First Pictures From Mars Phoenix Lander 211
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.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it doesn't NEED to be said... (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I was never so excited about pictures of dirt.
Rocks yes, but not dirt.
And I can't just remember what the other stuff is called, but it ain't dirt.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
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Brine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure what that means for the polar region's dirt, but just tossing that out there.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Other than for scientific purposes
Anyone? I mean really, "fine particulate matter eroded from the local soil" is dirt no matter what planet you're on, innit?
Cheers
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Soil = Dirt + organic material.
Pure dirt would be roughly [sic] equivalent to regolith.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Likewise, I tell my kids that "weeds" are just "plants" that are growing somewhere someone doesn't want them. We all like dandelions, so when the neighbors complain about the weeds, I say, what, you mean that grass there?
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So, Martian dirt. We're done. The presence of organic matter hasn't been established yet.
I'll ignore your random insertion of 'sic' [wikipedia.org] in relation to your own typing since it makes no sense in context.
Cheers
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(Drumroll please)
Earth!
That is where the name of our planet comes from, together with similar names in other languages like "terra".
So, is there "earth" on Mars, or is it something different, like calling it "mars" (lower case deliberately)? As in "I am planting my corn in the mars tomorrow." Substitute the word "earth" in the above sentence if you think this
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But I agree that it's semantics~
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I think the fancy word you may be looking for is sand [wikipedia.org]. NASA uses all sorts of fancy words, such as dirt & soil [nasa.gov].
Go ahead and call it dirt.
Mars is ugly (Score:2)
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Man, are you in trouble.
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Of course, they didn't reckon on finding the black monolith....
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damn you slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
I'm working on my seeminly hundredth coffee this morning after reading and watching Mars stuff until the wee hours. Now you do this to me.
Expect a bill from my employer.
Colour? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Colour? (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, pretty much all the color images from previous landers are composites of multiple images with different filters, making a human-eye approximation.
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The Titan lander was a huge disappointment in this regard.
Re:Colour? (Score:4, Interesting)
These [hasselblad.com] are more pleasing to the eye than what is being transmitted from the Phoenix lance but a little less scientifically useful. They are also limited to missions that will return, since the film has to be developed.
A good portion of the gear used now shoots photos in stereo so objects can be more accurately scaled and located. And B&W only sensors can be made more accurate in that regard than color (a quick look at any decent graphic explanation of one will illustrate why). As previous posts have noted, filters can be used to determine color.
Re:Colour? (Score:4, Informative)
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Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to photoshop to make the photograph of a color chart come out close to the same on the screen as it looks in real life. Then there's the real fun -- getting the thing to print out so that it's close to the chart and the computer screen.
There are times when I'm about ready to switch to all black-and-white.
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http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001461/ [planetary.org]
It looks pretty spectacular.
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Why are the photos black & white?
Because with that particular camera, taking an RGB photo involves making three separate exposures with different filters, transmitting the result back to Earth, and combining them. Given that the lander has been on the ground for less than 24 hours so far, they're still at the quick-glance-around-to-see-where-we-are stage and don't want to waste bandwidth taking the same picture three times. Give them time. Given the PR value of RGB images I'd expect some to start showing up within a few days.
(In fact a
Re:Colour? (Score:5, Funny)
It's the same principle as colorizing old movies.
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Digital imaging equipment doesn't see the world in colour. In a digital camera light causes electric charge to build up in photoelectric elements (CMOS or CCD) inside the camera. Lots of light makes lots of charge, less light makes less charge. In other words, an image that the camera sees is translated into brightness values - black, grey and white to you and me.
To turn this back into a colour image you need to take more than one photo, and place a filter over the top of the camera so that only light
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Frack it, now you got me spelling "coloured" wrong. Took me years to break myself of the "haemoglobin" habit...
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Where on the planet did it land? (Score:4, Interesting)
Somewhere in the red circle... (Score:5, Informative)
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Prime Meridian / I Had No Idea (Score:2)
Thanks for the lat/long! Now, the prime meridian on Mars, what's that near?
I had no idea the Air Force was involved in this mission. It's clear they are because of the green blobs in the right lower corner of the map which are apparently a golf course adjusted for lower gravity and reduced atmosphere.Re: (Score:2)
The reason they chose a Navy man, was he was used to not retrieving the balls! Splash!
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There's a map at the bottom showing Phoenix's position relative to the other landers.
Not sure if it's on the NASA site?
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/images-all.php [nasa.gov]
That seems to have just about everything, plus some earth comparisons that should give you an idea of where on Mars it landed.
Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm sure my father said exactly the same thing when the Viking craft landed back in the 1970s.
