First High-Res Color Photos from Mars

mzs writes "The first color thumbnail from Spirit was available yesterday from a larger image. Today some full-size color images are available. If you are in the USA you may be interested in catching the NOVA program on your local PBS station tonight." Acrobatman notes the existence of a nifty utility:"Mars24, a Mac OS X and Java application and applet which displays a Mars 'sunclock', a graphical representation of Mars. This free utility shows the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format and landmarks such as the landing positions of the rovers."

Re:Why is the sky red?

[Guano_Jim]

Perhaps all those oxides in the soil get whipped up into the air by the intense winds on the surface, coloring the sky kinda butterscotch? [nasa.gov]

Re:What are they censoring?

[AKAImBatman]

It looks to me to be damaged tiles. Most likely, NASA is sending the images in chunks of compressed data. Given the distances involved (and the processing power for images this large), they are probably slicing the images into squares and using those as the chunks of data to compress. When the data is received on our end, NASA reconstructs the images and throws away bad data that didn't make it.

It's possible that they'll have the lander retransmit the image at a later date. (Does anyone know the storage capacity of this thing?)

Re:What are they censoring?

[paul248]

Those are probably places where some data was lost in transmission. When you have a half-hour ping time, it's not so easy to re-request lost packets. Those parts are still being stored on the lander's memory, if someone decides that they really want to see them.

Wrong file dates?

[erroneus]

Go have a look at:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/ [nasa.gov]

Notice the dates on the files? Makes you wonder doesn't it? And why are they all modest? I want something bold and/or spicy!

another link

[mzs]

There is a decent article [space.com] available at space.com with some more information from the press conference and the first color image as well.

Re:Why is the sky red?

[james72]

The sky on Mars would be blue, if it weren't for all the dust particles within it. These red dust particles colour the sky with a pink shade. Vikings 1 & 2, Pathfinder and now Spirit have confirmed this.

http://calspace.ucsd.edu/marsnow/library/science /c limate_history/sky_color1.html

-James.

Re:Hmmmm.... Patterns....

[Webmoth]

First of all, there's a vertical line just left of center. This is where the image is stiched together. Although NASA may like us to believe this is one image, it's really a composite.

Aside from that, I see nothing terribly unusual. Interesting, yes, but not unusual.

The "line of rocks that starts at the middle left edge of the picture and goes up and to the right" is an illusion created by shadows and perspective. If I stare up at the light fixture on my ceiling, there appears to be a "pattern" of concentric rings and radial lines of texture. It's daylight, the curtains are open, and snow is on the ground so when the light is off, I have plane-source scattered light and any "pattern" disappears.

Any appearance of order in the image is just an illusion.

Re:What are they censoring?

[Morrisguy]

they are probably slicing the images into squares and using those as the chunks of data to compress.

Exactly, you can tell by looking carefully in the other pictures for those "mirror lines" or spots where a horizontal section of the image seems repeated or cut off.

It's like if you were cutting out a two page photo from a magazine, but the photo were on two seperate page leaves. You would have to cut both segments out and try to connect them again, but would probably never get a perfectly aligned fit between the two.

Hmm, what happened to the last lander NASA sent???

[hpulley]

The Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed [space.com] in 1998 so I think it was wise of them to be cautious and realistic about their chances this time. They sent two to improve their chances of getting one down. They went with stuff that worked in 1996 on Pathfinder, airbags, instead of lander legs which proved troublesome. More importantly, they included telemetry on the way down which is more expensive but which means you aren't left with such a guessing game if there is a failure. You at least have a clue how far it got, unlike the Beagle which hasn't been heard from since it left its mother craft; we have no idea whether its chute opened or if it was eaten by a space-probe eating monster. I applaud NASA for being more careful this time and for putting the equivalent of some printfs in there to make sure it wasn't going to slip away quietly this year.

Re:Dark Patches near the Rover?

[shuz]

The news conference said that it was most likly a salt composite that makes it clump together like that. Moisture coming up from underground could have caused the salts to interact with the soil. The believe this because the viking lander found high concentrations of chlorine in the soil.

Re:Wrong file dates?

[AKAImBatman]

Dude, you're looking at the files from the last rover. Scroll to the bottom and you'll find the file dates are correct. BTW, they're "modest" because NASA keeps the images in "small", "modest", and "original 300 meg for scientific research" sizes.

Hi Res image mirror

[Odonian]

Nasa has taken down the 8MB hires image off it's site due to bandwidth problems (/.ing aint helping im sure. I managed to get it earlier today and put a copy of it [earthlink.net] on my otherwise useless earthlink web area - Im sure that one will get hammered in short order too, so if anyone with a robust web server can get it and provide a better mirror, be my guest.

I've heard this before (link)

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

There's some color-corrected photos here that show this:

http://mars-news.de/life/ [mars-news.de]

Basically, the theory behind it is that:

1) The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.

