just use those in your final, combined image (after shifting them to be properly aligned). With longer exposures, you'll average over both good and bad seeing, and they'll all look nearly the same, so this technique won't work.
Re:post processing? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:post processing? (Score:2)
I highly recommend "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods, ISBN 0201180758. Expensive, but gold.
Re:post processing? (Score:2, Informative)
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)
Wow
Nice close-up for wallpaper (Score:5, Informative)
wget http://hubblesite.org/db/2003/22/images/a/formats
It's pretty slow loading, but wget will get it for ya.
CB
Nice blue halo... (Score:2)
Re:Nice close-up for wallpaper (Score:5, Informative)
space.com is not very well informed (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:space.com is not very well informed (Score:4, Informative)
XXX! (Score:2, Funny)
Adultcheck Gold required.
See The Blue Atmosphere? (Score:2)
Re:See The Blue Atmosphere? (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
I actually should have sent you to The Color of Mars [mars-news.de] bit on this site.
Thanks.
Re:See The Blue Atmosphere? (Score:3, Funny)
don't forget those strange anomalies like animals [mars-news.de] on the pathfinder mission.
yeah. ok.
So... (Score:2)
Oh My God!!! (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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.
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blue sky on Mars (Score:2)
--trb
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:2)
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:2)
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
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Have we become obsessive? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Exploitable mineral content (Score:2)
Re:Exploitable mineral content (Score:2)
Nonsense (Score:3, Funny)
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)
I doubt Mars would be any different.
Re:Exploitable mineral content (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
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
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
Yeah, according to Roman mythology, Venus was pretty hot.
Better Venus link (Score:2)
Here's a better one one without whitespace. [nasa.gov]
Click on the Venera links.
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
That aside, the Soviets actually were able to put several landers on the surface of Venu
Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date (Score:2)
Wow, what a difference an atmosphere makes (Score:2, Funny)
One thing that surprises me... (Score:3, Interesting)
All the science guys knew that Mars would be this close decades ago. I just wonder... what a wasted opportunity.
There's a Steven Wright joke that applies (Score:3, Insightful)
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:There's a Steven Wright joke that applies (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I never thought of Apollo as a boondoggle. The shuttle is IMO, but not Apollo. Apollo inspired a whole generation of us to become engineers and scientists. The payoff for civilization on that one was huge.
You are right about seeing more things done around earth(LEO). But the key part of your phrase is commercial ventures. NASA was founded to do the big stuff - like Mars. And we can do it within NASA's current budget. See the Mars Society [marssociety.org] for more information.
Re:One thing that surprises me... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:One thing that surprises me... (Score:2)
Re:One thing that surprises me... (Score:2)
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.
Re:One thing that surprises me... (Score:2)
From the article: (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my God! This global warming epidemic is contagious!
Re:From the article: (Score:2)
What you are probably thiniing of was a research paper in the 1990s that claimed Mars' axial tilt varies chaotically between 10 and 50 degrees. However, these variations happened over millions of years. The cuttent tilt is twenty-ummmmmm.... something degrees.
Sure it's close... (Score:2)
--
Evan "Let's see who understands"
Keck observatory & optical interferometry (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Keck observatory & optical interferometry (Score:3, Informative)
Nice sharp image (Score:2)
What the eye wants to see (Score:2)
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)
The next step (Score:3, Funny)
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)
Hey! (Score:3, Funny)
Why so excited? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that such a marginally closer opposition distance significantly improves observations of anything.
Watching ants from the top of a tower (Score:3, Informative)
2 million miles makes a HUGE difference in what you can and can't see.
Ben
Which Begs The Reverse Question (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Which Begs The Reverse Question (Score:5, Informative)
Alex
Wot no canals? (Score:3, Funny)
Look out for thread.... (Score:3, Funny)
Huge staplers live on mars?! (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Amateur Astronomer Images of Mars (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
dammit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saturn? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:best Mars photo ever? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is Mars really red? (Score:3, Informative)
No, mars is not really red. Its more of a tint of orange, but thats not the reason you dont see color.
You should be complaining about your eyes, not the telescopes you were using. Your eye is made up of rods and cones(HS biology). For numerous reasons, you cant see colors under normal nighttime conditions. In low light conditions, you are using your rods, which only detect black and white shades. While mars might be incredibly bright throught the telescope, you are still only using your low light optics,