Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations 157
Nancy Atkinson writes "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover 'awake' at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. 'Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers,' said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. 'We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.'"
Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, it does to me too, but that doesn't make it one. Take the famous Mars face [wikipedia.org] photos. It looks like a face, under the right conditions of lighting and shading, but is otherwise an unremarkable piece of Martian real estate.
Re:Nautical tradition (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just nautical tradition. In English, anything of "common" gender (i.e. persons unknown or groups of mixed gender) get masculine pronouns, while anything ordinarily neuter but "personified" gets feminine pronouns. There were some archaic examples of personification from neuter to the masculine gender, of which see Fowler's for details, but these mainly follow Latin gender categories; modern usage of the gender of personification favors the feminine, as far as I know, exclusively.
Re:Sell the images to raise funding money. (Score:4, Informative)
Between the Martian pics, Hubble, and APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day), we have enough pictures to last a lifetime...or at least until Microsoft starts charges us to change wallpaper. Hohoho.
Re:Phobos & Deimos (Score:5, Informative)
Here a series of pictures [wikipedia.org] taken by Spirit in 2005.
Re:picture of Earth (Score:2, Informative)
Not from the Rover, but here's a pic from the old MGS craft:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_from_mars_030522.html [space.com]
Even more impressive (to me, at least) is this snap from Voyager:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/top10_images_010925-11.html [space.com]
Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d (Score:3, Informative)
If you're wondering why they don't make "true color" images, it's because "true" colors aren't scientifically useful. They choose the color filters very carefully to give them the most useful images for seeing certain things, not so that you can get "true color" pictures.
But then I read the second part of your comment and realized nothing I say will be understood.
Re:picture of Earth (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wind Event? (Score:3, Informative)
You grew up somewhere nice didn't you? We call them Dust Devils here on earth too. And on the large flat deserts where I group up they are about as uncommon as clouds in Seattle.
However, this does not detract from the point that night time observations would be cool. Seeing 3 or 4 dust devils 5-10 feet tall, all swirling Taz-like across the Martian landscape would be something to behold.
Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d (Score:3, Informative)
I forgot to mention that there is a book called "Postcards from Mars" that has some wonderful color images (true, approximate, and false color) from the rovers. It is a bit dated in that it doesn't include some of the newer places visited, but still a very nice coffee-table book.
http://www.amazon.com/Postcards-Mars-First-Photographer-Planet/dp/0525949852/ [amazon.com]
Sadly, the cameras are so dusty now that they cannot take very good panoramas anymore. However, I was wondering if they couldn't clean up the images because the dust fuzz should mostly be the same for any given sun angle. In other words, subtract out the known noise pattern. It would probably have to be done by an amateur because NASA doesn't have a lot of spare funds for that kind of activity. Panoramas involve dozens if not hundreds of smaller images. An amateur cleaned up some of the earlier Soviet Venus lander images, and did a bang-up job. He even made some discoveries of unknown detail partially hidden by haze.
Re:Wind Event? (Score:2, Informative)
I can assure you that Dust Devils are quite common on this mudball we call home:
http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q=dustdevil&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&aq=f&oq= [google.ca]
A couple of the more awe-inspiring shots:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/images/lmk/photo_album/wxdata/dustdevil_LEX1.jpg [noaa.gov]
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/images/lmk/Drought/sep07/glendale_med.jpg [noaa.gov]