NASA Mars Satellite Snaps 1st Public-Picked Photos 61
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it took eight high-resolution photos of Mars that were chosen through a public suggestion box the space agency put up in January. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is nicknamed 'the people's camera,' NASA stated. Through the suggestion box known as HiWish, NASA has received nearly 1,000 suggestions. The first eight images of areas the public selected are available online."
The worst part about trolls (Score:1, Insightful)
Is that you can only mod them down once.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Mod me down if you're a liberal pansy (Score:5, Informative)
I was all like, "Take pictures of the surface" (Score:3, Funny)
And they listened.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, the other 992 suggestions requested pics of the Mars Face specifically.
They'll get to that, but their Photoshop specialist is currently working on the Prius project.
Re: (Score:2)
And within seconds... (Score:2)
SLASHDOTTED!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Mirror? (Score:5, Insightful)
The face (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HiRISE_face.jpg [wikimedia.org]
My God! It looks nothing like any face I've ever seen! Obviously the beings who created it possess an intelligence entirely unlike our own!
Re: (Score:2)
http://bradkaya.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/ipod-indian.jpg [bradkaya.com]
My God! It looks totally like a face!
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
pics (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As of 22:19 UCT, that one is down too.
Give them a break.... (Score:5, Funny)
Barsoom (Score:1)
I want pictures of the ancient martian cities. And the mostly naked martian girls.
Re: (Score:2)
Martian Mutant City (Score:2)
Or really any chick with 3 boobs will do.
Re: (Score:1)
Your comment would make sense if it was procured or launched since August 2008. HiRISE has been on station over Mars since 10MAR2006. The asset is there, not using it would be a bigger waste of money.
Re: (Score:2)
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cost $720 million dollars. There are over 75 million students in the United States. Please reply with your plans for fixing the education system with a budget of $9.60 per child.
Personally, I can't think of a better way to encourage students to dream big and to pursue science than a mission like this one.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The cost listed on wikipedia is the budgeted cost of the mission, which includes construction of the spacecraft, the launch vehicle (and a use of the launch site), and the operations team for the spacecraft for its expected lifetime. So yes, 720 million is the total cost. I don't know what other "infrastructure" you could possibly be talking about.
Re:Buzzkill (Score:5, Insightful)
Buzzkill is right. You could at least have formulated a reasonable complaint, instead of being a whiny bitch. How much do you figure it costs to snap a few pictures using a satellite which is already in orbit of mars? Enough to buy lunch for 10 kids in your hypothetical "closing schools"?
Re: (Score:1)
The 720 million mentioned on Wikipedia as the 'cost' was just the cost of the physical craft, not all the infrastructure required to make it more than a 720 million dollar paperweight.
Re:Buzzkill (Score:4, Insightful)
What can I say ... your comments are a perfect demonstration of the fact that education is wasted on most people.
The US spends about 1 trillion dollars per year on education. The entire NASA budget clocks in at under 19 billion. If you scrapped NASA entirely, you could increase education spending by less than 2 percent. Now, it's clear where you stand on the issue, but I'd personally much rather use that money to push back the boundaries of human knowledge instead of giving it to the school system and praying for a miracle.
Re: (Score:2)
NASA budget for 2010 = 0.52% federal (18724 million).
That is almost exactly 26 days of war in iraq or about 1500 times the bonus of the CEO of Goldman Sachs after receiving the bailout.
Our return on investment for NASA is spectacular.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Buzzkill (Score:5, Insightful)
Throwing money at schools won't improve education. The extra money will go for more rent-a-cops, metal detectors and an extra limo for the members of the school board. It has been tried before.
However canceling NASA will eliminate the aspirations and goals of thousands of bright young people and put us in a position where all the knowledge and skills of a generation of aerospace engineers are lost. The cost of restarting the space program after giving it up for a decade would dwarf the amount saved. We give that up and we as a nation will have accepted our place among the third world nations while nations like Pakistan, India, China and even North Korea take the lead.
I agree that we need a larger focus on education in this country, but gutting NASA isn't the answer. It is going to take a major policy change to fix education because the system is degenerate. If that costs more, then can find the money somewhere else.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
$18.7 billion / 76 million students = $246/student
$18.7 billion / 48 million students = $390/student
Doubt that would fix much, even if every single dollar trickled all the way down.
Re: (Score:2)
We have to multitask as a species. If we stopped the whole world to work on one problem at a time, nothing would get done.
Context switching is expensive.
Re:Buzzkill (Score:4, Informative)
Cognitive dissonance I guess. They rail against bailouts that sucked but probably did save the economy from a total collapse. But then things like pretty pictures of Mars it's all 'whatever it takes!'.
What you call "cognitive dissonance" I call "having a sense of proportion".
In other news, I'm unhappy with the automotive and banking bailouts for wasting money, yet just yesterday I payed extra for a completely unnecessary helping of guacamole for my quesadillas. Clearly I am a hypocrite.
Re:Buzzkill (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget the hot sauce!
suggestions? (Score:2)
I'll give you 20 to 1 odds on 90% of those "suggestions" being something along the lines of "Take pictures of Uranus!".
Re: (Score:2)
I'll give 40 to 1 that the few wishes selected out of the 1000's were pictures that the NASA scientists wanted to take anyway, but created a huge public relations event to make themselves look good. "Just consider the kids...!"
Re: (Score:2)
Kind of like the space station module naming contest.
"Suggest a name for the module! Or, just vote on one of the ones we've selected for you! Oops, the one that won isn't one we listed and it's silly, guess we won't do that. Also, we're not picking the one that got the most votes of the ones we ourselves suggested. Apparently we only put that one on there to fuck with you."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
,i>I'll give 40 to 1 that the few wishes selected out of the 1000's were pictures that the NASA scientists wanted to take anyway, but created a huge public relations event to make themselves look good. "Just consider the kids...!"
The odds that NASA is only taking the pictures they want to take because they look scientifically valuable to them is 100%.
The odds that NASA is selecting such pictures from the set of public suggestions is also 100%.
I mean sure the orbiter is taking other pictures besides, but
Samara Valles (Score:1)
Ah, Samara Valles you wrinkly old bellybutton you! http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_016895_1525 [www.uahirise.org]