Mars Curiosity Rover Shoots Video of Phobos Moon Rising 67
An anonymous reader writes "This movie clip shows Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars, passing overhead, as observed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in a series of images centered straight overhead starting shortly after sunset. Phobos first appears near the lower center of the view and moves toward the top of the view. The clip runs at accelerated speed; the amount of time covered in it is about 27 minutes"
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:5, Insightful)
Either your expectations are too high, or your sense of wonder is too low, to get much out of this. Personally, I loved it.
Sigh... Louis C.K. was correct, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy": http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-i_fun [dailymotion.com]
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General Life Protip: People who generally describe everything in absolutes and black-and-white scenarios, are usually very very likely to be morons too dumb to see that it's not that simple. This does not exclude this Protip.
Also, I think if you're still fascinated by boring gray rocks that all look alike, you haven't seen *shit*. Any stone pit is more "fascinating" than that. You've seen one gray rock you've seen 'em all. And to any being with a healthy brain everything that's not new anymore, and also not
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one was disappointed, but only because I fully expected to see evidence of leather goddesses [wikipedia.org].
Damnit.
OTOH, the sense of wonder was less to do with eye-candy, and more to do with mentally placing myself on that remote plain, watching the thing rise. Sort of like how I felt the first time I saw a satellite pass over on a clear, moonless evening in the country.
Sure, it's just a dot, but as someone elsewhere in here said, when you know a little about what you're watching, that little moving dot becomes pretty fricking amazing.
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500, we could probably even have some sort of replicator magic doodaa thing that harry potters food in to existence or something.
Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. It might be magic, but it isn't Harry Potter's magic.
Re: spectacular ... not (Score:2)
It's Scotty magic. He's a whiz with the replicators.
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem is that unless you're very familiar with Mars and its satellites it's a little bit of a let down to see a group of pixels move across the screen, rather than the stunning moon rise we see regularly here on earth. I know I was.
It's not that I have lost any sense of wonderment, it's just that my lack of knowledge allowed me to build up a mental image of a visibly cratered moon rising over a dusty red planet's horizon. Then I searched for photos of Phobos [wikimedia.org] and realised that that was pretty dumb.
Compare this to my awe at watching the transit of Venus (online, it was too cloudy where I was in the UK to see the exit), and all I was watching was a black circle move in front of the sun, but that was how I expected it to be.
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem is that unless you're very familiar with Mars and its satellites it's a little bit of a let down to see a group of pixels move across the screen, rather than the stunning moon rise we see regularly here on earth. I know I was.
Nope. If you stop and think about it for even 1 second you get this:
It's a moonrise ON ANOTHER PLANET!
ANOTHER PLANET!!!!
A MOONRISE ON ANOTHER PLANET!!!!
Basically if those words alone aren't enough then you have no soul. And I don't even believe in the existence of souls.
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Re:spectacular ... not (Score:5, Informative)
You're not too far off the mark. Phobos and Deimos were named after fear and dread [wikipedia.org], respectively.
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It should really fill you with a sense of wonder when you think about the Earth's Moon, realizing that it is really a dwarf planet all to itself and in fact one of the largest "natural satellites" in the Solar System... on the same general size as the Galilean moons of Jupiter or even Titan and Triton. Phobos and Deimos really are not much more than captured asteroids. Indeed I think the Moon should be considered as a planet... as much as Pluto, Vesta, and Ceres currently are considered as such by the IAU
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I think the problem is that unless you're very familiar with Mars and its satellites it's a little bit of a let down to see a group of pixels move across the screen
What are you talking about? When I first saw Phobos being rendered before my eyes, even if at a shoddier pixel count than one would like, I was instantly amazed. The sense of wonder took whole weeks to dissipate, and got a second wind when I reached the Cyberdemon. And I knew absolutely jack about Mars back then.
Re:spectacular ... not (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, it is a little disappointing. I mean, I could have taken a much better video than this. Except for the whole "having to take the video from fucking Mars" part.
Re: Our tax dollars wasted yet again... (Score:2)
Derp.
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Um, recession ended a few years ago. The economy has shown improvement over the last 3 months in unemployment, the stock market, and consumer spending. We are still the world's largest manufacturer, with many companies building factories and foreign companies returning manufacturing here, and China owns far less debt than Japan and France (and all foreign holdings is a small fraction of total debt).
