Latest Mars Photos Show Frosty Landscapes, Ancient Lakebeds

Phoghat writes "A new batch of images has been released by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissaince Orbiter and as usual they are stunning. In the first image, there is a lot going on! Numerous dust devil tracks have left criss cross marks. The second is an image of what could have been a once habitable lake. There are more, including a possible future landing site."

Re:Wow

[arth1]

Amazing, indeed. Amazingly photoshopped, with more kohl and false colours than a Soho gal. I don't know about others, but I am more impressed when pictures haven't been exaggerated, so what I'm impressed with is what I see and not the artistry and what the publishers want us to see.

As for "could have been a once habitable lake", that's a rather meaningless statement. The area behind your house could have been an ancient burial site too. Speculation with very little to go on isn't very fruitful, except causing confusion when "journalists" blow this out of proportions and rewrite it like if it were fact, and people start believing it.

Re:Wow

[ferd_farkle]

"“Holden crater has some of the best-exposed lake deposits and ancient megabreccia known on Mars,” said HiRISE’s principal investigator, professor Alfred McEwen of the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. ”Both contain minerals that formed in the presence of water and mark potentially habitable environments. [...]“"

"Meaningless"? Blown out of proportion? I don't think so.

Re:Wow

[oldspewey]

Either an ancient alien artifact, or a few hundred billion barrels of crude under the sand ... either one has an equal chance of getting our asses to Mars.

Re:Wow

[Nyeerrmm]

I don't think theres any likely discovery that will get us moving.

Instead whats going to get us moving is getting it to the point that its cheaper. Hopefully with the albatross of the shuttle no longer around NASA's neck we'll create an infrastructure that makes it (relatively) easy to go anywhere in the solar system. Cheap transport to orbit, orbiting fuel depots and built-in-space spaceships that never enter the Earth's atmosphere -- sustainable exploration. Hopefully the administrations proposed NASA budget will get us to that point, even after congress got done with it. Only external geopolitics will up the NASA budget above $20B (in 2010 dollars) again, so if its going to happen in the mid-term future without hoping for a cold war, it has to be done this way.

Re:Wow

[Chris Tucker]

"Amazingly photoshopped, with more kohl and false colours than a Soho gal. I don't know about others, but I am more impressed when pictures haven't been exaggerated"

The use of color to indicate variances in terrain elevation is common.

The use of false color to indicate areas of differing surface chemistry and elements is common in remote imaging.

To equate either with Photoshopped imagery is to betray a level of ignorance that one should well be embarrassed to display in public.