First High-Resolution Color Mosaic of Curiosity's Mastcam Images | Hacker News Reader

First High-Resolution Color Mosaic of Curiosity's Mastcam Images

nasa.gov

75 pointshybrid1146 comments

So I downloaded the high def picture and panned around. At first I was rather underwhelmed. "Great, another desert landscape. Good use of a few million tax payer dollars. We could go to Afghanistan and get the same picture for cheaper.", I thought to myself.

Then I just let the whole scene soak in. I imagined talking with a founding father about my life. "Sure, I've seen the surface of Mars. Blue rocks and red dirt. Mountains in the back." This really opened my eyes. This is a high def of another planet. I pulled it up on a computer that could hold all of the written words in the time of the individual with whom I was imagining the conversation. The whole thing is rather impressive and inspiring.

The images are a red herring. Yes, it's an inspiring engineering achievement to land a thing on another planet that can snap pretty tourist photos. But that is not the point. Science is the point. The sophisticated geochemistry instruments are the point.

I know that's the point, but the science has to be sold to the public. Science for the sake of science would be great, but the reality of the world is that money is in finite supply. As a result you have to sell your dream/goal to get it. I think these pictures, plus a bit better pr campaign by NASA could bring her back to her former glory. Remember, the whole trip to the moon was a giant PR program too. But look at all of the science we got from it.

"...Good use of a few million tax payer dollars. We could go to Afghanistan and get the same picture for cheaper.", I thought to myself.

Our daily burn-rate in Afghanistan would buy us a new MSL-sized project every 8 to 10 days. It would probably be cheaper to go to Mars but pull out of Afghanistan a couple weeks early.

That's amazing.

The area toward the top center, where you can see the color striations in the hills is, I think, the rover's primary destination.

I played with it a bit in Photoshop to attempt to correct for the atmospheric haze and wound up with this: http://orng.us/faquvj which may be (probably is) highly inaccurate, but it does make it very evident that there are a variety of rock types and a good deal of exposed geological history there to be sampled.

That's neat. Thanks for taking the effort to do that. How much of that is due to distance vs haze though?

Good point. It could very well be as much or more matter of aerial perspective rather than atmospheric haze.

So the sections of the horizon that are missing are the martian cities, yes?

seriously, though, what's with the blacked-out sections?

It's a mosaic so they're not blacked-out, they're sections where there is no image data. Presumably they either haven't taken pictures of those parts of the visual field, or the pictures aren't available or are unusable for some reason.

Either that or, you know, maybe a bird drifted into shot ;-)

Well, damn, it looks just like some desert landscape on Earth - nothing surprising, but still really awesome!

Originals here, in some cases clearer than the corresponding spots on the mosaic. I suppose due to whatever method they use to project the images into a cohesive whole.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/

You're right, so I went ahead and recreated the panorama with the source images. Output file is much clearer at 31,792 x 5,683 (~50MB).

You can find it here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2Y0xU4gYdrLd1BFNXJiT1JacUE (Use File --> Download, beware of opening this file inside the browser…)

Edit: Was wrong link.

The black strip in the top looks like a dried-up river valley. Or is it just rock/soil patterns?

I was also wondering what that was, anyone know?

Yeap, that's what it looks like to me. Wow.

Those are black sand dunes[1]. The rover will have to go through those dunes to reach Mt-Sharp. [1] Hi-Res image of the area (dunes on the right): http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2012/details/cut/mt-sha...

Huh, Curiosity uses the same Bill Nye calibration target/sundial as the Spirit/Opportunity rovers.

http://www.astrobio.net/interview/625/interview-with-bill-ny...

(Hopefully this massive browser-crushing 10,000x5,904 jpeg will shut up the endless legion of idiots who complained about "sub-iphone" picture quality.)

The endless legions of idiots are actually right. The sensor on Curiosity is of much power resolution than that of the iPhone. The way (as has been explained a million times now) that Curiosity gets a high resolution image is by splicing multiple images together. Just like a panoramic, or how professional photographers photograph artwork.

Obviously had the sensor been more modern the image would have had better dynamic range and less noise. However, as with the resolution issue, these problems are mitigated by the fact that what Curiosity is point it's lens at isn't moving, because resolution, noise and dynamic range can all be addressed by taking multiple images and joining them all together.

I hope this helps explain so we don't have to go through this again.

This is the first picture of Mars that made me say "wow" -- literally out loud. The image is truly awesome, not only from visual aspect, but also because of the amazing technological achievement(s) it took to obtain it.

The clarity of the terrain, and the mountains/hills in the background, makes Mars feel much more tangible to me; It almost feels like I was there to take the shot myself.

While stitching together the original images to a higher resolution panorama (https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2Y0xU4gYdrLd1BFNXJiT1JacUE - 50MB, 31K pixels wide, do not open the image in the browser, but download it, you've been warned.) I noticed a very clear difference in brightness between the left and the right end of it (the ends meet in the middle of the image, since I was recreating the angle that NASA chose).

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2Y0xU4gYdrLUU5iMEMzSUdYUzg

Looks to me like changes in weather during the time the pictures where taken.