It would be great if space exploration went at a faster pace, but as long as there are wars to be fought, don't hold your breath.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
This clip... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait... this is reality ? In that case, I have another beer - make that five please.... And some peanuts.
Colour Imaging? (Score:2, Interesting)
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I don'
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I happen to agree with you, and it seems as though even efforts by the "space enthusiasts" community to help with providing rationale and even funding for more "visible spectrum" filters is deliberately torpedoed by the NASA management.
The "public" is paying for these images, and certainly deserve to get something for their investment, even if it doesn't provide the
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Re:Colour Imaging? - Cost and Compromise (Score:5, Informative)
For example, the rover missions usually use infrared filters instead of "red" filters for that end of their range; but they can use that one to approximate the red filter with some adjustments.
I suspect they will do similar things with this mission once it gets up to speed. The preliminary color images are 2-filter approximations. If they do what the rovers did, they'll use 3 filters that don't match human eyesight but compensate with digital processing to give us "human" approximations. They'll be better than these early 2-filter approximations.
If you as a human are upset at this approximation; fish, birds and reptiles will be even more angry because they have 4 color cones instead of 3. (We'd probably have four if our mammalian ancestors were not nocturnal. Damned those mammal-squishing dinosaurs who made us hide in the darkness! I wish meteors on you for limiting our color!)
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Interesting Object? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/phoenix/collection_16/SS000EFF896228773_10CA8R8M1_8877.jpg
Re:Interesting Object? (Score:5, Funny)
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I was about to ask that... (Score:2)
it could also be the sunlit side of a larger rock.
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Re:Interesting Object? (Score:5, Informative)
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*looks out window into back yard*
*looks back at picture*
Hey, that's my house! OMG! I live on mars!
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Or the lander has done its job and found a martian.
Cosmic ray hit (Score:2)
In all likelihood, this is an artifact caused by a radiation event that hit a few pixels of the CCD chip while the image was taken. These are often called cosmic ray hits, although most of the time it's due to the radioactive decay of something local.
Artifacts like this aren't very unusual, most raw data from any CCD camera will have these if the exposure time is long enough. The raw data from Hubble is littered with these. In addition, the reason it's a streak is that the charge often bleeds to some degr
Looks like a glacier (Score:2)
I hope they don't find life (Score:2)
https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/ [technologyreview.com]
An intricate argument but well worth the read. (Bugmenot has passwords if you're too lazy to sign in.)
You mean (Score:3, Funny)
Cool, but (Score:2)
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Hey, whatever floats your boat. Me, I'll get excited when I see the pictures of the little green women.
Cheers
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Dont wait by the phone.
Why Mars all the time? (Score:3, Interesting)
The mission to Europa was canned which is a shame.
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Re:Why Mars all the time? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Dear NASA: Hire an editor, please! (Score:2, Insightful)
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....
Looks familiar . (Score:2)
Those rocks look familiar, looks like the place I ride my dirt bike. WTF.. BRB....
So why don't they support FireFox? (Score:2)
I would have expected a university run show to do much better than this.
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They seem to be using flash to display images. Who knows why - it is surely simple enough to just load the image into the browser (img tag, anyone?). Does anyone know of any other sources for the images that doesn't require flash? For some reason on my machine about half the flash stuff I try to load doesn't load at all. I think I have the right flash, but it still occurs.
Color Camera == 3 B&W Cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Except that.... (Score:2)
Re:Color Camera == 3 B&W Cameras (Score:4, Informative)
The rovers Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity use a lot of different color filters that are placed in front of the imaging sensor. Because the filters are fixed, 3 CCD, or 3 CMOS cameras isn't very good for science, it's good for making a pretty picture.
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False color? (Score:2)
This issue was discussed in a series of posts on the last Mars mission, that left me more confused than I was before: is the red color in the photo on the main page the real color of the Mars surface (or at least an accurate reconstruction of what a human eye would see with ambient light there) or is it something NASA arbitrarily adds to impress viewers with notions about "the red planet"?
Now what? (Score:2)
OK, the poles look pretty much like the other locations where landers have taken pictures. Now what?
So far, from what we know of Mars terrain, it makes Nevada look exciting.
Photos comparison with permafrost on Earth (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/deja_vu_on_mars.html [nasawatch.com]
They caught it on way down (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html [nasa.gov]
They mentioned giving it a try at a press conference, but gave it really small odds because the image size is much smaller than the potential landing range drift. Lucky hit.
Shoulda' snuck a Mars bar in there (Score:2)
Funniest. Prank. Ever.
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I wrote an article about this in 2004: http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/vision.html [scarydevil.com]
Re:A Stupid question (Score:5, Funny)
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