Businesses exist for profit. There is no current economic motivation for a business to take pictures on Mars..
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My video:
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Nothing short of sighting God himself would impress me at 2 pixels wide. I just can't get into the "that's mindblowing" frame of mind at that resolution. And we've been able to take pictures from space for a long time now.
MRO's images are totally awesome (Score:5, Informative)
For more immediate visual gratification appreciated by a wider audience, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [wikipedia.org] provides wonderfully detailed images of Phobos [nasa.gov].
That was the instrument that caught this mind-numbing image of the Phoenix lander as it was descending on its parachute [arizona.edu]. Words are really quite superfluous.
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Thanks for posting that third link - I hadn't seen that image before. As you say, words can't do it justice. Incredible.
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For more immediate visual gratification appreciated by a wider audience, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [wikipedia.org] provides wonderfully detailed images of Phobos [nasa.gov].
That was the instrument that caught this mind-numbing image of the Phoenix lander as it was descending on its parachute [arizona.edu]. Words are really quite superfluous.
That's a great image, I wouldn't consider it mind-numbing [merriam-webster.com] at all.
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Perhaps the words "mind blowing" should have been used instead. As for a reference showing it being used above... try to read the context of what was being said rather than trying to be a jackass and a grammar Nazi for a change. Capturing an image of a flying vehicle in the atmosphere of another planet as seen by yet another spacecraft on an unrelated mission really is an incredible accomplishment and something that deserves a little bit of awe rather than trying to smack down the person making the observ
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Maybe, however, you have a point. So in the spirit of mending my jackass ways I'm not even going to bring up what a mess this "sentence" is: "That sure as hell isn't "dull, boring, or tedious" except trying to respond to a troll... which certainly
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It's only a model.
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In an astronomical scale Mars is hardly 'distant'
Hardly relevant. The point is, that in a "mobile ground based remotely-controlled-by-humans camera" scale, it most definitely IS distant.
I'm not sure what is more annoying - dismissing the video because it doesn't look impressive enough, or dismissing it because it's not much of an achievement anyway. All I know is, anyone not impressed / moved by this does not understand it.
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I agree with you that a mission to Europa is DEVOUTLY to be desired - let us hope that Europa Clipper goes ahead! However, that surely doesn't make film of an extraterrestrial moonrise any less awe inspiring - and for what it is, not how it appears.
moonrise during the day? (Score:2)
Anyway, nice one!
Probably Mars wont experience a lot of tidal forces from such a tiny rock
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The moon rises within the day on Earth too.
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Did you actually read the post you replied to?
did you guys read the article on the site this was spam advert for? "This movie clip shows Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars, passing overhead, as observed by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity in a series of images centered straight overhead starting shortly after sunset. Phobos first appears near the lower center of the view and moves toward the top of the view. The clip runs at accelerated speed; the amount of time covered in it is about 27 minutes. - See more at: http://spaceindustrynews.com/ma [spaceindustrynews.com]
Error in headline (Score:2)
It's not rising, it's already overhead.
That's no moon!!! (Score:2)
Obligatory Star Wars reference.
What's the big, bright glow in the... (Score:3)
lower center of the move? The Sun? (This was supposed to be just after sunset.)
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Question: does our sky go dark like flipping a switch the instant the sun is "below" the horizon, or does the atmosphere scatter enough light to light the sky for an hour after sunset?
Now that you arrive at the answer to that question, answer this one: does Mars have an appreciable atmosphere capable of raleigh scattering, or is it so tenuous (like our Moon's) that it is little more than a few particles and gas so thin that there is no measurable pressure - and barely qualifies as gas, but more of random pa
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Atmospheric scattering was actually the first thing I thought of.
According to Wikipedia and a calculator, Martian air pressure is 1/159,489th that of Earth's (I already knew that it was a tiny fraction), so that's why I questioned how much scattering could happen.
KSP (Score:3, Funny)
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I would, but I'm being too anal about getting my ship put together in orbit. Jebediah's getting bloody impatient in the hitch-hiker module.
clickberry.tv embedded iframe link is useless (Score:2)
I had to manually scrape the html to find a link to the actual video.
They claim to support IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, but somehow I think what they really mean is that they only support Mac and Windows.
Obligatory: (Score:1)