Maybe one side was facing the sun slightly?

This looks so earth-like... I wonder if we could find a hardy bacteria (or a set of bacteria) to inject life on Mars and kick-start the process of creating an ecosystem there. It might take hundreds of years to get a tangible result, but it'd be a start...

Then, we just need to find the Aliens' Turbinium reactor and start it up, and bingo - blue skies on Mars.

Doubt we would see much progress on this front until the have definitively concluded that their is no current life native to mars. So probably a long way away.

I wonder what happened to all the water on Mars. Unless there were lakes of liquid CO2 or methane in the past, pictures and measurements of Mars' geology strongly indicate that there was a huge ocean and lots of river systems and/or glaciers in the past. The most likely-seeming explanation is that it sublimated to gas and was gradually kicked out of the atmosphere by the solar wind, but there are plenty of experiments we could do to figure out if this was really the case.

If Mars still retains most of its water in frozen form (perhaps trapped under a layer of rock in the northern hemisphere), there is a possibility that the planet could at some point be terraformed. Or at least that it would be much easier than expected to set up a self-sufficient settlement there. There is just so much about the planet we don't know. Sending a lot more probes would be a great way to start exploring further and figure out the answers.

Not to belittle the achievement, but what's up with the HUGE white stripes above and below the panoramic image? Makes browsing the image a bigger hassle than necessary and adds quite some MB in size. 11.5 MB for the full resolution image vs. 8.2 MB without the stripes (in PS saving at best JPEG quality) or 4.8 MB (at second best quality setting).

Also: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ doesn't load thumbnails but the full sized images… (is this 1994?)

with very little atmosphere on mars (<1 kpa), what is causing the 'fogginess' in this picture?

(amazing picture btw)

Dust in the air, most likely. There was a dust storm in the vicinity prior to landing. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0803-mars-curiosity-...

and with so little atmosphere, what would cause these dust storms? Would the wind at 1 kpa be able to do it alone?

Just a guess: The weaker gravity (around 1/3 of Earth's gravity) makes it much easier for wind to pick dust off the ground. Once a dust storm starts, it would also take a lot longer for the cloud of dust to dissipate.

Look at the videos of astronauts on the moon from the Apollo landings. Everything they do kicks up a significant amount of dust that takes quite a while to dissipate. Obviously it's not a perfect comparison because the moon has weaker gravity and a different composition.

Apparently the small amount of atmosphere means most of the wind is caused by changes of temperature from sun-heat. The atmosphere heats up very quickly over large areas. I imagine that an area the size of several countries going from -50 to +50 in a couple of hours could raise up some dust, no matter how thin the atmosphere...

Something about seeing another planet in high definition makes it feel so very close. One day, people will sit on those rocks and ponder that horizon in person.

I always imagine putting my martian grandkids on my knee and pointing to the martian heavens says "That dim dot is where i was born."

Top center/right area of this image definitely looks like a place where water/rivers/streams once ran. But I'm no geologist and these images could be deceiving.

Water streams or lava streams. But mars has been volcanicaly inactive for a long time now, and i am not sure which happened last, water flow or lava flow.

or wind.

Whats with all the dark patches in most of the photos released.. are those the secret alien bases NASA doesn't want us to see ? :)

"The black areas indicate images not yet returned by the rover."

Mars is really disappointing when compared to the Mars we've seen in movies. Thanks to Hollywood my perception of Mars is permanently inaccurate and exaggerated. I thought it would be a lot more... red... and out-of-this-world like.

Honestly, it looks like Namibia, Africa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAC_Namibia-escarpment2.jp.... It looks so realistic and dare I say it, "down to earth". On one hand it feels touchable and visitable and on the other hand, boring and visually uninspiring.

It doesn't really surprise me. I mean, when I go to the beach, the oceans are sort of gently blue-ish. But when you look at the space photos, it looks like sapphire.

Photos from Viking Lander 1 and 2, 1976-1977

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/mars/vikinglander...

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/07/vikin...

http://mars.spherix.com/spie2003/SPIE_2003_Paper_GVL_files/i...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Mars_Viki...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/First_Col...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mars_Viki...

Most of the Solar System tends to be dull in color; most publicity photos from NASA are significantly enhanced in the color department. The red of Mars or blue of Neptune are real, but a lot more like #AA8888 than #FF0000. Water ice and silicon-based rock are both predominantly gray, so you need a considerable presence of some other elements to deviate significantly from that. Even Jupiter's atmospheric bands and Great Red Spot are mostly dull browns, and pretty much everything else with an atmosphere is considerably grayer and blander than most photos lead you to think. Here's a few examples of the Solar System in real color:

http://whillyard.com/science-pages/our-solar-system/upload-i...

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Jupit...

http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/HIIPS/EPO/ganymede_g1_true.jp...

Does anybody else get a severe visual illusion of motion when looking at the Venus image?

There are some rocks on the photo with quite sharp edges. I imagined that, with winds so strong, they could be more levigated.

I always secretly hope to spot a weird footprint or some other missed evidence of something mind blowing.

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