Holy Haleakale! Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is the spacecraft with the amazingly high-resolution HiRISE camera onboard. How high-res? Heh. Feast your eyes on this:
This is an overview of Victoria crater as seen from MRO. But at the upper left of the crater… see that silver blip? Here’s a zoom:
That silvery bump in the image is the rover Opportunity as seen from MRO in orbit around Mars!
It’s a dream of every would-be armchair space explorer (that means me too!) to actually see our hardware on the surface of another world, and HiRISE has delivered. You can easily see the rover’s tracks off to the upper left, and even the shadow of the camera mast to the lower right!
Incredible. Simply fantastic.
Opportunity reached Victoria crater recently and has been taking amazing pictures from close up. Sometimes, though, you need an overview, too. Here’s the whole crater as seen by MRO:
Gorgeous. Look at how the edges of the crater have collapsed in little landslides over the eons, and check out the detail on the dunes in the center.
And Opportunity is right there! We can see it!
Look what we’ve done!
Can you even imagine what we’ll be seeing in the coming months?
October 6th, 2006 at 10:26 am
That is very cool!
Also answers my questions about what it might be able to see (i.e, the Vikings, Beagle 2′s crash site, ect). That would be cool as well.
This is an exciting time, seeing Mars better than before!
Combined with the recent news of Hubble’s discovery of new planets near the galatic center (I’m sure we’ll see that here as well, Phil), and more of Cassini’s feats, this is a great time for astronomy.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Hot damn! It’s just so darn awesome! Wait, not just awesome. It’s PURE UBER AWESOMENESS. And the quality of that image is just breathtaking. Talk about a great camera resolution!
October 6th, 2006 at 10:32 am
That’s breathtaking.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:34 am
I always enjoy high-shots of dunes because they often look like the light/shadows cast on the bottom of swimming pools from the waves on the surface of the water.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:51 am
This is truly amazing. Am I correct in thinking that those dunes are produced by Mars’ weather? Presumably those little craters must be pretty young then.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:53 am
That is absolutely astonishing. To see not only Opportunity, but even its frigging TIRE TRACKS???
The wonders I have seen in my lifetime ….
October 6th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Words fail me, so I’ll resort to punctuation instead: !$!%&!@^!%!@~$!%!@
October 6th, 2006 at 10:57 am
This blows my mind! What a great way to explore Mars. Astronomy Picture of the Day ran a shot taken by the Rover of Victoria crater from the very spot photographed in this picture. Go to http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061002.html to see it. It really lends an interesting perspective to your picture here, Phil. See the crater from above and see it from the ground at the same time! Makes me wish I could go there. I guess with Opportunity and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter I practically am.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:09 am
I finally regained my composure after falling out of my chair.
I’m breathing again.
Damn….that is just the coolest $^&*$ image ever! When do we get a HIRISE camera in orbit around the moon?
October 6th, 2006 at 11:10 am
“When do we get a HIRISE camera in orbit around the moon”
I think in 2008, with the LRO.
I may be wrong about that, though. But it’d be nice.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:30 am
I haven’t been this excited since I lost my virginity.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:39 am
That is fickin’ amazing! The shadow of the camera mast!?!?! Absolutely, unadulterated super sweetness… *tear* sometimes, I wish I was born a little bit later, but times like this make every step of the way worth while!
October 6th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I wonder when they’ll come out with Google Mars.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I increasingly feel like these Mars missions are the Apollo of our times. Just incredible. I am speechless
October 6th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
WOW! Astounding. Can the mission scientists tell from this image whether they’ve got a chance to attempt to get Opportunity down into the crater? What a difference from those first moon landing images so many years ago (when I was much younger – and I, too, wish I’d been born just a tad later)… So much high tech stuff coming so fast. It seems like science is expanding with technology and ideas at an exponential rate. I am in awe of today’s scholars who are able to keep abreast of these breathtaking and rapidly occuring changes…
October 6th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Followed the NASA link above and my questions about exploring the crater were answered. PLUS – got a great look at part of the landscape in 3D! I am still amazed…
October 6th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
“I wonder when they will come out with google mars.”
