111–120 of 150 posts
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What's long? a year? twenty? And to answer that question and others is why we(humans) have bothered with Space Lab, Mir, IST. You can Google answer.
No, I mean if humans were to colonize Mars -- would gravity make that process difficult?
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That image was taken in 1977. Actually, this is how people saw it until 2009 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl1_11d128.gif when Mr Van der Hoorn "used the original 11d128.blu, 11d128.grn and 11d128.red images from the NASA Viking image archive, converted them to .png, manually removed the noise and finally merged them into one image" Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Van_der_Hoorn/Viking/Filte... Th…
While yes, the full color image I posted was re-compiled from the original red, green, and blue channel images sent from the rover by a non-NASA source, even NASA's B&W images look better back then than they do now. I made an image to illustrate this: http://f.cl.ly/items/0k2w2d1C1O3w3e0t300f/NASAQualityDegreda...
To contribute to these goals, MSL has six main scientific objectives:
* Determine the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials.
* Attempt to detect chemical building blocks of life (biosignatures).
* Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils.
* Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution processes.
* Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide.
* Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons.
By those I can understand why carrying a high res camera was not a priority because it would have added weight, taken up space and also consumed more bandwidth while transmitting? :)
I absolutely love this stuff. The photos to me are strangely eerie, and even perhaps a little sinister. I have trouble comprehending the size of other planets, photos like these make me feel uneasy (in an exciting way) because they are strikingly similar to landscapes we might find here on earth - yet it's a completely different planet! I'm no longer looking at mars as a red circle as shown in textbooks, but now as v…
It's actually reassuring to me. It's rocks. We understand rocks. I'm surrounded by them. There may not be a blade of grass, a gasp of air or a friendly face to greet us but at least there are rocks.
To sum up sentiment of many here: NASA should have got Canon as a sponsor and give us some decent images. It's ridiculous to travel across the system and not being able to send good images.
I absolutely love this stuff. The photos to me are strangely eerie, and even perhaps a little sinister. I have trouble comprehending the size of other planets, photos like these make me feel uneasy (in an exciting way) because they are strikingly similar to landscapes we might find here on earth - yet it's a completely different planet! I'm no longer looking at mars as a red circle as shown in textbooks, but now as v…
The Venera program is definitely one of the "unsung heroes" of planetary exploration. Perhaps the best resource for surface images of Venus (along with fascinating image reconstruction) is Don P. Mitchell's page: http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm Another fascinating tidbit: the Soviets also performed the first (and to date, only) deployment of a balloon probe on another planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
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The Venera program is definitely one of the "unsung heroes" of planetary exploration. Perhaps the best resource for surface images of Venus (along with fascinating image reconstruction) is Don P. Mitchell's page: http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm Another fascinating tidbit: the Soviets also performed the first (and to date, only) deployment of a balloon probe on another planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
I was going to mention Don - he's a friend of a friend - and the book he's writing about the Russian Venus program. There's a lot of awesome stuff here that almost no-one knows about.
He mentions on his copyright page[2] that he studied Russian books/papers, befriended & interviewed Russian scientists, dug up rare photographs, and even processed original spacecraft data with custom C++ code to create some of the images!
I look forward to his book; does he have an ETA on the publication date?
[1]: http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm [2]: http://www.mentallandscape.com/Copyright.htm
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Also, it was easier to do on a sound stage.
While I'm guessing this is in jest. All of these hardening necessary raises a lot of question about the legitimacy of the older photos.
In the past years, while your mother played in the sunlight and your father smiled at girls and drank cool drafts as the evening drew in, before you were even a glimmer or a sunbeam, we had devices called "film cameras".
These "film cameras" did not have electronic components. They worked by using levers, springs and wheels. An emulsion that is reactive to light was prepared and pasted onto a plastic film. The plastic film was exposed to the light, but briefly. Later a complicated process was applied to transfer the reacted image (for that is what it was) onto other media, which could then be copied.
If one looks upon The Sacred Ebay (all bless the name of Sacred Ebay) one will find similar devices today.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/...
In this way, the dark time became but light.
Ahhhwaahhhh wooooo. Ahhhwahh wooo...
(THIS IS IN JEST)