The View from the Top of Husband Hill 184
chriscrick writes "After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. According to lead scientist Steve Squyres, 'What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go.'"
Everything you ever wanted to know about Spirit... (Score:5, Informative)
Full 360 picture (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beautiful Imagery (Score:5, Informative)
Or is that not what you meant.
Re:Full 360 picture (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see a colour 360.
The Official High-Res + Wide Angle Image (Score:5, Informative)
From the catalog [nasa.gov] page
This approximate true-color panorama was taken by NASA's Spirit rover after it successfully trekked to the top of "Husband Hill," in the "Columbia Hills" of Gusev Crater. The "little rover that could" spent the last 14 months climbing the hills in both the forward and reverse directions to reduce wear on its wheels.
This breathtaking view from the summit reveals previously hidden southern terrain called "Inner Basin"(center), where team members hope to direct Spirit in the future. The rover left tracks to the left point toward the west, the direction Spirit arrived from. The peaks of "McCool Hill" and "Ramon Hill," both in the "Columbia Hills," can be seen just to the left and behind Inner Basin.
The mosaic is made up of images taken by the rover's panoramic camera over a period of three days (sols 583 to 585, or August 24 to 26, 2005). It spans about 240 degrees in azimuth, and was acquired using 51 different camera pointings and three camera filters (750, 530 and 480 nanometers). Image-to-image seams have been eliminated from the sky portion of the mosaic to better simulate what a person standing on Mars would see.
Re:Beautiful Imagery (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Full 360 picture (Score:5, Informative)
Roving Mars by Steve Squyres (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Beautiful Imagery (Score:5, Informative)
The Pancam, the highest resolution cameras, have 1024x2048 pixel CCDs.
Re:Why must it look so normal? (Score:5, Informative)
Both Mars rovers have cameras which are sensitive from the near-IR to the UV. The greyscale images are taken by putting a bandpass filter over the lens, and usually they'll take the same shot with 3-7 different filters.
Three of the filters correspond to roughly the same frequencies that the receptors in your eyes are sensitive to. So they can approximate what it would look like in person by assigning the three images taken using those filters to the R, G, and B channels in a digital image.
There is a bit more processing involved. Human eyes are more sensitive to green than red or blue, so the additional processing is probably to take that into account.
But anyway, the short answer is that generally the Mars images are as "true" in terms of colour as what you'd get with a colour digital camera here, setting aside that the three channels are taken at slightly different times.
There are a few exceptions, in that I believe sometimes they may substitute the nearest infrared band for red. If you have to pick one or the other, near IR is useful because it scatters less in an atmosphere.
Other NASA images (like from the Hubble) are made the same way, they just assign completely different spectra to the three channels (assuming they're using an RGB model, which isn't a given). For example, maybe they'll assign radio waves to the red channel, IR to green, and X-rays to blue. Again, they're not *inventing* colours, even though it's not what you'd see with your own eyes. It's like pitch-shifting bat squeeks down into the audible range so humans can hear them.
You ain't seen nothing yet (Score:5, Informative)
http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
This cross-platform donationware gem fully automatically downloads the raw imagery, auto-stitches, false-colorizes,makes slideshows... And best of all: creates "virtual-reality" pannable and zoomable panorama's...
Everyone into these rovers should really check it out.