One of the coolest things I have ever seen ...

[Darth Mandarb]

I know some of you care about this kind of thing ... but I came across this earlier and was completely blown away.

This is one of the most amazing photos I've ever laid eyes on.

That's the Phoenix lander descending to Mars.  That's a photo of something from earth descending on another planet.  Simply incredible.

Does anybody else find this as amazing as I do?  Thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss.

Or not.

[Nacho]

Has this (Edit: Enthusiasm) something to see with the fact that you were drunk chatting via messenger at 01:30 PM? 

On the other hand, I think there is a landing video somewhere... Browsing for it.

[GarageGothic]

Yes, they are indeed incredible, and the detail is amazing. Reminds me of the photos from the Bennett/China mission of 1997 if anyone remembers that:

Lander descending on planet surface

Zoomed view

Spoiler

Ok, I'll stop being a dick now.

[close]

[DanielH]

It's amazing that the tiny little lander has traveled all that way from us, to another planet. So yes, I would say I'm as amazed about it as you are. Going off on a tangent, I overheard a man at a cafe recently saying 'Phoenix is a conspiracy like the moon landings'. Right then and there I felt the overwhelming urge to punch his face in.   How anyone can believe that is beyond me.

[Pumaman]

That picture reminds me of last time I tried to take a photo of fireworks.

After all that money, time and effort spent sending the thing to Mars, and all we get is a black background with a couple of white dots. I demand a refund.

[evenwolf]

I tire of people's indifference to space missions.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/

"As of the end of 2006, of 37 launches from Earth in an attempt to reach the planet, only 18 succeeded, a success rate of 49%. Eleven of the missions included attempts to land on the surface, but only six transmitted data after landing.

The U.S. NASA Mars exploration program has had a somewhat better record of success in Mars exploration, achieving success in 12 out of 17 missions launched (a 71% success rate), and succeeding in five out of six (a 83% success rate) of the launches of Mars landers."


We got this thing to travel through space, decelerate in the Martian atmosphere so that it could land.   What's there to be indifferent about?  This is the next logical step for humans to take.    I certainly prefer this over building bigger bombs.

In memory of:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/past/polarlander.html

[Alarconte]

The future of humanity was in space,  Simpy why a terms of other type of "space". Earth is limited, the resources were going. The population is incrementing.

Maybe will far in the future; But this world has becoming little for humanity

[Domino]

Get your ass to Mars.

[Dualnames]

Time and space are relative to the viewers position.

[evenwolf]

[Chicky]

Some of the comments on that blog are pretty messed up:

"Oh, my, god! I was just going to post this pic but then i though i bet bad astronomy blog post it first and omg omg you did! You're so big, fast, bad and astrnomical bad astronomy blog, come ride my milky way."

I take it im missing something here, it's a picture of a plastic space box floating onto a big earthy space planet taken by another big plastic space thing? Right? Or is my brightness too low and im missing some giant welcome sign?

On another note, i pulled a pretty cool face in the mirror the other day. I kind of wish that i had a plastic space thingy in the mirror so i could have taken a picture of my face. I think that maybe if i had i could be the one with lots of comments saying how awesome i am and then maybe someone would give me a high power green laser pointer so that i could put it on the bottom of my shed, because that is the most logical place to install a high power green laser pointer.

[GarageGothic]

I think I've actually been to the place in the first picture. Isn't it near Flagstaff, Arizona?



I see what you're saying, guys. It's a huge accomplishment to succesfully send something to a different planet. I just find the pictures totally unremarkable. Does NASA have some kind of rule against color cameras in space? I realize that special hi-res equipment like that used for the original landing photos probably uses grayscale for technological reasons, but I mean, those two last pictures evenwolf posted - they actually have a camera on Mars, and we can't even get to see a trace of red?

[vict0r]

I have to be with garagegothic here... I can't really see much remarkable about any of these pics at all, no matter how awesome it is that we have our robots on another planet..!

[Tuomas]

Yeah, I'm awesomely unimpressed. Looks like a sandbox and a fly stuck in some tar.

[Snarky]

The cool part is that they were able to take a photo of Phoenix as it was landing, from one of the other space probes we have in orbit around the planet. On that picture, you can clearly see the lander descending with the parachute unfolded.

It's cool because they were able to aim the camera at the lander as it was hurtling through the atmosphere. You almost never see photos of things happening in space (at least not human-scale things outside of our immediate neighborhood). It's all stuff like the second two pictures evenwolf posted, after all the action is over. Here you can see the most dramatic part of the mission, the moment of highest risk, as it is actually happening!

Color photos are problematic for a number of reasons, including that they often use infra-red cameras because of the lack of light (Mars being further away from the sun and all). Also, previous color photos of Mars have shown that it's essentially a monochrome planet. Without life, almost everything is the same dull reddish-brown color. Just tint the photo, and you'd get a good idea of what it would look like in color.

[MrColossal]

One of the coolest astronomy related images I've seen is this:

LINK

That's Saturn as seen by the Cassini space probe. Cassini was about 1.3 million miles from Saturn when this picture was taken. 1.3 MILLION MILES.

And it was about about BILLION miles from earth. Where is earth in that picture? On the left hand side of Saturn, above the ring about a half an inch away is a small white pixel. That's Earth. That's amazing.

[Darth Mandarb]

Yeah ... I am not overly thrilled with the quality of the image.  I had hoped that, in the year 2008, we'd have better image quality since they're spending billions of dollars on this and my 200 dollar digital camera can take better images than this.  However, for me, it's not the quality of the image it's the substance of the image that amazes me.  I would totally agree with the scientist(s) that the "science" (experiments) of these missions are FAR more important than the images ... however, to keep the public interested (and thus maintain their funding for the science) I would argue top-notch images are required.  Meh ... I'm happy with anything really.  I'm just glad we're doing it!

Something about the thought of where/what that actually is just blows my mind.

It's rather interesting to see the different levels of interest (to down-right not caring) something like this engenders.

Farl - hah!  Nah I was sober and operating during normal business hours when I saw this picture!  And it was drunk, chatting on msn, at 1:30 AM!!!

MrC ... thank you for that link!  Another one added to me "kick ass photos" collection!

[Nacho]

Farl - hah!  Nah I was sober and operating during normal business hours when I saw this picture!  And it was drunk, chatting on msn, at 1:30 AM!!!

Bah! Silly american meridian system... 

[Quintaros]

I tire of people's indifference to space missions.

...

What's there to be indifferent about?  This is the next logical step for humans to take.    I certainly prefer this over building bigger bombs.

If bomb-making and space exploration were the only two ways to use our resources,  I'd agree with you.

I also agree that space exploration is the next logical step based on what humanity's M.O. has been so far.  We are consumers and we have strip-mined the earth...therefore we need to find more resources elsewhere.  And to me that's a sad motivation for going.

I think this is cool but I don't think it's the answer to our earth bound problems. 

[InCreator]

I think it's amazing how much hungry african kids could be fed with the money spent to aquire that photo.