Mars Global Surveyor Image Gallery

eroberts00 writes: "There is now a Web gallery that has 25,000 images from the Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera. Some of the images are available by date taken and some available via image maps that let you view by location. " One word: wallpaper.

I like this...

[CormacJ]

The more stuff like this goes up the more people will get interested in space. The more this happens the more politicians are willing to fund projects like this.

More Images of Mars

[pigpogm]

More images of Mars available here [totl.net].

If only we could get interest levels high enough..

[yardgnome]

A professor I know is absolutely sure that one day we'll have people on the moon and Mars. The only thing in the way, though, is relatively low public interest and only moderate space technology.

His solution? Competition.
He cites the incredible progress made to get an American on the moon when Russia sent a man in space. In his opinion, what America really needs to get a man on Mars, is a good international incident. And once hostilities have built up to incredible levels, just have one party try to put a man on Mars.

After that, it's just a matter of a few years until one of the countries manages to do it.

Re:Mars Face

[orangepeel]

I believe it was CNN that had an article about the "Mars Face" last year that included several new pictures of the feature. The story said that the Mars Global Surveyor was intentionally nudged out of its flight path just so that it could take pictures of the "face" and put an end to some of the speculation about it. That said, I can't find the article (I think CNN must kill some of its online articles - this isn't the first time I haven't been able to find one in their archives). You're right though - the "face" proved to be a trick of the light (and perhaps the relatively low resolution of the original image, or the image processing used on it). The various new images taken by the Global Surveyor were taken at different times of the Mars day, at different angles, and with a much higher resolution camera than the old original image. In some of the shots you could sort of see why the landform feature might have turned out looking like a face before. But none of the new images showed a face-like feature at all really.

You might have some luck with this article [cnn.com] though. It allows you to look at some of the newer Global Surveyor images of the Cydonia region (where the so-called Face is).