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Space Science

Control the Camera on Mars Global Surveyor 178

Posted by CowboyNeal from the begin-pan-left dept.
Angry Toad writes "According to Spaceflight Now, NASA is getting ready to take suggestions for what parts of the surface of Mars the Mars Global Surveyor should take pictures of next. Currently there are high-resolution images for around 3% of the surface of Mars, and they are willing to consider any reasonable suggestions for new imaging locations. Of course this is a publicity stunt, but all the same it would be rather cool to have a bit of 'virtual control' of the MGS camera."
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Control the Camera on Mars Global Surveyor More

Control the Camera on Mars Global Surveyor

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  • New locations? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm pretty sure that NASA knows of any interesting things on mars and will image them. The mail reading staff at NASA will probably interpret them, and submit to someone else what the people are responding the most with. This most definately would not make any decision - time on that thing is way too valuable.

    • Re:New locations? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by digital bath ( 650895 )
      Well, the surveryor has been out there for about 6 years. I bet they've started to run out of locations that they planned on imaging - maybe our guess for interesting places to take pictures of is just as good as theirs now.

  • Impractical? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by baseinfinity ( 18023 ) *
    "At this time, the Target Request site only works with Internet Explorer (IE). It was developed and tested with IE 6 / Windows 98 SE and IE 5.2.3 / Mac OS X (10.2.6). It is impractical for us to make it work with every browser on every platform, due to the incompatibility of various browsers."

    - Burn them! [w3.org]

    • If you design with straight CSS2 / XHTML Transitional for everything, and use all server-side components for handling anything that would require more (posting data, working with a database, etc.), then what's the big deal?

      Of course, if you do that, then IE is the only one you have to actually worry about [tantek.com].

    • How sad. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by WindBourne ( 631190 )
      I actually worked on the software that controls the cameras. We used Linux as development workstations talking to a nice Solaris box. The final stuff ran on the Solaris box. It is hard to believe that somebody actually was this short sighted to require MSIE, when we were doing it on *nix. The funny thing was that it was an after thought AFTER mgs was on its way.
      Things have truely changed in the last couple of years. I wonder what else got pushed through at the government level.

  • How about... (Score:5, Funny)

    by justrob ( 445616 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:20PM (#6761761)

    the other 97%

  • Focus on impact craters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:20PM (#6761763) Journal
    There's still that theory that life originally evolved on Mars and found it's way to Earth via the ejecta formed from a meteor impact, right?

    So focusing on the impact craters may be a way for us to see where it all really began.

  • Liitle green snowmen (Score:4, Funny)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:21PM (#6761767)
    I suggest they take pictures of the polar cap. If there are any little green men on Mars, I'm sure they've built some awesome snowmen and ice castles! :)

    • Re:Liitle green snowmen (really!) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:22PM (#6762066)
      Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.

      This [asu.edu] image and this [asu.edu] corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS [asu.edu] images from the mars odyssey probe here [asu.edu]) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here [usra.edu] to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers [puddingbowl.org] or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.
    • There might be little green penguins too!

  • I know! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Renraku ( 518261 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:22PM (#6761773) Homepage
    How about we get to Phobos and Deimos instead?

    Maybe if they zoom the camera all the way in they'll be able to see a cyber demon lord or at least one of those buildings we got to walk through on doom.

  • Aftermath (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:24PM (#6761785)
    I'd like to see a report of the number of times each feature was asked for after they're done. I'm guessing 95% "monkey face", unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".

    I've been looking at Mars each night through a small telescope (but with reasonable detail at 140x, probably as much as the atmosphere here supports). It's all pretty interesting and it's very cool to look directly at surface features on another planet, but they're HUGE features like Syrtis Major or the entire southern pole cap. It's difficult to see how the vast majority of people will be able to come up with something they actually want to see imaged.

    So I guess I'm voting "Monkey face".

    • The Face and Pathfinder sites re-photographed (Score:5, Informative)

      by tunabomber ( 259585 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:49PM (#6761905) Homepage
      I'd like to see a report of the number of times each feature was asked for after they're done. I'm guessing 95% "monkey face", unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".

      Been there [msss.com], done that. [msss.com]

      Here's some shots of the Viking Lander site [msss.com] as well.

    • Re:Aftermath (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dslbrian ( 318993 )

      unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".

