First Pictures From Mars Phoenix Lander

Now that the solar panels have been deployed, the Mars Phoenix Lander has begun sending back pictures of the red planet to the hungry space geeks of earth. In just a few weeks the claw will deploy and they'll start digging a hole. The scientists expect to use the dirt to construct a little sand castle which they will defend with several GI Joe action figures, and a bald barbie stolen from their sisters. Oh, and maybe find water or bacteria.

Colour?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are the photos black & white?

Awesome

[stoolpigeon]

Those are some amazing shots. I was just looking at them with my 5 year old son. Hopefully by the time he is my age, pictures from Mars will have people in them.

Re:Wow

[apathy maybe]

I saw the pictures of a barren landscape and my jaw fell in total awe...

I was never so excited about pictures of dirt.

It isn't dirt.

Rocks yes, but not dirt.

And I can't just remember what the other stuff is called, but it ain't dirt.

Re:Colour?

[theurge14]

It might be more publically useful to maybe, perhaps, on one of these multi-million dollar missions to see fit to at least put one "real" camera on board one of these landers to placate the taxpaying plebians such as myself. If NASA needs it, I might have a spare Canon digital camera and some duct tape.

The Titan lander was a huge disappointment in this regard.

Dear NASA: Hire an editor, please!

[myvirtualid]

There is a repeated error on http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/images.php [nasa.gov]: The caption used for many images should read Team Members Celebrate and not Team Members' Celebrate

(Unless they really meant to write Team Members' Celebration?)

Let's just hope there are no misplaced apostrophes in any of the wee beastie's code. Especially in the firmware update upload controller. That would be delightfully ironic....

Re:Why Mars all the time?

[cowscows]

While Europa is certainly well worth studying, I think mars makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons. First, there's still plenty to learn about it. Second, when you're talking about planetary distances, mars is pretty close, so you get feedback on your missions much quicker. Not only scientific data, but also about how your spacecraft did/didn't perform, which should help improve the designs of future spacecraft. And third, there's a decent amount of satellites already orbiting mars, and the newer landers and such can utilize those satellites to facilitate their mission.

Basically, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck with mars. Europa would be great, no doubt, but it's likely that for the same cost, they'd only be able to send a smaller probe with less instruments on it, and would get significantly less data out of it. But hopefully we'll get there one day.

Color Camera == 3 B&W Cameras

[foniksonik]

Just so peoples know... a color camera is not as good as a set of Black and White Cameras which only capture light from specific light spectrums... ie: think of it as 1 Red camera, 1 Blue, 2 Green and probably 1 pure Black/White camera, where camera == CCD.

Look up CCD [wikipedia.org] for more details on what it is/does and why using 3 separate CCDs for imaging will get you the highest quality image.

Re:Take life to Mars

[DougF]

Because that could irrevocably contaminate Mars before there was any proof of life that may have arisen independently. Besides, we already know what the surface conditions are like from the various probes, landers, and rovers sent there. We can duplicate Mars' surface conditions in labs here on Earth and get a good idea of what would happen to various kinds Earth-based living things.

Re:Awesome

[Teancum]

In all fairness to your father, there was reasonable expectation in the early 1970's that manned missions to Mars would be not only happening but routine by the 1990's. Apollo not only showed it was possible, but even well within our technological realms to accomplish that task.

What happened was a group of politicians who looked at the huge cash cow that was NASA in the 1960's and deliberately sabotaged the agency to fund their own pork barrel projects of various kinds.

Unknown to ordinary taxpayers at the time, when Neil Armstrong was stepping on the Moon, NASA as it had been known previously was being dismantled... and that dismantling of NASA along with the layoffs from NASA research centers that basically threw away all of the talent that was accumulated at significant expense.

This resulted in a glut of electrical engineers at the beginning of the 1970's, which IMHO is one of the things that fueled the "digital revolution" by having teams of engineers who had experience with complex systems from Apollo and the earlier NASA projects that were re-directed into building personal computers and working with modern semi-conductors. It also forced engineers like Steve Wozniak to become entrepreneurial when older engineers were taking positions in private industry for far less than what would be considered typical wages due to this glut.

You can only guess at what NASA might have accomplished had they been able to maintain their 1966 funding levels in proportion to the overall federal budget to today. I think it could have been done if there had been leadership at the top of the U.S. government willing to spearhead the issue, but those who might have pushed for this sort of future were either killed (JFK and RFK) or involved in other politics such as the Vietnam War (LBJ) that proved to be unpopular and a turn-off to other voters. Ted Kennedy was never really able to pick up the mantle from his older brothers other than to make a significant career in the U.S. Senate.

When I'm talking to older people (older than myself... I'm more of a GenXer myself) who lived through the Apollo era, they are quite surprised that so little of the Federal budget is spent on NASA. They thought that the 1960's style of spending continued throughout the rest of the 20th Century and beyond, and that NASA has been accomplishing less due to sheer mis-management.

There is also an assumption that space travel is a difficult task, and along that line of thought that perhaps travel to Mars is simply impossible because with all of the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on NASA each year (yes, I know this is incorrect, but bear with me here) that NASA can't figure out how to build anything that can get past the moon unless it is robotic. With the "smartest guys on the planet" trying to figure this out, it must therefore be impossible.

I would argue that they are somewhat correct in that assessment, but in all fairness to what is NASA today has to do with incredibly unpredictable budgets from year to year and earmarks that had to be spent in certain ways that weren't exactly the most efficient method of spending that money in terms of an overall vision of space exploration.

We'll get to Mars eventually, but I'm not sure if it will be in the lifetime of my kids or my grandkids.