They have.
http://www.google.com/mars/
What I find ironic is that this picture is in a better resolution than many satlite photos of the Earth.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
It’s a conspiracy. The picture of the rover is fake. The scale on the close up and the long shot don’t match.
I’m taking bets on how long it takes for my ‘evidence’
to end up repeated at GLP. Tee hee.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
wow, it’s not like those rovers are very big, and yet there they are!
October 6th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Insert Hoagland joke here …….
October 6th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
[...] (Via Bad Astronomy) Two years ago the rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars and started crawling around taking pictures for eager scientists. Now that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has arrived, it has been taking its own snapshots of the Mars surface, including the rovers themselves. [...]
October 6th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Insert Hoagland joke here …….
The bluish triangle-shaped rock in the second image is artificial!
October 6th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
[...] Visto en Bad Astronomy, un blog dedicado a astronomÃa y escepticismo cientÃfico muy interesante. También se puede leer la noticia en el sitio web de la Nasa. [...]
October 6th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.
October 6th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Gang,
It gets even better. If you go to the HiRISE website (click on Phil’s “zoomed” image), and download the original file (263.8 KByte JPEG), it’s even “zoomier” than what Phil worked with. Nearly twice as big, actually. Or, you can just go here:
http://geekcounterpoint.net/files/GC042C.html
Not only can you see the rover and the camera mast shadow, you can see the camera mast itself, standing up above the rover’s top deck. This is just about as good as it gets…
Well, at least until MRO finds that larger-than-life-size statue of Elvis that the Weekly World News wrote about some years back.
Lorne
October 6th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Hehehehe. Artifical, indeed. And from outer space as well.
This is really breathtaking.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
If we can see Opportunity, I hope there are plans to examine the area where Mars Polar Lander was supposed to land.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
“Can you even imagine what we’ll be seeing in the coming months?”
The Face, of course. And evidence of how it was destroyed. duh.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Three Cheers for NASA!!!
Now, when shall we have that same camera orbit Earths moon so we can regaze upon the LEMs’ (mabey footprints and Rover tire tracks) from Apollo 11, 12, 14,
15, 16 and 17.
By the way—the Moon looks real BIG tonight: Friday the 6th of October 2006.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Well, I found my new wallpaper. That is until we get pictures of the LEMs.
October 6th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
That’s really awesome!
October 6th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Words cannot describe how awesome this is. They just can’t.
October 6th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
I’m speechless. Good thing I’m typing this, then, eh?
Seriously, though, this is one reason I’m glad to be alive now, to witness this kind of thing. I just wish I could live to be 300 or so in order to see what comes next. And next. And next after that… you get the idea.
October 6th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Wait a second! What’s that? My CAR KEYS?!? How’d they get there?
October 6th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Same way all those socks “eaten” by my washer & drier got there. (See? They’re in a small pile by that part of the crater rim over there… no not THAT one, a little further over!)
October 6th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Ten bucks says that blue stuff in pic number two is water… on the side of the mountains. All logic fails to convert the blind.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Wow Cant wait to see the Vikings!
October 7th, 2006 at 1:55 am
[...] Bad Astronomy Blog » Best. Mars. Picture. EVAH! [...]
October 7th, 2006 at 2:53 am
To see the same place, from different perspectives, on another world; and what vistas! Astonishing.
October 7th, 2006 at 4:42 am
Ka wow!
October 7th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Pure unadulterated sweetness. Hoagland will have to come up with some new conspiracy theories about other planets now ha ha!
October 7th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Yay for MRO and the HiRISE team. That is a superb pic (or set of data).
Most excellent.
October 7th, 2006 at 9:20 am
David V: If we can see Opportunity, I hope there are plans to examine the area where Mars Polar Lander was supposed to land.
It would be hard to find it because its excact location is not know. But if it is in a HiRISE image, it should be easily visible.
October 7th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Amazing – what is that blue smear that appears to blow from the folds in the crater wall. Is it the underlying rock strata that has been eroded where the wind concentrates in the valleys at the crater edge?
