Take One Moment, Stop, pause Options

[djellison]

I know this picture doesnt look like much. It's grainy, it's bleached out quite a bit

But you owe it to yourselves to look at that picture, and think.

There is a rover climbing a hill on mars.

Isnt that amazing?

If you think hard enough - you can actually imagine being there. Walking with a rover, that we sent half a billion km's to a whole other world.

Sometimes, an image will just catch me off guard and I'll go "wow - LOOK at what we can do!"

Doug

[Tesheiner]

It is too easy to forget about it, specially because these pictures resamble places that we can find here on earth.

But actually and specially after finishing a full-res panorama I realize that I'm looking to a picture taken on *another world* just *few hours* ago.

And this is an incredible feat.

[dilo]

These "tele-presence" and "familiar place" sensations are even stronger looking this color image from same Sol...
Looking this, I'm more and more persuaded about the grat return from unmanned spaceflight for all umankind.
Sure, manned mission are more "romantic" and "old-fashion" style, but costs and risks are probably too high, compared to these great results.
And there is also a lesson learned for future explorations: continuous improvement of succesfull missions (Pathfinder=>Mer) is better than revolutionary and untested systems...

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[Nix]

I hear you Doug, one actually CAN imagine being there...can you hear the motors hum? See Thira over there? Turn around now, shall we walk up to those mesas on the horizon? We'll be there in a day or two, c'mon..

[tfisher]

Yes, and big kudos to NASA for letting us experience this. The strategy they have of releasing images pretty much as soon as they arrive makes following the unfolding story of this exploration so enjoyable. They do such a better job than, for instance, the ESA. With Spirit and Opportunity, we are along for the ride. With ESA, we get a few secondhand postcards passed along from the lucky few scientists who get to see the real stuff.

[aldo12xu]

Yes, indeed, as it's been pointed out a few times, we're incredibly lucky to be experiencing this exploration of another planet essentially first hand and practically in real time. Viewing those sol 526 images in stereo is incredible!

[Bill Harris]

The incredible aspect is that within a very short time of these images being created on Mars we are able to view them in our homes and then discuss them with other MarsNuts worldwide.

I recall that, for the first Mars encounter with Mariner 4 in 1965, we were shopping in downtown Birmingham (AL) and I eagerly looked at the halftone Mars images in the newspaper and was astounded that there were _craters_ visible.

How times have changed.

The astounding thing is that these are two human-created devices that have been (for the most part) successfully investigating the surface of an alien world.

It is not unusual to have the "telepresence". One of my hobbies is radio-controlled airplanes and it is a common feeling to feel I am _at_ the plane at 1200 feet altitude and not watching it from the ground.

--Bill

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Yes, there is something really moving about seeing landscapes on other worlds. Not just science, not just technology (but without forgetting that we owe all this to technology) but experiencing a new realm of life, looking for the first time out of our Earth craddle! Life on Earth will never be the same after this.

I remember when I was a child, we knew of Mars only the old Shiaparelli's images, and the existence of the "channels" was a hot debate. Robots were only a sci-fi hype, and computers were something out of an unknown fringe, we called them "artificial brains". Then came the first sputnik beep beep... and, fast, Gagarine, the first men on the Moon... Then, the pace slowed, as space is huge and the challenges enormous. 20 years for a Titan mission, design time, journey time, etc.

All this makes the outer worlds images still more enthraling, as we know they are rare, and many of us will never know what showed the Titan images.

The strangest in Mars images is that they are not strange at all. Rocks, dunes, hills, stones strewn plains... all very familiar visions we could have on any Earth desert. Remember old sci-fi images showing bizare shaped mountains and unrealistic flat ground...

What I hope is that all this will contribute to help us treat our own planet with some care: Earth is the strangest planet in our system, the only one with grass, tress, birds, friends, the only one where we can live.

[glennwsmith]

Doug, what blows my mind, in addition to the landscapes, are the microscopic imager pics -- to be able to count grains of sand on a planet 100 million miles away!

Good topic!

Glenn

[Marcel]

Great break between all the stitching, discussing details, trying to explain what we see ! I also often have this feeling that it is absolutely absurd what humans can do these days ! I allready am jealous to my children. Imagines what they can witness within 50 or 60 years....

Let me use this pause to ventilate this: From the first moment i could read, i read about the universe and spaceflight. It took me 35 years to get the knowledge i know now. And the more in know, the more i want to know more. There's this unstopable hunger for knowing everything (the whole "body of knowledge") that humans know about it. Ofcourse that's not possible.....but i will try, try until i cannot anymore. What i find so strange though, is that in daily life (and i meet a lot of people also because of my job) I hardly ever meet someone that has the same amount of interest in the subject !!! Or at least, it seems so. In other words: I can't understand why not more people are that interested !!! It is as if i want to say: HEY, do ya all realize how cool it is to be able to see Mars as it is today ? Have you ever thought longer than a minute about what it is about to see an image of the surface of Titan ? It is not just a rock strewn plane.....it is a rock strewn plane where no one has EVER been before, with a metal dish falling on it, that makes images and sends it home. A 1000 times a 1000 times a 1000 kilometers away. And we made it, put it on a rocket, and steer it there !