      An interesting idea, would pathfinder/sojourner be big enough to see? Actually has one probe ever photographed another on the surface of another planet before? Makes me wonder if they could find the Viking probes, or mabye they are buried under the sand by now..

    • Re:Aftermath (Score:3, Funny)

      by shird ( 566377 )
      Given that we were intrigued by what looked like a face on the surface of mars, maybe we should create some face-like formation on earth. This way, passer-by aliens may see the creation and send a probe of their own... heh. just a thought.
      • a) We already have Mt. Rushmore.
        b) I think there are probably a few clues on Earth that we're an intelligent species without having to make a huge statue of a "face"
      • "Given that we were intrigued by what looked like a face on the surface of mars, maybe we should create some face-like formation on earth. This way, passer-by aliens may see the creation and send a probe of their own"

        Bigger than these? [circlemakers.org]

    • Re:Aftermath (Score:5, Funny)

      by ralphclark ( 11346 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @05:23AM (#6763385) Journal
      unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".


      If we could get sufficiently high res pix to see the pathfinder rover itself we'd probably see that it's up on bricks with the tyres missing and the radio's been stolen.

  • How about something unique and fresh, something that will imprint into people's minds, so they can recall that it is mars just by looking at the features.

  • Publicity Stunt (Score:5, Funny)

    by simon_aus ( 649753 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:25PM (#6761793)
    If mars had nude-beaches then this would be really popular and be in the real spirit of the internet.
    • Not if they were anything like the ones here! Old, fat martians with their butts hanging out of the bathing suits they really shouldn't be allowed to wear wouldn't go over well with the public.
  • Just release the pictures of a parallel evolution on mars that you already have. Shut the creationists up once and for all!

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:27PM (#6761804)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kazrak ( 31860 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:31PM (#6761822)
      They did it already. Here [msss.com] you can see Earth, the Moon, and Jupiter, as seen from Mars orbit.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:earth? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by panaceaa ( 205396 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:04PM (#6761974) Homepage Journal
        "As seen from the Mars orbit", eh?

        Because Jupiter is over 5 times farther from the Sun than Earth, two different exposures were needed to image the two planets. Mosaiced together, the images are shown above (top picture). The composite has been highly contrast-enhanced and "colorized" to show both planets and their satellites. The MGS MOC high resolution camera only takes grayscale (black-and-white) images; the color was derived from Mariner 10 and Cassini pictures of Earth/Moon and Jupiter, respectively, as described in the note below.

        So what about that picture is accurate?! They changed the brightness, contrast, and colors for each planet and moon independently. And when they were done, "the color image was edited to return the background to black." So the process of colorizing was so lossy and brought out so much noise that they then had to redraw the edges of each planet and moon when they masked out "space."

        • Re:earth? (Score:5, Informative)

          by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:48PM (#6762157)
          They changed the brightness, contrast, and colors for each planet and moon independently.

          What they actually did (if you manage to decipher they're somewhat unclear description of the colorization process), is to use the high-resolution grayscale images as indexes to match with lower resolution color photos they already had.

          Basically, they reduced the 24-bit color down to 8-bit grayscale and sorted in order of intensity. They also sorted the grayscale images in order of intensity. Then they mapped the colors from one, in a 1-to-1 fashion, onto the other. Pretty straightforward really.

          So the process of colorizing was so lossy and brought out so much noise ...

          The process wasn't lossy or noisy, because pixels of identical color in the result image are also of identical color in the original. The colors themselves have changed, but the distinct identity of each color remains intact. Black just happened to map to a nonblack color, so they changed it back to black. This is no different than any other "false" colorization process used in any other area of science. In fact, it's really quite aesthetic since most false color images have highly saturated colors (bright red, blue, green, etc), not the less saturated, natural looking colors these images have.

          • I read the finer print too, but I don't understand why you would map black to a non-black color. But if you look closely at the pictures of Earth and Jupiter, you'll see there's quite a bit of noise on them. I suspect that same noise over the space portion of the picture would have gotten a bit of color on it. If I were them, I would have desaturated it rather than filled it with black. However, because Jupiter and Earth were done with two different pictures ("exposures"), they had to black it out since
      • Look! There's no stars! We don't really have anything on Mars, it's a stunt!