October 7th, 2006 at 11:16 am
I truley stand in awe and bow to the greatness!! There are no words
October 7th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Yee Haw!!! (That’s Texan for Oh My Gawd!!!) I can’t wait for similar resolution images of Cydonia. I want to see how Hoaxland weasels out! Make no mistake, he will weasel. He will NOT back down!
October 7th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Great show! I was taken by surprise as I suddenly realised that these shots were the real thing. I had not expected to see anything as good and as detailed as when I went to one of the links (posted by Lorne Ipsum at 2.23pm), and downloaded the whole shot. I had dismissed seeing this as clear as previous comments suggested that ground resolution would be at about a meter.
There is one thing though, and I have previously mentioned this in an earlier posting some months ago, but no one else commented about it at the time. You see, I have difficulty in resolving the “crater”. It is a dome to me, a rather ragged one, and in fact , looks even more lika a pancake with its scolloped edges. It is only the full shot I have a problem with, the small segments, ie the enlarged bits, are OK. Previous crater photos have sometimes been OK, but with rotation of the troublesome images, I have been able to resolve them, sometimes instantly, while others have taken a little while, but then reverted. This time nothing worked, and I suggest that is because the shadows are more pronounced and on the inside, and there is a confusing yellow where I would expect a shadow. Rotating this image did not reveal a crater, just a pancake! Anybody else having this viewing problem?
Is that another set of tracks to the left and lower, going to the crater’s edge? And what about the small circle thing at the edge in the lower right quadrant? Another recent crater perhaps? These questions would not arise in the three images as above, but they can be seen in the ones as downloaded from the link provided.
Ivan.
October 7th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
*Jumping up and down in excitement*
WOW! That is so COOL!
October 7th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I can see your rover from here…
This is just sweet. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped a picture of Victoria Crater and has captured the Mars rover Opportunity. (HT to Bad Astronomy Blog)……
October 7th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
That is way cool.
October 7th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
icesmith…. Try looking at the image with it rotated 180 degrees, your mind might be able to turn the pancake into a crater. Looking at it upside down often works, easy to do if you have a laptop, not so easy if you have a desktop.
October 7th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Holy SHAMOLY!!!! OOHH!!! YEAH!!! AAHHHH!!!
OWWWHH YEAHHH!!!
HOOOOOO!!
October 7th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
cool i think they do have satellites that have same resolution they are called spy satellites.
October 7th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Mr. Plait, It may be eons old, but I on space.com there is this ufo debunking thing and it features your website at #6, http://www.space.com/top10_alienencounters_debunked-6.html
Just noticed :p
But those Mars pictures are really GREAT!!!!!! It’s about time!
October 7th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Is that another set of tracks to the left and lower, going to the crater’s edge?
Icesmith, I was wondering the same thing. Looks to me as though the rover approached the crater’s edge, then moved north (generally speaking) to find a better vantage point.
Pure speculation on my part. Maybe someone else can elaborate with facts.
October 8th, 2006 at 12:05 am
Have just downloaded the 16MB jpeg image, it took a little while even with a cable connection but WOW!!!
It looks like the Rover enters the picture near the top left making a beeline for the small crater with the orange flecks around it, skirts around said crater then heads for “Duck Bay”; from there it starts back on itself then arcs upwards (towards the top of the photo) before making a 90° right turn to get to where it currently appears .
Fantastic stuff! Trouble is, this means we all have to check satellite positions before taking a leak in the middle of a desert
October 8th, 2006 at 12:08 am
Wow, something we put in orbit of another planet taking a photo of something else we put on the planet. Wow, just wow!
If it this wonderful and awe-inspiring now, imagine what it will be to see humans there
October 8th, 2006 at 12:23 am
The mind boggles!
October 8th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Thanks HiTime, but that is one tactic I developed last time, reasoning that shadows are best recognised by having the light source shining from over a shoulder (the Sun), and as can be expected, seems natural. Although my 21″ monitor is too bulky to “rotate”, I did try looking from over the top, but to no avail. To me the condition is strange, hence my couriosity as to whether others noticed the effect. Usually I can get the image to stick at least for a while. This time – no joy. It’s probably the yellow tinge that is the culprit.
Ivan.
October 8th, 2006 at 2:29 am
Icemith, I saw instantly that it was a crater, but when I turn my head upside down I can force my brain to see a dome.
