78000 Pics From Mars Mission

DerOle writes "Here http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ are about 78.000 pics from Mars, shoot by the Mars Global Surveyor. There are even more pics to come, about 163 gigs of uncompressed data. From the page : MOC is operated daily at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS). MOC consists of three cameras: A narrow angle system that provides grayscale high resolution views of the planet's surface (typically, 1.5 to 12 meters/pixel), and red and blue wide angle cameras that provide daily global weather monitoring, context images to determine where the narrow angle views were actually acquired, and regional coverage to monitor variable surface features such as polar frost and wind streaks. Most of the high resolution images are obtained by careful planning and inspection of predicted MGS orbits by Mars scientists working at and/or visiting MSSS. The company is also responsible for archiving the data once they are received on Earth."

Really!?

[n-baxley]

Add that to the 78000 that were available earlier [slashdot.org] and that makes 156,000. You've really got to hand it to those NASA guys. They take a lot of pictures.

78.000 pictures

[JCMay]

I suppose I'll do the obligatory Ugly American post:

I'm surprised in their precision in the number of photographs they took. 78.000 photographs. I didn't think you could take non-integer numbers of photographs. Of course, if an image file was corrupted exactly halfway through, I suppose they would only have ad 77.500 pictures.

People: just write the number out: seventy-eight thousand. That way there's absolutely no confusion about what is meant! 78.000 (seventy-eight and no thousandths or seventy-eight thousand?) != 78,000 (seventy-eight thousand or seventy-eight and no thousandths?) no matter where you go, but in different regions those two collections of symbols will mean different things. Let's rid ourselves of numeric colloquialisms!

Re:78.000 pictures

[caffeinated_bunsen]

78e+3

'nuff said.

Re:78.000 pictures

[Debillitatus]

78e+3

Unfortunately, using standard scientific notation, this would be 7.8e+4, and then you'd be in the same problem! Heh

Re:78.000 pictures

[QuantumFTL]

Last I heard Slashdot was an *AMERICAN* web site, owned by VA LINUX, which is an *AMERICAN* company. I mean, if you think it's too American, there's plenty of other places online for news and discussion.

I do not think that the american way of doing things (writing numbers, spelling "color" or making sandwhiches) is necessarily better than the way any other country does things, but complaining about the US-Centricity of a web site based in US is like complaining that a japanese web site is in japanese! Please!

Re:78.000 pictures

[QuantumFTL]

The guy that wrote "78.000" appears to have been GERMAN (looking up the domain his web site is). I don't know *ANYONE* here in the US that uses the decimal point like that. Honestly, I think that commas in numbers are okay (Makes their order of magnitude so much easier to figure out at a glance). I don't see why there's anything wrong with using commas in such things. I had heard from someone that those were being phased out in the scientific community, however I honestly do not see the problem they present. Commas are different than decimal points.

Also, the AMERICAN way of doing things is not always backwards. Our unit system is from ENGLAND (my gosh, we didn't make most of it up) and yes, I hate it and wish we'd somehow gone to metric, but that does not mean to say that the way we write numbers "37,395,396" is bad. Also, I don't think that if I wrote 75,000 as "7.5e4" that that would necessarily be a good thing. Big numbers, small numbers, but totally medium size numbers, it's like overkill and complicates it (yeah, you save a digit, but at what price?

I have to disagree with you that the way americans do things is always backwards. Look at how much of the world's scientific and technological advancements come from the US. Everything from personal computers to software (GUI, hyperlinks, exokernel, C/C++/Java, etc... all invented here) and most importantly the internet (ARPANet). Also think OSes (Windows, UNIX, BSD, MacOS). I don't think we're entirely backwards.

Granted units of "feet" and "inches" and "miles" don't make a lot of sense, but neither does "seconds" or "hours" and people still use that!

Precision

[[e-mail]]

78.000 pics from Mars

I'm glad that they make sure that they have exactly 78 pictures, and that they measure it out to three places past the decimal.

Re:Precision

[Tumbleweed]

Well, you know, after that whole standard-metric conversion fiasco, they're pretty paranoid about measurements at NASA.

DerOle might be german.

[rebelcool]

In germany (and probably other european nations), a period is used instead of a comma, and a comma is used for decimal notation.

Wow, I'm impressed.

[Culturejammer]

You mean NASA got something to Mars without crashing it? I'm beside my self.

Wow thats nearly as big as my....

[Baud_bum]

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