        (For those of you unaware, this is poking fun at the critisim of this [primeline-america.com] image and the whole "moon hoax")
      • An amazing picture. A 1444 x 4266 almost completely black JPEG image takes up more than 400Kb. Did they try lossless JPEG of some sorts? Even when I use 100% quality, the size is only 40Kb. May be that's the reason why we don't have DVD video from Mars yet. Talk about waste of bandwidth...
        • I may be wrong, but here's what I think...

          You can make a 1444x4266 jpeg in photoshop with a single "painted black" background. There - 40k. However, this is probably not simply "Black" but rather a photograph of space, meaning every other pixel might be another shade/darkness of black, resulting in 1444x4266= 6160104 potentially different pixels.
          • Well, there actually are some non-black pixels (1,1,1) and (2,2,2) in this image, but there are too few of them and they are obviously some sort of error (i.e. not faint astronomical objects).

            Anyway, I just checked that you can save this image in true-colour PNG (lossless format) and it would still be only 44Kb. This PNG may be not as good as their original image (beamed from space), but it sure is as good as the JPEG on their website.

            So, in summary, they might be decent astronomers, but they sure as hell

  • Landing places? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digital bath ( 650895 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:28PM (#6761808) Homepage
    How about some more images of places that appear to be very flat? These places could serve as great landing places for probes or even humans later. As this is the closest that Mars will be to Earth in something like the next 200 years, I'm kind of dissapointed that we aren't taking more advantage of this unique opportunity by sending people.

  • This is probably a little ethnocentric but (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:28PM (#6761809)
    why not take a shot of the Mars Pathfinder landing site? IIRC, Mars Global Surveyor can take shots with a resolution up to 1.5m/pixel, so it'd be interesting to get a direct overhead visual feedback of how the Pathfinder probe landed, to see if the cushioning balloons have deployed evenly for example, or see if there's anything that could have been missed from ground shots taken by the rover itself. It might help improve future automatic ground probes missions ...

  • Definately the pyramids (Score:5, Interesting)

    by McAddress ( 673660 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:28PM (#6761810)
    I would like to see some more research done on the Pyramids of Elysium [mars-news.de] that Carl Sagan wrote about.
  • possible sites for russian nuclear power plants or the movie set for Total Recall ;)
  • besides a "publicity stun" as suggested, why doesn't NASA just progressively and systematically take images of the whole Mars surface?

    i'm not sure if it's a job too big/long to complete (seeing only 3% is done), but won't it be useful if we have a 3D geo-map of Mars so the next landing can be more successful?
    • Taken from the story:

      The spacecraft, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., has been orbiting Mars since 1997, with more than 20,000 orbits so far. The Mars Orbiter Camera has already taken more than 120,000 pictures of Mars.

      That's about 20,000 images/year, or ~55 pictures per day. At that rate, they'd need quite a few more years to map much more of the surface of mars. Perhaps they could take many pictures of different areas, and once they find an area that seems suitabl
  • There are theroys about how mars once had river beds [solarviews.com] and Volcanos [nodak.edu] i would love to see a closer look of these
  • I just noticed that in the pictures of Mars taken while the Surveyor approaches Mars, there are no stars. Does NASA actually photoshop the images to take out the stars, or is it glare or something from the planet itself that prevents us from seeing the stars? I know they touch up images of nebulae and galaxies to create more aesthetic (and budget-enlarging) pictures, but I would think that images with stars would evoke more of a sense of awe in people.

    • Re:A little offtopic, but (Score:4, Informative)

      by Siergen ( 607001 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @10:43PM (#6761877)
      As I understand it, the exposure times needed to see features on the sunlit side of a celestrial body are too short to see stars. It's like trying to see the stars at night right after you leave a brightly lit house - your eyes are still adjusted to full light, and you just can't see the dim light of the stars...

    • Re:A little offtopic, but (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is just a feature of the original Capricorn One set, which they still use.

      Seriously: this is a frequent reason cited for why the Apollo moon landing pictures MUST be fake. The reason there are no stars is simply that it's a camera - it has to be set to a particular exposure to take a picture. You could get a shot of the stars with a long exposure, but the much brighter planet would be completely washed out. Glare on the lens or refracted light in the atmosphere (the reason you can't see stars in the d
  • Isn't that a good way to ensure we'll only have upskirt photos of hot green Martian women?

    I mean, we already know about the Leather Goddesses of Phobos...

  • I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.

