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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is starting to send ‘em back now. The image above is a 1/2 res crop of a 3000×2300 image of the martian surface– click it for the page with the full-res version.
Here is the bigger of those three craters at full res (though slightly JPG compressed– don’t tell Hoagland or he’ll claim he sees the London Symphony Orchestra there):
It looks like there is rubble and dust in the crater floor, no doubt sculpted by a billion years of thin but high-speed winds. Unfortunately, I could not find a scale for this image, so I don’t know how big the crater is.
Not only that, but Venus Express has already switched on its cameras, and delivered this interesting snapshot:
That spectacular image was taken over Venus’s south pole. The left hand side is the daylight half, and is a composite of visible and UV filters. The right hand side is the night side, and is in infrared with false colors. Where the image is dark, the clouds are thick, blocking the heat of the surface from escaping. Where it’s bright, the clouds are higher and thinner, allowing some of the IR to escape to space. You are seeing Venus’s runaway greenhouse effect in action in this image.
This image was taken when VE was still about 200,000 miles above the surface of Venus– roughly the distance of the Moon from the Earth.
Expect a lot more cool stuff from these orbiters as time goes on.’
April 13th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
That’s not the London Symphony Orchestra in that crater, it’s obviously the Texas A&M Marching Band!
I didn’t see it on the site – are this true or false color? Just curious if these are visible light or other types of images. I gather from the NASA page they’re still fine tuning the calibration of the cameras and I’m assuming that the detectors include ranges outside visible as well.
jbs
April 13th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
This is simply colorized greyscale. This is a perspective shot generated from the first MRO image. That image was taken in visible light taken through a red filter (which tends to help detail stand out on Mars).
April 13th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Brought to you by the letter “V”…
One of the first images from the Venus Express Orbiter. Left side is night side, right is day side. Incredible. h/t: Bad Astronomy……
April 13th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
OMG! It’s a set of footprints from a Martian Fighting Machine! Stop taking flu vaccines, it’s our only chance for survival!
April 14th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Another nice post, BA. I love that day / night pic of Venus. Incidentally, have you visited the Cassini-Huygens site recently? They have photos that C-H took as it swung by Jupiter, centred on Jupiter’s poles:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMZU1NFGLE_0.html
April 14th, 2006 at 2:07 am
Re: HiRISE detector wavelength ranges
There are three filter bands: blue-green (400nm-600nm), red (550nm-850nm), and near-IR (800nm-1000nm).
There are ten 2048-pixel detectors arranged end-to-end with red filters, producing a monochromatic swath 20,264 pixels wide at a resolution of 1 microradian per pixel. (Some edge pixels are lost for detector overlap.) Co-aligned with the center two red detectors are two blue-green and two near-IR detectors producing a swath 4072 pixels wide that overlaps the center of the red swath.
Since separate detectors are used for the three wavelength channels, HiRISE can produce three-color images at the same 1 microradian resolution, albeit over a narrower swath.
– Timothy
April 14th, 2006 at 6:38 am
As a dedicated fan of all things stupid I felt compelled to take a look at Hoagland’s “research” website. He’s already found striking evidence of “hyperdimensional physics” in the atmosphere of Venus. George, this is obviously a coverup by the ESA.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:38 am
Gee, that nice MArtian crater is obviously a space port processing site, just waiting for our arrival,,,please have your intergalactic passports handy before disembarking,,,
April 14th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Tom wrote:He’s already found striking evidence of “hyperdimensional physics†in the atmosphere of Venus.
Nonsense hyperdimensional vortexes rotate the other way.
This is clearly a chronic hysterisis
April 14th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Even that compressed image looks great. MRO will deserve it’s own photo album (like “Beyond”) after a while.
And Venus Express is already providing good stuff, I see. I bet many mysteries await us there.
April 14th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Following BA’s remarks about Hoagland’s, I had to go visit his site (forgive me for increasing his website hit ratio).
Anyway, after reading some of the, uh, “Research” he’s presented … I wondered, exactly how much Meth does one have to do to come up with such … emmm … what’s the word I’m looking for, oh, right. cr*p.
… and clearly, that’s NOT an Orchestra, but a small grouping of Monoliths. You people really need to clear the lint out of your eyes.
:p
April 16th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Ya know, looking at the image of Venus I get an impression of Heaven and that other place. Turns out they’re the same place!
jbs