2) The atmosphere seen at an angle from the Hubble is almost always blue.

This latest landing only makes it the conspiracies flourish, because in 1997 and even in the 1970s when Viking landed, they immediately had color photos. Why was the color being hidden?

Re:What are they censoring?

[pballsim]

On msnbc website they have a cool video of them panning out. The picture is taken from inside the craft (ie the black spot). Watch the video from NASA it's really cool!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3855168/

It's also 12 million pixes (3000 x 4000). It is taken in squares.

Gustav crater was the desired site

[edremy]

Watch the Nova episode on the Rovers. Gustav Crater was the *risky* landing zone that the scientists really wanted but the engineers didn't know if they could do.

It's basically a huge basin that has what looks to be an old river leading into it. If there was water, this is where to look, at least in a place where we could actually land. (The constraints are large: needs to be near the equator to get direct transmission to earth, low elevation to get maximum aerobraking, not too bumpy, etc)

Good: Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH)

[dekashizl]

For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH) [axonchisel.net].

This has links to tons of great information, images, QuickTimeVR, 3d images, videos, history, and lots more about Mars and this MER Spirit mission in particular. I have been obsessively checking this page and branching out from there every couple of hours for the last few days.

Canadians also write colour

[hpulley]

Well, Canadians also spell it with a 'u' so there are some of us on the left side of the 'pond' who spell it colour.

The 1873 epoch

[andyrut]

this is somehow a reverse-engineered date/time format?...i mean, clearly, humans knew mars existed well before 1873, after all....

The Mars epoch of 1873 was chosen for its precedence to a cosmic Martian event in 1877. Read the Mars time technical notes. [nasa.gov] for more info.

I think it's safe to say all epochs are "reverse-engineered" by being placed in the past. You don't see any ancient documents dated "1066 B.C.", do you? :)

Re:The pics-

[FubarPA]

Hate to burst your bubble, but there won't be pics of the Beagle 2 crash site, as it's on the other side of Mars. According to USA today (dead tree addition, dated yesterday), it would take the rover 1,000 years to get to the intended landing position of Beagle 2, assuming it crashed even remotely near it's target.

Mirror site for a panoramic image

[Leebert]

On the chance that this gets slashdotted (it's been slow for a while), I'll mirror the high-res panoramic image here: http://nccs.nasa.gov/~lsherida/PIA04995.jpg [nasa.gov]

other hi res planetary surface images?

[esnyder]

At this page: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber =pia04995 [nasa.gov]

The caption says that

This is the first color image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the highest resolution image ever taken on the surface of another planet.

There's clear compositing artifacts in the image (where the subpieces don't stitch together smoothly), so I got to wondering: what's the previous record holder? And was it a single image or also a composite?

Any pointers?

High-Res Pictures

[SmilingBoy]

For a good slashdotting of NASA's servers:

Here is a link to a high-res mosaic, 3498x3851, TIFF format, 40.4MB:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/PIA04995.tif [nasa.gov]

And the same picture as a 1.1 MB JPG (still full resolution):

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA04995.jpg [nasa.gov]

Re:Low res?

[gorilla]

Scientific work is almost always in monochrome. If you have a colour CCD then you automatically have 1/3 the resolution, and you can only pickup those colours. Here they have the potential to use many different colour filters, including ones which include wavelengths our eyes aren't sensitive to.

As for space certified. I'm not aware of PCSAT having any CCDs on it. However, I'm also not sure that it was built using space certified components. It was meant as a student exercise, to give the students experience at building a satellite. If it lasted a week then failed, then that wouldn't be the end of the world. The mars landers have to last at least several months to get ANY results, and therefore have to be built to be more bulletproof.

cost.

[rebelcool]

Actually landing something with rockets requires a liquid fueled throttle controlled engine attached to the radar altimeter which is very complex and expensive to build. The vikings landed this way at ~$1 billion 1976 dollars. Their landings were *amazingly* accurate, designed to disturb the ground as little as possible. Viking 2 I believe landed with an estimated disturbance of less than 1 mm of dust blown off the ground.

How this mars lander worked was to deploy a parachute to slow it down and then fire some solid rocket motors (can't be shut down or throttled and are really cheap) to bring it to a dead stop around 20-40 ft in the air and then deploy airbags to cushion the last few feet fallen. The system, though complex as it is, is far cheaper and less complex than a liquid fueled rocket motor landing system.

The reason for stopping in mid-air is because of timing variations in calculations. Its difficult to tell exactly what conditions the lander will encounter from 300 million miles away and months before launch. So they fire the rockets early enough to bring it to a stop well before it would hit the ground.

Re:why was the rover dropped..and not landed?

[DumbSwede]

Controled landing takes rocket fuel and rockets which add weight and complexity and cost.

Mars has a very thin atmosphere so a parachute landing directly is going to be a hard landing, plus the danger of getting tangled in the chute after you land.