    Instead, I suggest trying to duplicate the same lighting conditions and view angle. This should make it easier to see how the shadows looked like a face in the fuzzier image...

    • Re:Re-photograph the "face" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:12PM (#6762018)
      I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.

      You don't see the face [nasa.gov] in NASA's latest pic? It's not as obvious as it was in the previous image [nasa.gov] but you could do a little Photoshop job on it and imagine what a better picture would look like.

      I get the feeling someone at NASA considers the "face" an annoyance...

      Wouldn't it be fun if clouds were turtles? Wouldn't it be fun if the laundry on the bedroom chair was a friendly monster? Wouldn't it be fun if rock mesas on Mars were faces or interplanetary monuments? Clouds, though, are small water droplets, floating on air. Laundry is cotton, wool, or plastic, woven into garments. Famous Martian rock mesas known by names like the Face on Mars appear quite natural when seen more clearly, as the above recently released photo shows. Is reality boring?

      They get a lot of publicity from the face, mostly from credulous simpletons who ascribe some sort of actual importance to it, and I bet this annoys them to no end- they're trying to attract everyone's attention to the actual science they're doing, and all they get asked about are the findings relevant to mysticism and pseudoscience.

    • I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.

      They've done it many times. See Cydonia Region of Mars [nasa.gov] for lots of high res images, alongside the Viking image that started the whole myth.

    • Unfortunately, due to the lack of manuevering propellants on the Mars Global Surveyor, I don't think you'll get many more good pictures of the Face of Mars from MGS. What we've seen so far is pretty much the best MGS can do with its black and white camera at 1.5 meters/pixel resolution.

      What I do want, however, is both daytime and nighttime IR pictures of the Face taken at multiple angles from the Mars Odyssey 2001 orbiter, plus pictures taken of the Face with the stereoscopic camera from the Mars Express o
  • It's a big feature -- the biggest (well, tallest) in fact, and I'd love to see it in all its glory. A photo will do until I'm standing there myself.
  • I think in light of the surveys that suggest that the public now questions the value of our space exploration, these types of public relations moves ("stunts") are very important to make our space projects accessable to the public-at-large.
    • I was just watching a show on the history channel about the space race. I find it rather sad that so far humanities greatest achievements in space have come from a "no, we're better than YOU!" argument between a couple countries. Now that that's over, I guess space just isn't as important to a lot of people.

      I, however, would much rather my tax dollars go to more funding for space programs. On the other hand, I don't actually care much if another country has a better space program than mine; I'd much ra
      • I think that's very interesting in that I'm not sure that the United States has really shifted space policy paradigms after the Cold War ended. Certainly, we cooperate more (the ISS, for example) but do we fund the space program as as a science policy project as opposed to the pre-1990's when we funded as if it was a Cold War tool?
        • There didn't really seem to be a huge difference between Cold War era and following within NASA; internal events (read: Challenger) have had much bigger impacts. However, the difference between when the "no, we're better than you" arguments were taking place, i.e. the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, are tremendous. I tried to google funding info from the 1960s but failed. However, it was a hell of a lot higher than it was following the end of the Apollo program and the mostly ended US/Soviet rivalry as of A
  • Maybe we should get some images of the supposed cydonia region where extremests say that ruins exist..That way when we find nothing, we can tell them to get lost.

  • Hmm... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 )
    "Many of the camera's images have sharp enough resolution to show features as small as a school bus." Given this, it'll perhaps be most rewarding to recommend canyons and valleys instead of deserts and ice-caps. Regardless, this opportunity will perhaps pave the way for future, partially automated, user-controlled satellites.
  • I'd like to see a photo of the Martian's take on the Statue of Liberty. I bet it's smaller and more efficient. Of course, this is contingent on the Martians having built "Earth Town"...
  • more pics of the vallus marinarus...largest known canyon in the solar system. and take some closeups of the polar caps and those areas that look like fluvial deposits...evidence of water and all.
  • ... but I still think they should take more pictures or the face, pyramids, and "city" at Cydonia.

  • Boo hiss - IE Only (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ObligatoryUserName ( 126027 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:12PM (#6762015) Journal
    "At this time, the Target Request site only works with Internet Explorer (IE). It was developed and tested with IE 6 / Windows 98 SE and IE 5.2.3 / Mac OS X (10.2.6). It is impractical for us to make it work with every browser on every platform, due to the incompatibility of various browsers."

