In what ways is the Surface Stereo Imager "better" or different than human vision? What can it see on Mars that we cannot?
Our eyes can't pick up the longer wavelengths of infrared light but the imager can. Infrared is very important for figuring out the chemical composition of rocks and soil and so forth. Plus, having infrared means we can take advantage of different lighting situations. The imager can also see polarized light, just like those polarized sunglasses that eliminate glare. This allows us to do analyses of aerosols and dust composition in the atmosphere. We also use other filters to look at the sun to get direct readings of how much sunlight is reaching the surface. This is very important because Phoenix is solar-powered. We can tell just how clear the atmosphere is and know how much energy the solar panels will get that day. We can get very high accuracy humidity readings, too, so we can tell how much water vapor is in the air.
Has the Surface Stereo Imager done what it was supposed to do so far? Any glitches?
The imager is all day, every day. In general, we shoot about 150 to 200 images daily and all the other science teams really rely on it. Before the robotic arm digs anywhere, it has to know where the ground is. We need to know when the arm is moving and where we left it at the end of the day. The geology and chemistry people need multispectral images so they know where the most interesting place to dig is. There have been some communication problems—not with the imager per se; they have been more on the sense of that we can't quite always get the images we've commanded back from Mars. They have to be relayed through one of the satellites we have in orbit around Mars, and then there's a communications delay [of 15 minutes] as they're beamed back to Earth. There are literally hundreds of things that have to go right to get a picture, and sometimes 98 out of 100 go right, and it's not quite the right 98 for us to have that image back home.But that's what you expect, and it's hard to be down about it. If I don't get my pictures today, I will get them tomorrow morning. I still have an instrument that's working and happy and a spacecraft that's working and happy. Phoenix is beating its little heart out to find cool things for us to look at on Mars.
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5 Comments
Add CommentWhat a bummer: with just a little tweak of the design they could have made this look just like the head of a SciFi Martian space invaders. NASA really has no PR sense at all, do they?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFocus resolution on the lander is just as bad as it is on all the other Mars cameras. It's set for "infinite distance," so no moving body in the foreground is ever focused on nor resolved. But if a tech RELIGHTS every single pixel, you can actually see things that NASA never publishes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe future is not for us to see, or to understand. The fact that we have a robot that is sending information to us from a distant planet, Mars, is placed in reference to fiction that has nothing to do with reality. Yes there are similarities to the present truth, but that is where fiction and reality depart. We are the generation of the past and the future is truly not for us to see or to comprehend. It boggles our minds that we are now capable of traveling to another planet. Wow! We place events in the contents of our own experiences and make references to what we know, and when it comes to space and how it will impact the future of humanity, we are like stone age people trying to imagine what the bronze age would be like. But without the stone age people, the bronze age people could not exist. We are centered on the need for exploration and science discovery and neglecting the need for habitation into the solar system. As we, as a generation of the past, slowly pass into antiquity, and generations arise, they will have a different points of references to guide them on their way. But! The future generations is based on the past, and I hope that we leave the next few generations with a solid foundations to build the future (solar, galactic and inter-galactic)house of humanity out of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLive long and prosper.
Some one, "if you don't have something positive to say, don't say it". It is all to easy to state the defects of something, but can you do better? Yes the camera on Phoenix is near sighted and is in need of corrective lenses for its short-sightedness, but if you can produce a better camera; do so and prove that this is the way it should be done. If you can't produce a better camera. Don't complain. They are doing the best they can, and learning on the way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEvery long journey begins with a single step.
My name is Emily Cragg and I am a former Xerox digital image repro tech & trainer. I went through the Phoenix photo database, one-by-one. The Lander was stationary; and yet it photographed more than four panoramas. Its photos were cropped, re-scaled, undeveloped, unfocused with poor 72-ppi resolution. The season in which they were taken was a dormant season of few changes to the landscape. In fact, digital cameras RECORD MORE than physicality; and 4th D and 5th D phenomena were recorded but left undeveloped. We could have learned a lot more from Phoenix photos, if NASA had any concept of truth-telling. Never A Straight Answer is the Truth NASA tells.
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