October 8th, 2006 at 2:50 am
PK, you can turn your head upside down???!
What are you, some kind of head-detaching alien?
October 8th, 2006 at 9:25 am
icemith, it may be that you’re thinking of it in terms of a “typical” lunar crater, with raised edges like a volcanic crater. This is more of a hole etched in the surrounding plain, most likely due to its age and erosion.
The sun is from upper left, and roughly equivalent to “late afternoon.” You can see the shadows that the cliff edges at upper left cast from the lower angle of the sun. I think these are the things that most illustrate it being a crater. If it was a pancake shape illuminated from the opposite direction, the shadows would be cast in the opposite direction across the plain.
Meanwhile, the crater edges at lower right are fully illuminated and reflect brightly, but have no shadows until the cliff edges begin to get oblique to the sunlight.
You can also see the erosion paths, mostly at those same edges, trailing loose sand down into the bowl of the crater. In the middle, the accumulated loose sand has formed minor dunes, my guess is from being stirred by the remaining vortices of the storms that have scoured the plain. Being in a hollow, those dunes have some protection. On top of a dome, they likely would not even exist.
Or if it helps, think of this as a view from the underside of the surface, looking up at your pancake dome
Meanwhile, my own optical illusion: Is it just me, or does the rover look like a little fist flipping the bird to all the hoax nitwits?
October 8th, 2006 at 9:33 am
How long until we get a similar picture of Mare Tranquillitatis with the lunar lander base and flag dead centre, proving to all those conspiracy theorists that Armstrong and Aldrin did land on the Moon?
October 8th, 2006 at 11:20 am
I cannot wait until cameras of this resolution are in orbit around the rest of the terrestrial worlds in our solar system.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow!!!!
October 8th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
That is odd you would see a dome, icemith. Our brains believe light comes from above. Shadows at the top should give you a crater. Shadows at the bottom give you a dome.
Your brain may need a tune up.
Darn, my rumor generating post hasn’t been picked up on GLP yet. They actually have a couple of rational posts about the images of the Mars rover.
But there was a recent thread on this fascinating image on Mars.
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_m12/images/M08/M0804688.html
I’d love to see an MROrbiter close up of this area.
October 8th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
“How long until we get a similar picture of Mare Tranquillitatis with the lunar lander base and flag dead centre, proving to all those conspiracy theorists that Armstrong and Aldrin did land on the Moon?”
Ph. This will be fake, too. THEY added landers. Or automatically lands dummies. Or whatever.
October 9th, 2006 at 5:52 am
I am absolutely blown away with this photo. I’ve been watching it and coming back to it for days. It ranks up there with the Apollo 8 view of Earthrise from the Moon (as they rounded the far side), the first time I saw Hubble’s Pillars of Creation (M16, not the rifle, thank goodness!!), the first time I saw the Viking footpad on Mars or even a shot of Pathfinder from Sojourner. Visualizing something I’ve thought about before from a completely different (and real!) angle. “Sokath, his eyes open!” (From “Darmok”, ST: TNG, http://rec.horus.at/trek/lists/darmok.html#Reference)
What a moment crystallized in time! Our little intrepid emissary, the little “Rover that could”, boldly going where no people have gone before — places we can only see at this point because we haven’t figured out how to get people there yet — and maybe we’ll never get there personally.
It really does bring a mist to my eyes, just to think how far technology has come and what its potential is.
Previous Mars orbiters have had to “roll” while taking an exposure to increase the resolution at ground level. Geeez, we can almost see its license plate from orbit! ~8-)>
I’ve worked at Griffith Observatory in L.A. for since 1973, and we’re involved in a high-stakes endplay right now for the sanctity of astronomical education. They’re reopening for the first time in 5 years after a HUGE renovation, and the brand new planetarium is going to have a 22-minute, highly glitzy show where actors have been hired to deliver it — there are NO plans to have a full-fledged planetarium show where a lecturer (such as myself and 8 others) will actually have a chance to talk to an audience about anything in astronomy. People will be rushed into the theatre to see something with little explanation and no relation to current events (the show is “locked” in place — there is no way to change a visual without massive and expensive re-rendering), and then rushed out. After 5 years, to think about it, there are no school shows in place, and there are no plans to use the most highly educated people at Griffith (aside from the Director and a couple other full-timers) to explain anything to the public in real time.