    Standards compliant scripting or Flash, those should be the only 2 options for developing the client side for a web application. "IE scripting" shouldn't even be on the list.
  • Could we get some some high rez passovers of these sites [mobygames.com]?

  • I'm having a conneciton problem. Please help. (Score:5, Funny)

    by rock_climbing_guy ( 630276 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @11:19PM (#6762054) Journal
    PING MARS.surveyor (207.46.245.214) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from my_leet_box (123.134.156.178):
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.

    Does something need to be adjusted, or is there a problem with the optical signal. Oh, wait a minute, I just got a response. What a crappy ping time!

  • Instead of taking pictures of the surface, we should have a couple taken of GS from the surface.

    If our friends do not feel like doing us that favor then we should use Sojourner, unless our friends are using it as a skateboard, of course.

  • It should be right on the opposite side of where the face is.

  • A recent New Scientist article [newscientist.com] mentions: Unusual warm spots on Mars might represent "ice towers" similar to those seen in Antarctica, say researchers. They could even harbour life...

    These are located in the Hellas Basin, a large feature on the bottom left of Mars, viewed from Earth. Here's [nasa.gov]a photo of Mars, the elliptical bright feature at lower-center in the image is the Hellas Basin, the largest unequivocal impact basin (formed by an asteroid or comet) on the planet. Hellas is approximately 2200 km (

  • Doh! (Score:2)

    by xihr ( 556141 )
    Don't point it at the Sun!
  • The lag will make their heads explode.
  • They should make the camera controlable in real-time from a web site, so visitors have control over what the camera is pointing at. Then, post it on Slashdot...

    "Dear God, they ./ed the Mars Global Surveyer!"

  • How about you map out a nice future home for the Russian_Mars nuclear reactor. I hear they have almost completed the technical drawings.
  • How abou the polar impact site of the probe we decided to have math error's on?

    or better yet.. I want a picture of the viking site.

  • NASA's PR budget is too big (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @12:57AM (#6762497) Homepage
    Congress should cut NASA's PR budget. They have way too big a PR operation. It's hard to get a budget number, because NASA obfusicates that part of the budget, but the key phrase to look for in NASA budgets is "Communicate Knowledge Crosscutting Process". At least $77 million seems to go into what NASA calls "education", but is really the part of the PR operation aimed at schools. There's other PR (NASA TV, road shows, etc.) not in the education budget.

    NASA keeps trying to compete with the National Science Foundation, and it's into research programs that have nothing to do with aeronautics or astronautics. The NSF has a better track record of getting results, but their PR budget is only $3.5 million.

  • An actual photo request (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mattr ( 78516 ) <{mattr} {at} {telebody.com}> on Friday August 22, 2003 @03:38AM (#6763095) Homepage Journal
    Okay this is Slashdot but how come only 1% of the posts are actual requests? Not that most of them are for Cydonia.

    Well I have a couple though I am not too far along in areography. If anyone knows the best way to get a navigable copy of a radar map and maybe a mineral content map for Mars at high resolution I'd like to know. Otherwise will look myself some time..

    If anyone knowledgeable has any comments on these ideas I would find them very interesting. Also how to get them to NASA.

    Request 1. High resolution shots of mountainous areas within 500km of viable (flat) landing spots. This might have the following merits
    - higher resolution of more vertical planes should increase the apparent resolution of three-dimensional models to which these images are mapped.
    - these areas may also be rephotographed later on and compared to seek changes due to wind, sand or water springs.
    - If robust fleets of robotic explorers are sent as has been mentioned, the robots might even be able to get nearby and shoot telephoto images from other angles

    Request 2:
    How about looking for small regions at the lowest altitude (i.e. farthest below "sealevel") in radar maps and shooting those with high resolution cameras?
    - Conceivably there could be a deep crater or canyon which provides shelter from weather as well as possibly slightly higher atmospheric pressure
    - Maybe such areas could have interesting cracks which lead even farther down.
    - Possibly siting a manned expedition in a canyon would reduce the (not so dangerous but more than a nuclear power plant worker gets) radiation?
    - Possibly geographical features in the near vicinity, crater/canyon rim, etc. could be utilized for stringing radio antennae or even anchoring observation kites/balloons
    - Conceivably wind caught in such an area would increase the apparent air pressure in the area temporarily

    Request 3. How about photographing a broad swath in all directions around proposed landing sites so that it is possible for earthlings to do lengthy walkabouts (flythroughs)?

