So what does it feel like to have your baby land on a planet millions of miles away?
The imager was always on a one-way trip. It had to be done right the first time, since we couldn't fix it, and she has worked splendidly. I'm proud of our team that designed, built, tested and delivered this camera to Mars. That first day that Phoenix landed and the imager started taking pictures, everyone else was all gaga about the solar panels unfolding, and for good reason. [The first pictures the imager snapped were of the panels.] But then the second image came back of the footpad on Mars, and that was the one that I was waiting for. The first place we touched Mars was with that footpad, and the same went for the Viking landers back in 1976. It really gives you perspective. I grew up being a Trekkie and wanting to go to the stars, and when I put that into something that I could really do in my life, it was where I am right now. It provides this continuity, this thread that goes from the dreams of when I was a kid to where the reality today is that I'm actually doing it. I mean, jeez, it gives your soul a lot of worth.
*Correction (7/21/08): The image of Phoenix's Surface Stereo Imager has been added since publication. The original picture was of the 1997 Mars Pathfinder imager.
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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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