[X] My Assistant

[The Singing Badg...]

For a while I've been realising that scale is difficult to judge in rover pictures. Given the close horizon on Mars, I often suspect that the features I'm looking at may be smaller than I think. For example, would climbing the Columbia Hills be an easy ten-minute stroll or an epic climb for a human?

Of course I can look up the numerical sizes of these features but numbers don't always make things as clear as pictures. Perhaps some of you who specialise in image manipulation might be able to produce some versions of rover pictures with a superimposed average-sized human figure, to give an idea of how these features would appear to human explorers?

Just a thought. If it sounds utterly pointless, ignore me!

[atomoid]

in Mars' low gravity she could probably bunny-hop to the top as long as the pressure suit was a light one and her muscles were still in Earth-condition

[elakdawalla]

in Mars' low gravity she could probably bunny-hop to the top as long as the pressure suit was a light one and her muscles were still in Earth-condition

I had a chance to try on a prototype Mars suit a few years ago, and the suit was neither light nor comfortable...this conversation makes me wonder which of the many technical difficulties that stands in the way of the human exploration of Mars will be easiest to overcome, and which hardest. I had the great pleasure of hearing Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt give a talk once, and one of the remarks that he made that stuck with me is that human spaceflight is terribly handicapped (literally) by the gloves that astronauts have to wear, which reduces the vaunted manual dexterity of humans almost to nothing. I wonder if they'll manage to make space suits comfortable enough for astronauts to go on long traverses by the time humans set foot on Mars.

Just for grins here's a couple of photos of me in the Hamilton Sundstrand prototype Mars suit in 2002 on Devon Island:

Just trying to stand up straight (notice the suit has no pants, fortunately I had some -- maybe this should be called the "Hamilton Sundstrand Mars Sport Coat")
EDIT: AFTER LOOKING AT THESE PICS AGAIN I REALIZED THIS FIRST PICTURE ISN'T OF ME, IT'S SOMEBODY TALLER! His boots looked like mine so I was fooled...oops...


Pretending to study a rock while ignoring the piercing pain of the suit pointily digging into the flesh between my neck and my shoulders


Flexing my muscles -- Grrr!


To be fair to the Hamilton-Sundstrand guys who were testing this thing, it was intended to be a prototype of the heads-up technologies that were built into it, not really of the suit itself. The suit was something they had cobbled together to hold the other stuff for testing. But while I was at Devon Island they were looking around for somebody, anybody, who would wear it while they did their testing. Turns out the shoulders on the suit were so narrow that it would pretty much only fit women or very small men -- boy did their eyes light up when they saw me. I was totally psyched to put it on, but after only a few minutes of wearing it I was growing increasingly alarmed that they'd actually make me wear it for many hours while they did their testing -- it weighed about 50 pounds or so and all of that weight rested on two pointy bits in the shoulders. They were hoping that bad weather would delay my departure. Thank goodness, I got out of there before I got to be their guinea pig. Still, cool pictures.

Sorry this is OT but I couldn't resist -- getting back on topic, I second The Singing Badger's request, and I'll raise it: would it be possible to use the parallax calculator to figure out distances in that long-baseline view of Gusev Crater, and maybe put in a string of Statues of Liberty or Big Bens or whatever diminishing into the distance to show the change in scale? That would be cool. For Opportunity, it would probably take a combination of the traverse map and a panorama from a viewpoint a few centimeters above the norm to figure out the distances...I'd better stop writing about this lest I forget completely about what I'm supposed to be working on and start messing with this myself....

--Emily

[lyford]

would it be possible to use the parallax calculator to figure out distances in that long-baseline view of Gusev Crater, and maybe put in a string of Statues of Liberty or Big Bens or whatever diminishing into the distance to show the change in scale?

You mean kind of like this?


or


"ULTREYA! YOU BLEW IT UP!"

Seriously - having a landmark there for scale is extremely helpful, if only to us Yanks. Sorry I don't have any Monuments of London clip art to help out in this thread. Can we agree on an International Architectural Landmark Standard? Liberties? Nelsons? Gizas? And why am I thinking of Mars Climate Orbiter now?

PS - Nice OT Devon pictures