Close Mars Means Close-Up Pictures

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

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

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

Man, don't you pay attention?

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

That depends on if you're searching for intelligent life or not.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

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

Nevermind the possibility that introducing a man-made probe into Europa's ecosystem (if it exists) may be the demise of said ecosystem.

---rhad

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

Are we talking about bacteria that might survive the interstellar trip and all its radiation [...] he former seems like a very low risk

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:Life

and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress

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

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.

Re:Search for life in Europa instead

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).

post processing?

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...

Re:post processing?

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?

Yesterday's APOD [nasa.gov] was exactly this kind of image using the same kind of technique [astroshow.com].

Re:post processing?

Straight up image stacking or averaging does not remove the effects of atmospheric turbulence. HTH.

It can, if the individual exposures are short enough (something like 0.1 seconds each). On those timescales, seeing (turbulence) causes an image to jump around. You can shift them all back into alignment before stacking them.

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?

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

Something is closer...

... and so we can see it better.

Wow

best Mars photo ever?

images taken by Hubble last night, dubbed the best Mars globe photo ever taken...

...from earth orbit, indeed.

Those pictures...

are quite underwhelming, don't they use this thing to look at black holes burping [cnn.com]? You'd think posting a sweet close-up would help their funding a little.

Nice close-up for wallpaper

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

Re:Nice close-up for wallpaper

Better yet, see NASA's site [nasa.gov] for the pictures

space.com is not very well informed

"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

Re:space.com is not very well informed

Could be of course that they do not adhere the same conclusion. Speculative science can not produce a conclusion on a subject. And this is speculative science at best.

XXX!

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.

See The Blue Atmosphere?

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)?

Gas versus dust

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

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?

Opps...

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

Thanks.

So...

...whats the focal length on that lens? seems just a little longer than my 300. :P

Oh My God!!!

"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?

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.

Exploitable mineral content

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.

Re:Exploitable mineral content

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.

sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

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 just too hot?

Re:sharpest ground-based images of Mars to date

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.

Wow, what a difference an atmosphere makes

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...

...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.

Re:There's a Steven Wright joke that applies

>before we wind up with another Apollo-loike boondoggle.

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...

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.

From the article:

The south polar ice cap is currently melting and shrinking in size...

Oh my God! This global warming epidemic is contagious!

Sure it's close...

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"

Angry red planet

Is it just me, or does the large close-up of Mars' Hellas Basin on the Hubble site look like Yosemite Sam?

Keck observatory & optical interferometry

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... :)

Nice sharp image

however, I *still* dont' see Arnold there...

Face on Mars

Finally, we'll be able to get detailed, close-up pictures of the face on Mars! I'm sure the Weekly World News is scrambling to scoop everyone else in this potentially groundbreaking revelation. I hope that they're able to prove conclusively that, just as theorized by the eminent astronomers behind the classic Mission to Mars, the Earth was indeed seeded by Martians after a cataclysmic meteor strike.

What the eye wants to see

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

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 face! Not the face!

Now let's see just how many new 'alien' features -pyramids, etc, your average tinfoil hat wearer spots in these images.

Saturn?

Although it is slightly OT, I have heard that one astronomer has stated that Mars is a bit hyped and that Saturn will provide a much better show in a few months. Does anyone care to shed some light on this?

Re:Saturn?

Maybe they're referring to the Cassini mission that arrives at Saturn next year? Here's a good site for basic info. [estec.esa.nl]

The next step

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!

Is Mars really red?

I went down to look at Mars last Saturday night with the local astronomy group. But instead of seeing the Red Planet, it was the White Planet. Not even a smidge of red to it. Three separate telescopes all showed Mars white. What's up with that?

So slashdot really is stupid?

I know this is a big thing for CNN readers, but slashdot?

Its just pictures. We've got thousands of those. We sent a freakin probe to survey the geography of the planet. What's so big about this? Is it so close you can almost touch it? Ooo, purty shiney red planet. *snapsnapsnap*

Too bad it's August...

It's a little unfortunate that Mars had to have its perigee and opposition during the summer months. Scientific observations taken from ground-level are always clearer during the wintertime (atmosphere more calm, less air turbulance).

Mission to Mars

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!

You can see my house from here!

Ice Cap is melting!

From the article:

The south polar ice cap is currently melting and shrinking in size.

See! Further proof of global warming! It's affecting even Mars!

Why so excited?

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.

Has anyone noticed that

Mars is also not Lambertian?
Is it the case for all the planets?

Which Begs The Reverse Question

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.

Re:Which Begs The Reverse Question

Mars and earth currently are in opposition (which is why they are so close), meaning than mars, earth and sun lie on one straight line. If you were looking at earth from mars, your eyes would hurt, because you'd be staring right at the sun behind the earth.

Alex

Wot no canals?

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....

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!

Ther it is!

I think I see the lot that will house my future home!!!

nasa has a better file to down load

Better resolution the the link at space.com

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/imag e_ feature_85.html

Martian Date Calculator

For any who are interested, I made a Martian Date Calculator [movetoiceland.com] so you can figure out important dates in history on the Mars Society's calendar

For example, today is Aquarius 34, XXIII.

Have fun with it.

Huge staplers live on mars?!

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?

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

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.

Clouds

Wow, those were good pictures. We were lucky that both Earth and Mars were cloudless.

(For the humor impaired: can you find two instances of silliness in my post?)

dammit

I like this [space.com] caption better.

Re:Does it means the martians can also see us?

Don't worry. All the martians can see is our night side. So stay in unlit areas at night, and you should be alright.
It's the same reason we can't see all of those hot venusian women.

Re:Are they smiling?

No, but if you listen real carefully, you might hear a chorus of "We are here, we are here, we are here!" (Dr. Seuss) [thegline.com]