Resume: i am very happy that i have found this place, a place where i can find the greatest group of space-nuts. An not just nuts......nuts that know (and do) an awfull lot of great things that makes me confident that i am not the only one... Keep on going you all ! Just like the rovers !

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

To know what I feel, please imagine if there was people on Mars or Titan...

They live their everyday life, and for them, Earth is just a spot in the sky, about which they know nothing. Their mythologies place gods there, their legends place all their hopes for a better life, their science tell them that life is impossible on this burning world poisoned with oxygen... But anyway they too hope that there is somebody there, that they are not alone in space...

And one day, completelly unexpected, there is a blazing white fire trail in the sky... thunder rolls around... A meteorite? No: an UFO! Small bits of the spaceship fall around, there is the thunk of the heatshield crashing on the ground... and, into the orange sky, a strange flying saucer hanging after a parachute... Then the thing lands, they can see it, it moves, gets on its wheel...

Imagine the joy and emotion of these people, suddenly realizing that they are not alone, that there are other living beings in space!! (note) All their dreams and legends suddenly become true!

Of course this is a fiction (at least for now) and very probably nobody witnessed the fall of our probes on their planet. But, when I see the images of Mars and Titan, I think the real stake is this: the emotion of stepping on another world, and it is nearby as strong as if there was somebody, as if we (and them) would be discoveruing new life!

So it is really moving to see mars and Titan, from the philosophical implications, in more of aesthetics or knowledge!




(note: they will feel joy, of course, if they have not seen before their equivalent of racist movies such as "Alien" or "Independence day" and the like, to spoil and distort their vision of life and of the universe)

[djellison]

" I allready am jealous to my children. Imagines what they can witness within 50 or 60 years...."

I'm jealous of those who were around when man walked on the moon and the Viking landers first touched down It works both ways

It's not long till MRO, and MEX data is beginning to come out. Then we will have Phoenix, DAWN, Cassini for years to come, so many missions yet to come, and hopefully, the amateur quarter can continue to contribute in a small way to awareness of the amazing things that people can do when they put their minds to it. If creating this place has given a home and a platform for people to do that - then it's more than I could have dreame of

Doug

[brianc]

Doug, you did an inspirational job in setting up this place, it's my first port of call every day. I do wonder how many of the guys from the MER teams and JPL are members of this forum. I think it would be good if they indicated their presence and acknowledged the great work of all these amateur picture editors.

I've a sneaking suspicion that they don't bother processing panoramas any more at JPL, I guess they just download the beautiful creations you guys create.

Thankyou for this place of sharing

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, this is a good place. I think about how things have changed over the years. I was around for Apollo, watched it live on Tv, and that was truly an amazing thing. The seventies - Viking, then Voyager at Jupiter, and the first Venera images of Venus, another amazing period.

But things got bad in the 80s. For a long time it looked as if planetary exploration would come to an end. No new launches... true, we had the Voyager encounters with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and they were amazing. There will never be another Voyager! (in our solar system anyway). But there were no new launches for a long time. it was actually the stated goal of David Stockman, head of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, to get NASA out of the planetary exploration game. (If I'm recalling this correctly). Luckily it turned around, and now we have missions all over the place. This decade is almost as great as the 60s for space nuts!

And of course the amazing thing is that we get to follow it all live. Others have commented on this - but it's worth repeating. Take Viking 1 - I saw the first pics on TV. Next day they are in the papers... well, just a few press release images. After a week or ten days the weekly news magazines have them, then Aviation Week. After two or three months they are in the astronomy magazines... but it was so drawn out! Any always the same press release images. Look at us now, with access to daily images from MER and Cassini, with hundreds of thousands of MOC and Themis images to play with, and off the shelf software to work with them. Armchair exploration has never been so easy! Now, if only ESA and JAXA would wake up to the fact that public release is the best kind of PR... it will be interesting to see what India and China do, but probably not much...

Phil

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Now, if only ESA and JAXA would wake up to the fact that public release is the best kind of PR...
Phil

Alas I have a feeling that there is still a prejudice (at least in my country France) as what the public is not clever enough to understand science, so scientists here do only very few releases with very simplistic explanations. Images and results are not released, they are processed only by "specialists". And amateurs are deemed "not serious" "not valuable work". There is some need of the american way in this matter...

I do wonder how many of the guys from the MER teams and JPL are members of this forum. I think it would be good if they indicated their presence and acknowledged the great work of all these amateur picture editors.

If there are, it is understandable they are perhaps instructed to stay anonymous, for reasons like avoiding giving caution to ideas or theories which are not from the JPL. There are other forums where really mad ideas are expressed...

I too hope that they read this forum, as there are sometimes valuable reflexions which could be a real help for the MER teams or to interpret what they see. But they also have specialists in geology, so perhaps they do not think useful to read this forum.