Posted on 03/24/2006 7:33:01 PM PST by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES - A high-resolution camera aboard NASA's latest spacecraft to reach Mars sent back its first view of the Red Planet from orbit, the space agency said Friday.
The crisp test image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was taken late Thursday at an altitude of 1,547 miles and shows a 30.9-mile-by-11.7-mile area of the planet's mid-latitude southern highlands. The mosaic of 10 side-by-side exposures shows a cratered surface with ravine- or canyon-like channels on both sides.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the smallest discernible objects are about 25 feet across, but that the camera will be able to capture images of objects less than three feet across once it reaches its much lower "mapping orbit."
The quality bodes well for future pictures, said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.
"The performance of the spacecraft looks superb, there's certainly no obvious smear here," he said in a telephone interview. "They have pointed us and oriented us just right to get unsmeared images."
The spacecraft reached Mars on March 10 and went into a giant elliptical orbit. Over a period of months it will dip into the upper atmosphere in a process called aerobraking to reach altitudes between about 199 miles and 158 miles and to make its orbit more circular. The science phase of the $720 million mission should begin in November.
The first image is comparable in resolution to those from the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 1997, McEwen said.
The main purpose of the initial image was to calibrate the camera. Two other cameras on the orbiter, the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager, were also tested Thursday night during a 40-minute collection of engineering data.
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On the Net:
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
/humorous sarcasm, folks
>Somebody tell Richard Hoagland!! There must be an
alien artifact somewhere in those photos!
You mean you don't see that four-fingered alien hadprint on the last photo in post 1, about 10% down from the top, and 40% over from the left??!! You can even see the fingernails!
Jimi Hendrix?! Cool!
Hey, I see signs of electricity down there!
False-color Martian images:
* http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mars/images/vall_mars_image.html
* http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mars/images/volc_lge_image.html
*above photos captioned 'false color' via this page - both "Courtesy of NASA": http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mars/mars_il.html
Regarding vertical exaggeration:
http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/IHpublications/mcgreevy/VRPE/wex.VRPE.2.html
Magellan data is providing a detailed digital model of Venus for virtual exploration on Earth. Already, dramatic virtual flights of exploration over the fascinatingly varied terrains of Venus have been computed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. It is not widely appreciated, however, that in these scenes the vertical scale is usually exaggerated by a factor of 22.5. This has serious potential to mislead the unwary, especially if the observer has not first seen the unexaggerated terrain (Brooks, F., personal communication, 1989).
This pertains to Venus, not Mars, but I feel my complaint holds. Imagine presenting ANYTHING scaled up by a factor 22.5 -- you would rightly be sued, fined, accused of fraud...
If you go to the Mars Exploration Rover pages, or the Mars Global Surveyor, or Cassini, or the archived Mars Pathfinder web sites you'll see that the photos are essentially un re-touched.
The only exception are "false color" images that are taken in different spectra for science reasons showing some shades of gray as blue and whatnot to identify certain minerals better.
The point is that NASA is not in the habit of creating false images for public consumption. In fact they go out of their way to provide more raw data than they need to in order to shut up the conspiracy kooks.
Are those little bumps the little green men.
Here are direct-from-NASA Mars rover false-color images. NASA's website is wrought with them.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/sunset_rt_sm.gif
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20051222a/Sol594A_P2281_L257F-A597R1_br.jpg
I despise people like you. You add nothing to anything.
Actually i heard they set the colour systems on the first pictures taken from mars wrong. As a result the first (sets?) of pictures where far too red.
However Mars still is red just not like the first pictures which showed that te soil and the atmosphere where both bloodred!
Most of the rocky soil is reddish/brown, some is yellow or other color, and the sky looks normal (whitish).
You can see the differences for yourselves if you compare pics.
http://mars-news.de/color/blue.html
Pic. A, Viking 1, Nr. 12b069, 29. August 1976, 12.65 locale Mars time This picture was created with color-correction derived from the filter response data. (click on picture to view it in original size) All Viking and Pathfinder images courtesy of JPL/NASA/Caltech. |
original data without correction |
http://ida.wr.usgs.gov/html/m08046/m0804688.html
Is that Helen Thomas' high school picture?
You obviously don't listen to Neal Boortz. Every time someone says "I feel" he asks, "do you feel or do you think?"
Carolyn
The color images are created after they get to JPL by combining various layers taken by assorted filters. To be exact, no color pictures are taken in the conventional sense with the MER cameras. All photos from MERs are taken as black and white images to begin with.
Looks like a Jeep trail with a washout.
By what measure do you determine contribution?
How would this relate to my point that dramatization with color effects and the manipulating of data by factors exceeding 20X is deceptive and wrong?
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