There is a buzz about a 1PM impromptu news conference at NASA today about some “significant” finds on Mars from the Mars Global Surveyor. Word has it it may be about water currently existing on the surface, I was under the impression that they knew ice water exists on the surface, so perhaps this is liquid moving water?! Link to a news story.
More Landers on Mars from Orbit
Some new images of Mars landers taken by MRO. The first is the Viking 1 and 2 landers which landed on Mars some 30 years ago. The third is the Spirit rover’s current position.
Viking 2
Viking 1
Spirit Rover
Credit Where Credit is Due
I recently posted the existence of this blog to another forum of serious researchers at www.unmannedspaceflight.com and since have had a few terse comments posted here (which I have now edited as of July 2007). My intention in posting there was to have these people take a look and see if maybe I was getting anything wrong or taking too broad a liberty with extending some images to fill the proportions of a wallpaper image. What I have had instead is a few people angry with me that I didn't credit certian people enough for some of the fine work they have done. The one example that I would really agree with was the Venus Projection image i colorized. Don P. Mitchell really did some extraordinary work on re-translating the old Venera data into those images used and I removed his credit from the color version which was water-marked. I left it in the original B&W image on the post, and linked to him in the text… but the wallpaper was void of any credit back to him and I have repaired that. Some other comments have been made about other usage and I guess I am feeling like it starts to get silly. The flash thing at the top picks from about 30 random images and apparently one of them was an image that someone had worked on. Now, I can remember staring at these places when I was in Junior High School and the image I used up top was nearly identical to this image I have been told was produced by a freelancer more recently. You see, NASA image are famously copyright free as the missions are paid through government funds… or taxes. So the trick here is to know when it is NASA free and not NASA free. When I made many of these wallpaper images I was not sharing them on a blog and didn't know I would one day. So I wasn't taking notation on where I found the original and I wasn't looking to see if anyone was claiming credit.
So, if you are one of these people whose materials I may have unintetionally lifted… please keep in mind this is non-profit, I do this in the interest of public interest of space exploration and that I admire the work you do very much. Just drop me a line and I will brand most anything with your credit and update the files. As a matter of fact, many of these freelancers maintain their own websites containing awesome galleries of images rarely seen by mainstream media so I am thinking adding some of these sites to a nice links page could be a great resource as well. One great example I recently found is this one for Mars Rover images: MER Imagery run by James Canvin.
From now on I will try to take note of where I am getting these things and run a credit and provide a link. The more the merrier.
That’s No Moon
In 1977 George Lucas released Star Wars and in it was featured the now infamous Death Star space station which was justly destroyed in the films final scene. That same year Voyager 1 was launched from Earth on its way to the outer solar system. On its way through the Saturnian system it relayed back images of a moon that bore a striking resemblance to Lucas’s own vision of the Death Star.
The only feature that really makes the resemblance complete is the presence of the Herschel crater which, like the Death Star, occupies almost 1/3 the moon’s own diameter. The central peak, which often occurs on larger sized impacts, also makes for a good stand in for the giant laser turret that destroys planets. With results of the Voyager mission streaming in a few years after the film became a smash hit and just a few months after the release of “Empire Strikes Back” one has to wonder if anyone at mission control uttered the words, “That’s no moon”.
However, while the circular feature on the Death Star destroys other worlds, Mimas’s giant circular feature nearly destroyed its own self. The crater is so large in comparison to the size of the moon itself it is believed that it was quite close to shattering the small moon into many bits which maybe could have resulted in even more rings for Saturn. As it is there are fractures on the opposite side of the moon which some suggest may be stress lines from that same impact and show evidence that the moon did start to become unhinged. Proportional to the size of the body itself, this is the largest crater in the Solar System with only Mars’s moon Phobos coming close with its Stickney crater.
The Surface of Venus Revealed
During the cold-war between America and the Soviets the real race was to the moon, but once that race was won a lesser race began to see who would master Mars exploration. After an unbelievably long series of failed Soviet missions to Mars — America managed to take the lead position in Mars exploration as well, with the Mariner and Viking missions. So the Soviets turned their eyes to our other neighbor, Venus, which seemed to garner very little attention from America apart from a few flyby missions. The Russians had Venus all to themselves and really didn't have to be too concerned with anyone beating them to the punch.
So during the early 70’s the Soviets managed to be quite successful with multiple Venera missions to Venus which included various flybys, orbiters, radar mapping of the surface and even multiple landings on the surface. Some of the missions had failed, but most completed their missions and we have the above color images to prove it. Recently though, I stumbled across these projections of the above images which I have never seen before.
Someone who knows about such things, Don P. Mitchell (see more on his blog mentallandscape.com) had returned to the original data sent to us by the Venera spacecraft from over 30 years ago and with new computing techniques, managed to reveal to us Venus anew. Instead of just looking at some stones and tiny hints at what a Venusian sky might look like, these projections show what it might actually look like walking on the surface of Venus. The main part of the image above is a composite from spherical projections, which are seen at the top-right, remapped to perspective projections. The way the projection works is the closer you get to the very center of the image, the less accurate the representation may be. However, there is evidence in the data to assume most of what you see here even at the very center where the data was at most thin, is still fairly accurate.
Unfortunately the new projection images were only in black and white and i really missed what seemed to be really fascinating color from the original Venera images… so I tried to colorize it to match the originals.
This interpretation is artistic and not based upon any data other than looking at the original images and trying to assume some of those colors back into Don’s black and white image.
