One Mars Probe Photographs Another 146
sighted writes "In one of the more remarkable shots ever taken by robotic space explorers, the Opportunity Mars rover has been photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ." From the article: "Shown in the image are 'Duck Bay,' the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; 'Cabo Frio,' a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and 'Cape Verde,' another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater."
Impressive resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anybody know if the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter is limited to the visible spectrum, or does it have multispectral capabilities?
P.S. I am sure the Google folks will want these data to update Google Mars.
Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
Will this change Opportunity's plans? (Score:5, Insightful)
But one actual question that comes to mind -- now that the Opportunity team has high-resolution pictures of their baby's room, will they change where they send him to play? For example, could they see that rock just south of the dark "Cape Verde" formation? And looking back, if they'd had pictures like these to work with, would they have approached the crater from a different angle?
Proof! (Score:5, Insightful)
(Robot is proof of intelligence, and its on another planet, the sentences don't necessarily have to be linked.)
Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Taking pictures of the car... (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering how NASA is consistently at the short end of the federal budgeting stick, would the agency do better as a private foundation funded by sending out probes decked out like something out of NASCAR?
Re:Moon Probe (Score:3, Insightful)
They'd simply argue that the probe's launch was actually just another routine launch, and with the state of today's CG capabilities, it would be a piece of cake to fake footage.
The only way to prove it to those people would be to actually send them there in person.
Re:Impressive resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see, 30 cm resolution at 300 km works out to be a microradian angular resolution. Hubble has a resolution of 0.1 arcsec, which is like 0.5 microradians, so I suppose if you put Hubble at MRO's orbit then it would see about a factor of two better, whereas a naively one might assume a factor of 4.8 times better given that the aperture sizes on Hubble and HIRISE are 2.4 and 0.5 meters respectively. That is probably a bit of apples to oranges because I don't know in what context the Hubble resolution is. The HIRISE says it is 30 cm per pixel at 300 km, but the Hubble number I found just states it as the basic telescope resolution without mentioning whether they are talking about an Airy disk size, Rayleigh criterion, or whatever. For what it is worth, both the basic Hubble (without instruments) and HIRISE both run at f/24, so their blur spots would be comparable, so if you put the same detector behind them, they would have the same resolution.
Re:Impressive resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Impressive resolution (Score:2, Insightful)
However, all the heckling was bothering the hell out of me so I had to go back and double-check my sources, and I apologize; I believe I stand mistaken...the first 2-inch res imagery to which I referred was indeed aerial photography (frown), and a secondary image to which I referred as being awestruck by was a 10cm res image (according to a colleague)...my sincere apologies to BWJones. I am humbled.
Oh, and thanks, Wavicle, for providing the heckle that made me run and check again. (yet another frown)