    Request 4. How about shooting interesting areas multiple times from different angles to attain stereo and also make possible extraction of higher resolution data through computation?
    - reasons would be various but basically same as #3.
    - different orbits will be a little off anyway so slightly different angle is possible right off the bat..
    - shots taken from farther away may be able to catch a given location at a later local time (i.e. shoot at 2pm where the satellite is but it is 3 pm in the next time zone where you are focussing) to get different shadows that will let you extract some more topology. Of course if the camera can tilt..
    - of course shooting the same place again will also help if the first time was messed up by a sandstorm.

    Request 5. Shots of horizon with Deimos/Phobos/other planets rising/setting above it.

    Request 6. Shots of places that aren't bright orange (are there any?)
    - I'd like to see what different landscapes look like to get an overall idea of what it is like to be on the other planet.

    Request 7. A series of overlapping high resolution shots which form lines crisscrossing Mars in a pretty much balanced "brocade".
    - This will allow virtual voyagers to travel all over
    - It will be relatively easy to shoot more photos to link a previously uncovered area to the hi-res web
    - It guarantees that all areas can be viewed in relation to a nearby context
    - Perhaps the brocades should be instead of a diamond pattern, follow latitude and longitude lines and be closer to the equator. This might make it possible to simulate landings and takeoffs on Mars from equatorial orbit (if that is the orbit that would be used).

  • You know how people will say about someplace on Earth,"If the Earth were to get an enema, [insert name] is where they'd stick the tube."

    I wanna see the Martian equivalent.

  • How about (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cackmobile ( 182667 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @05:22AM (#6763380) Journal
    Night side. Have the probe turned off. Then suddenly power it up and take a photo with a big flash. That should catch those Martians off gaurd.

    A bit silly I know!!!
  • I would suggest taking pictures of the debris that eminates from the edge of a crater. Different patterns could suggest the presence of water. For instance, when an object hits dry land, the rocks and junk thrown out form thin lines that seem to point to the center of the crater. When an object hits liquid-saturated ground, the center of the crater may rise up to form a little mountain inside the crater. There also may be a sort of lava flow-looking pattern of ejecta. I will be going to Arizona State Unive
  • The Apod [nasa.gov] showed this Mars mountain a month or so back, and one of my ski discussion boards noticed that there's a nice little bowl in the upper right. I'd like a better photo to pick some lines for my first interPlanetary ski trip.

    (We have solutions for the whole :Co2 != Snow problem)

    M@
  • Will the dimensions and focal distance of the pictures be in English or Metric units? Do NASA and their contractor(s) know this time? I'd hate to have an accidental extreme closeup of some Martian's nose hairs.
  • Can they take pictures of the place on Mars where Brittany did her 'whoops, I did it again' video.
    Then have her autograph them. If they wanted, they could even shoot the photo in black and white and then 'color enhance' everything. The guys at NASA really seem to have fun doing it. And at least that way they could change Brittany's awful shade of lipstick

  • Olympus Mons (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blchrist ( 695764 )
    What about high-res images of the largest mountain [wikipedia.org] in the solar system (which also happens to be an extinct volcano). It is almost 3 times as high as Mt. Everest (over 16 miles high), and MUCH bigger in area. After the ice caps, Olympus Mons is clearly the most interesting surface feature of Mars.
  • A few years ago, when I got a stereoscopic microscope and an ultrasonic cleaner, I cleaned and examined all of the hundreds of mineral and fossil specimens I'd collected over the years. In so doing, I noticed something interesting and unexpected. (Actually, I noticed several interesting and unexpected things, but only one of them is germane here.)

    The specimens that were the most interesting to the naked eye were generally duller than heck at a microscopic scale. The really interesting microscopic features
  • Step right up! Make your guess where the ill-fated [msss.com]
    Mars Polar Lander ended up.

    It's kinda like a scavenger hunt, but on another planet!
  • For a minute there, I thought maybe X10 put a Ninja Robotic XCam2 thingy [x10.com] on the Mars Global Surveyor!

    T

  • I think we should go with the recommendation [naciente.com] of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Mars) and go look at the American flag Neil Armstrong left there in 1969!

    After all she is on the House Space Subcommittee. She certainly would know what's most interesting on Mars.

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