Spirit Takes Snapshot of Earth 257
ControlFreal writes "On its 66th Sol on Mars, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has obtained its first full view of crater Bonneville. In doing so, Spirit achieved its primary travel destination, as set out in its initial itinerary. Furthermore, Spirit has now travelled more than 300 meters, thereby fulfilling its minimum mission success criteria. With this, and Opportunity halfway through its primary mission, and having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past, NASA has truly many an astonishing interplanetary succes story! See the overview at the Mars Rover site for more details." Another reader writes "Among the 'money-shots' from the Mars rovers would have to rank the 'pale blue dot' image released today--a view looking back towards Earth. The larger image also includes the horizon and Sun, which because the Earth is seen as an inner planet closer in towards the Sun from a martian perspective, is difficult to photograph without saturation by solar glare."
Congratulations! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good job all!
hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Important missions on Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the realisation that the missions were not going to be highly inspirational came when it occurred to me that the first rover landed on a plain and the chosen mission was to drive over to a crater and look in while the second rover landed in a crater and its chosen mission is to take a picture of the plain just over the rim.
Seems that getting there was the easy bit, achieving something meaningful has been a bit harder.
But the cultural impact... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt any image returned by space exploration in the next few thousand years will change our perspective on things as much as the Earthrise photographs from Apollo 8. Our first view of Earth from the Moon, and it showed so much. It was large and clear enough to connect with, it was plainly Earth with oceans and continents and clouds, and it was tiny - all of human history and culture, all our achievements, in that small spot. Now that's quite a culture shock.
But 'pale blue dot' images? It's just a dot. It might just as well be Venus for all the emotional impact I get from it. Maybe if we could see _two_ dots from Mars - Earth and Moon - then we'd get the same sense of smallness we got from the Apollo views, because that would establish identity at the gut level.
The Little Dot in The Sky (Score:4, Insightful)
But now we see another little dot hovering above a brightening horizon.
That's our planet.
Our home.
Seen from the surface of another world.
We are now just the little dot in the sky.
Re:But the cultural impact... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope I'm not the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.h (Score:5, Insightful)
Pale Blue Dot [planetary.org]
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Re:But the cultural impact... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, seriously, turn it your geek badge now. And take that patch off your jacket. If you can't see the significance and 'cultural impact' of taking a look at ourselves from another planet then I think you lean more to the side of our culture that watches Jerry Springer, certainly not the 'news for nerds' side.
Re:Waste of Time and Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting attitude.
I, for one, find the pictures fascinating and awe-inspiring on many levels.
At first it was just an appreciation for the mere fact that NASA was able to get the rovers onto the Martian surface. When I think of how f***ing far away Mars is, and how they were able to hit the target, I'm pretty much in awe. Yeah, the physics are well understood and software exists to determine everything about the mission (I can download such software for my home PC), but actually doing it is still pretty amazing.
Then there's the whole rover itself. It's a semi-autonomous machine, thousands of miles from home base, and it can send back some pretty detailed images of the surface, drill rocks, sample the environment. Hell, sometimes getting cams in the other room to work properly can be a task. That they could do this, troubleshoot and re-program the machine from that distance, and do it *twice* gives me a tremendous feeling of well-being.
Then there are the pictures themselves. We're peering at a f***ing other planet, man! Never before in human history have we seen the Martian surface with this much detail and this much information. I know it doesn't mean much to many people, but this is the spirit of exploration, the pure f***ing joy of discovery that pushed our forefathers to new worlds, new medicines, new art. Pushing the bounds, ripping apart the g*ddamned envelope, reaching beyond our grasp, is what makes us human and differentiates us from some cockroach or mindless automaton.
Mod me as a dork, but I am happy to be alive at this time.
Re:Very humbling indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But the cultural impact... (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow, that aspect of the images is what hit me emotionally. This is the first time I've actually realized what has been accomplished here: there is something (a robot, in this case) on that pale red dot I kept staring up at last autumn that is looking back at us and seeing us as a pale blue dot.
Images from the Moon are pretty, I'll grant you that. But it's still our moon; to me, it doesn't feel like anything more than hop, skip, and a jump away. This is another planet. This is an entirely different world, with its own orbit and autonomy.
We think so grandly of our history and our oceans and our continents and our clouds. But from our nearest neighboring planet, we're just another dot in the sky. So no, there's probably not much cultural impact here, since our culture is centered completely on our planet. This is a different world, and the emotional impact of seeing us from that world, at least to me, is plentiful.
Re:Important missions on Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Like having Janet Jackson show a breast or what? The definition of "meaningful" that general public (and mass media) uses differs a lot from what intelligent people consider meaningful. Most people are idiots and sheeps, that's a fact of life. They want big explosions, deaths and sex. If NASA manages to crash their next spaceship into Paris, destroying the Eiffel Tower, I guarantee it will be a hot topic longer than anything related to the twin rovers. If a senior NASA officer (female) poses for Hustler, this will drive more traffic to nasa.gov than any photo they can shoot on Mars. That's a sad reality, but to stand on the position of the public and claim that rover missions were not really meaningful is totally wrong.
Blame it on light pollution (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a bit of experience to be able see what is dramatic. People are usually underwhelmed by what they see in a small telescope, they much less likely to be able to take in the magnificence of an unmagified image of the sky. I look at Alberio [astronomyphotos.com] through my little 90mm refractor, and it's absolutely stunning to me. However for most people it's a yawn. The only sky object that uniformly gets a "wow" is the Moon.
If you're accustomed to looking at the sky quite a bit, you'll find that planets are dramatically different from stars: they look like little holes punched out of the sky. Once you've learned to really see planets, the idea of seeing Earth the same way will have more resonance for you.
Mars also has kind of a creamy color when viewed from Earth; it's a bit too faint to look as dramaticall red as it is close up. Earth is a larger planet and might be a bit brighter. I wonder if the picture were in color, whether Earth might be a pale blue. A tiny sapphire glowing in a reddish dawn might be a bit more dramatic. However, the delights of naked eye and low magnification sky viewing are subtle, sometimes in hints of color, or tiny but striking arrangements. It takes a certain number of hours to be able to even perceive them.
And in the meantime, on CNN... (Score:5, Insightful)
How strange a thing is humanity, which is capable of such horrors and yet can move rovers on an other planet and look up in awe at the pale blue dot that is Earth.