20 years of Mars Express | Hacker News Reader

20 years of Mars Express

esa.int

80 pointssohkamyung19 comments

Direct link to the money shot ~3MB JPG:

https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...

It almost doesn't look real in just how detailed it is. I'm awestruck.

It is not real. It's 3d model.

It’s a mosaic, “To view the planet more widely, HRSC gathered 90 images at higher altitudes (of 4000 to 10 000 km), thus capturing areas of around 2500 km wide. These images were then put together to form a full global view.”

It’s written in the first paragraph of the link.

Why would you write it’s not real and a 3d model?

Look at the two circular images. They use height map to produce the consistent highlights using 3d model. The texture is real but the highlights are faked using 3d model based on height map.

I appreciate what you're saying, but images are nothing more than representations of something we measured with sensors and then combined into an array of data.

It's misleading to call this a photo. It's not easy to rigorously define what we mean by "photo", but I'd say it should involve measuring only photons in the human-visible spectrum.

However, I'm perfectly fine calling this an accurate image, because that's what it is.

Related: trailer to the like-named french science fiction anime: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iroDVDTPco

Kudos to the engineers who designed and built it, 20 years is pretty amazing.

A beautiful image, it makes me even more amazed anyone would want to physically go to that planet. I'm of the opinion humanity's future is hopefully in space, but not at such barren, hostile gravity wells as Mars. Perhaps there will be huge robotic mines and factories there one day, but why would anyone want to land other than as some sort of "extreme tourist"?

Compared to deep space, Mars is positively luxuriously bountiful in many ways. You can even go outside with just a compression suit and a tank of oxygen and there's plenty of radiation shielding material just lying there on the floor (rocks).

You can just lay solar panels and cables on the ground rather than a complex vibration-prone truss array, you don't have to worry about the mass of the nuclear reactor, etc. You don't even have to have all your buildings connected, they won't float away.

You can use gravity for lots of things too, and you don't need to spin your entire chemical refinery (or just your kitchen) to make it work without special zero-g engineering.

There's even oxygen in the atmosphere, it just needs "some" energy to release it.

The super-fine possibly lung-shredding dust might be a bit of a issue though.

Wait until you hear about Earth!

I was going to say "if you wanted to live in human-ready paradise you can already do that right here" but decided not to add it!

You cannot go there, there might be life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

You never know - like, people live in Detroit, so why not on Mars ?

There are no gas stations on Mars. /s

The infographic mentions the craft uses 200 grams of propellant per year. I realize it's mostly used for bumping the craft into slightly different orbits, but it's still a very small and impressive amount all things considered. A pint of half and half is about 500 grams.

10 years in service on orbit around mars, which is 10 times the original design lifetime. Impressive even by NASA political-engineering standards.

It's an ESA spacecraft?

It can still be impressive by NASA standards even if it is an ESA mission (even though, I'm guessing it was an honest bit of confusion).

The reason they put "express" in the name is pretty impressive too. Putting together the spacecraft for the mission was very quick and cheap. (relatively) I think because they had the satellite bus left over as a spare from another mission.

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