The View from the Top of Husband Hill

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.'"

Beautiful Imagery

[Nerd Systems]

The imagery that is coming back from the Mar's missions has been truly amazing. Very detailed pictures documenting this foreign landscape. I noticed this took 14 months to climb to the top of this summit. What is the average speed these martian rovers are crawling at?

Re:Beautiful Imagery

[Nerd Systems]

Yeah, better to go slow, and assess the stability of where they are located, then go fast and face the possibility of tipping the rover over. "I've fallen and can't get up" takes on a whole new meaning from Mars. Very vivid pictures nonetheless, I wonder what megapixel rating the digital cameras inside these rovers are rated at. I assume very high, considering the extreme cost of each rover.

Re:Beautiful Imagery

[Stephen Samuel]

That's about as much energy as they can get in a day's sunlight, so there's no reason to make the engines really fast. The rest of the energy is used for things like running the instruments, transmitter, block heater, etc. Efficiency (in terms of both weight and energy use) and durability are far more important than having a hot-rod on mars.

BTW: Units gives me about 0.000224MPH. I'm using a start time of Jan 3/2004 (Yeah, and that's average time (including coffee breaks) not top speed.

Re:Beautiful Imagery

[srw]

They are 1MP. A good lens is more important than the number of pixels. This article [space.com] discusses the issue.

BTW, the CCDs are Canadian. :-)

Re:Why must it look so normal?

[BewireNomali]

That's amazing. That same photograph just took my breath away.

It's wishful thinking, perhaps. but looking at the photograph and I imagine a place that once housed life. It might be the birthplace of life in our system and the seed planet for life on earth.

A dead planet once alive. Conservation of information.... the entire evolutionary record of that planet is in those rocks, that dirt. It's suffocatingly exciting.

And at once harrowing. It has no magnetic field to speak of. It must have had some form of one due to the clear volcanic/geological activity. What happened to it? When will the same thing happen here? If there was life there, did they just run out of time?

There are finite strictures on the amount of time ones birth planet remains hospitable to you. And if you don't figure out how to get off, how to survive in space and thrive, maybe you're doomed to die with your planet.

Some theories abound about why we haven't seen sign of intelligent life. my favorite espouses the notion that civilizations get wiped out by their own technology. What if the stricture is planetary? What if we don't see any intelligent signs because no species could survive the life cycle of their own planets?

It puts any interest in a next-gen ipod or the new google beta in perspective.

It's a great photograph. It fills me with that little kid feeling.... the one whe you look up a the sky and it feels like there's something there looking down at you, waiting for you to discover it.

Re:Full 360 picture

[ColaMan]

Be aware that some mars photos of those devils might be one and the same. It might be just one that keeps popping up in frame as it's moving quicker than the camera taking the set of photos. For example, it looks like the shadow of the big devil on the left hand side is repeated a little bit in the next image - I guess you could get an idea of how fast they are moving from that.

Re:The Official High-Res + Wide Angle Image

[deglr6328]

Waaaauu! :D Look at those solar panels! Almost no dust at all! What wasn't mentioned in the article is that Spirit's power output is now back up to ~930 Watt hours/day, the same as it was on landing day. The rover is now being shut down every day in the afternoon, no so it doesn't run out of power and die, as was the case around a year ago, but to prevent the electronics box from OVERHEATING!! Wildly successful doesn't even begin to describe the rover missions at this point :)

Re:The Official High-Res + Wide Angle Image

[BewireNomali]

we should mass produce the rovers using the same specs and retrofit with geographically specific tools. We can send up more at a time and have standing teams exploring in real time, as we're doing now, amassing data.

Re:People AND Rovers - no geologist required

[BewireNomali]

See, I think you stumbled on the holy grail of space travel to other planets. We as a species have to accept that the human sent up to ther planets are on a one way trip. Part of the problem is this idea that the humans are coming back. We need to determine how we can keep humans alive for a while (this would include regular food and supplies modules in a continuous string, or maybe peppering the landing site with a ten year supply of essentials, etc). But the problem with sending humans is that society isn't prepared to deal with the idea that we're sending them to a probably early death. When someone drops the fig leaf and is like, "dude, explorers fucking die. It's blood and glory, not an afternoon watching Lifetime," true exploring can get about its business. But I agree with you about sending humans. It'll be a while before our civilization matures enough to allow it. by then, Mars will be owned by the Chinese, and the Russians will be launching DOS attacks from the moon.

I wish NASA would show us the true color of Mars

[Teilo]

And if they did, this is more likely what you would have seen:

http://thinkingspace.org/HillPanoramaRestored.jpg [thinkingspace.org]

Take it for what it's worth, but NASA has repeatedly admitted that they arbitrarily shift the color of the Mars shots to make them look more red. Why? Who knows. Trying not to confuse the public, I suppose, who expects the Red Planet to be not just red, but really really red.