By slowing to a halt just feet about the surface with one burts, you get away from the parachute that could entangle you, but have nowhere near the complexity and weight of an expensive landing on rocket plume solution (Viking).

I have never seen this mentioned, but would guess also you avoid scouring, contaminating, or sterilizing your landing site with your rocket plume.

Re:And you can see... rocks.

[anagama]

From the JPL website:

• Rover Speed [nasa.gov]
  
  The rover has a top speed on flat hard ground of 5 centimeters (2 inches) per second. However, in order to ensure a safe drive, the rover is equipped with hazard avoidance software that causes the rover to stop and reassess its location every few seconds. So, over time, the vehicle achieves an average speed of 1 centimeter per second. The rover is programmed to drive for roughly 10 seconds, then stop to observe and understand the terrain it has driven into for 20 seconds, before moving safely onward for another 10 seconds.

Just click on the Technology [nasa.gov] button.

Re:I've heard this before (link)

[johnos]

I know dick about the Martian atmosphere, but I know about photography and photoshop. The "corrected" image on that page is wrong. It has an overall cyan cast. For most images there is a sweet spot where you get the most vibrancy. If there is a colour cast, it degrades that vibrancy and makes the picture look flatter. You can clearly see this effect in comparing the two images. Its possible that the person didn't do a proper job with photoshop and the image needs a differential correction rather than a uniform change, but that's not evident from the picture.

Re:Low res?

[jCaT]

Probably quite a few... what many people fail to realize is how massive the numbers are for a relatively simple impact. Check out this article about dropping laptops. They dropped laptops in various bags from a height of 40 inches onto concrete to see what kind of shock loading the laptop experienced. The worst out of the bunch clocked in at a little over 200 G's!

http://www.codidirect.com/reviews/mobileComputin g_ 02-01.asp

55 G's really isn't that bad, when you think about it... and as long as you're mindful of the forces involved, designing an object around this is not that tough. Hell, laptop hard drives are designed to survive over 100 G's (while they are off, though.)

Re:I've heard this before (link)

[Anonymous Coward]

If the atomsphere is red, then everything on the ground will have a red tint to it. If you go into a room, put a red filter on the light in there and then look at a US flag, you'll see the same color distortion.

It's entirely possible that Mars is a different color than what we see when these landers send back pictures, but what those landers see is what human eyes would see if they went to the planet as well. The only way to get the true color of the planet is to get rid of all the particles in the atomosphere or single out an area of ground and point a true-white light. Of course, you can do this in other ways scientifically, like analyzing the dust and surface rocks and determine which wavelengths are 'reflected', thus determining the color of the object. But it's doubtful conspiracy theorists would care if NASA did a spectrum analysis of the rocks and dust there...if they believe someone there is tweaking the color balance, then they'll believe someone altered any other data relating to the 'true' color of Mars.

Personally, I don't think a space agency would spend time and energy on perpetuating some lie about the color of something, especially when other space agencies are sending their own spacecraft over there to check things out and send back pictures, among other data, that would catch them in such a lie.

astronomical cameras...

[rebelcool]

work in monochrome. Actually all CCD's do. Your consumer camera has built in color filters attached physically to the CCD with a separate color per charge well. While this makes processing for you and the camera simple, it lowers the resolution and sensitivity than if you were using a single filter across the whole CCD and then later combine it into a mosaic.

The filter wheel also includes infrared and ultraviolet filters so that the camera can explore in those wavelengths as well. So it can still see more than what your consumer camera can.

And while its all fine and good the PCSAT has been lucky enough to work with off the shelf parts, if you're given a big budget and told to send something to mars (several months and a whole lot of radiation away..once you leave earth's somewhat protective magnetic field you're in a really dangerous environment) and you want to be really sure things work well, its best to get your equipment space certified and well proven, even if it sacrifices the cutting edge.

Re:Low res?

[ferreth]

I was reading on JPL's site last night (don't have link handy, sorry) that the vertical resolution was 4000 pixels. They didn't give a horzontal resolution. Given the picture is 3851 pixels high (cropped?), they might be right in some form.

Looking at the picture, I'm guessing a splice of four pictures, with a middle overlap - you can see two vertical splice zones, and two horizontal splice zones - the bottom horizontal splice zone is the hardest to see - look at the large rock just to the right of center on the image, but still to the left of the right vertical split. Perhaps this is how the camera works - take 4 pictures, beam back for post processing into a 4K X 4K pixel picture.

Re:I've heard this before (link)

[Anonymous Coward]

The untainted atmosphere at higher altitudes is what is seen as "blue" in the Hubble shots. Down on the surface, fine dust is constantly suspended in the air, creating the reddish Martian sky and red sunsets we see here on earth (coupled with a blue sky).

Re:What are they censoring?

[eln]

10 bits per second is what I recall seeing on the live update site that was up when the thing was landing.