They have a new $6M (some say $7M) projector that shows a perfect sky — Zeiss retooled their operations to make a more realistic sky for Griffith — and it’s going to be used as a backdrop — as “wallpaper”!!! — during about 5 minutes of that 22-minute show, and no one will explain anything in that sky, and it won’t even be the current sky for that evening!!
A picture such as this marvel of technology will be relegated to a picture wall — maybe with a caption. And people will walk by it, day after day, with no one to explain it unless they grab a Guide and actually ask.
This is exactly the sort of thing that people need to see in a planetarium, where a lecturer can set a context and have a discussion about what all of this means.
Sorry to rant — I’m sorry that I can’t “bring” this excitement — this turning point in my visual life — to people who can appreciate it in a planetarium: people who can then go out and vote for more space-related things to help bring humanity closer to the stars.
October 9th, 2006 at 7:39 am
Ah, it worked! I can see the ‘crater’ and it is dished. I just opened the topic and immediately it resolved concave and not the dome as with my previous attempts to see the crater. And I cannot explain what is different from the other times. I’m cured! I’m cured. I can get on with Life.
Ivan.
October 9th, 2006 at 7:49 am
Oh drat, it’s gone again. Oh well, back to the “medication”
Where can I get a brain tune-up?
(By-the-way, if you can force a ‘dome’ view, look closely and it appears as if the Sun is shining from the lower right, and all the clues are correct for that dome illusion. It is difficult then to revert to the correct and intended view.)
Ivan.
October 9th, 2006 at 11:44 am
In my haste to comment on my initial elation, I forgot to thank Just Al for his analysis of the scene etc., but even foreknowledge of those features, only yield the expected result some of the time. As above at 07:49, I had lost it again, minutes after the successful rendition.
The next attempt only minutes later again, I was happy once more. Obviously now, a few hours later, I still have the gift. But tomorrow? Who knows?
Ivan. (He who likes to think cannot be fooled!)
October 9th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Hi Steve, too bad Griffith lost sight of the ball there. I think the observatory is brilliant, and not just as a make-out spot (my wife took us there to an astronomy lecture on our third date). I hope the rest of the refurbishments have gone well.
October 9th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hey, PK —
Well, I proposed to my first wife not far from where Kelly eventually made out with Dylan in 90210. That marriage didn’t work out, so my second spousal unit and I met up there, and that’s worked very well. Our son LOVES Astronomy, and I was really looking forward to learn more — but it looks as if it won’t be from the planetarium show. Too bad. When the “Satellite” was open, he actually learned a lot of the informal lectures there AND he learned to operate the Starry Night program used there on our own home computer. He even used iTunes to sync the planetarium effects to music.
The rest of the place is great! I’m VERY impressed with what’s been done. As Dr. Krupp says, Griffith Observatory really is like the hood ornament of L.A.
And so is the planetarium! Well, it could be. Just because we’re near the Hollywood sign doesn’t mean we have to do the Hollywood “thing”. If people wanted to see IMAX, they’d go to IMAX. If they needed to see a glitzy movie, they’d see a movie.
But where else around L.A. can you see the sky and hear an explanation about it with the grandeur of what used to be give-and-take planetarium shows at Griffith?
— Steve >>>>
October 10th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
[...] I’m about a week late with the news (It happened on the 3rd of October), and Phil Plait’s blog, via the Huffington Post, was where I first stumbled across the story. I actually intended to post some different HiRISE (the name of the camera on the satellite — called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — MRO) shots to not be quite such a copycat, but alas, these were the only color ones I’ve found to date. [...]
October 10th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Thanks for this. As the trackback above suggests, I belatedly posted on this for my little blog.
I like the discussion here; I particularly like Steve Cooperman’s comments at 552am yesterday.
-wolfe
October 11th, 2006 at 11:08 am
[...] Bad Astronomy Blog » Best. Mars. Picture. EVAH! [...]
October 31st, 2006 at 9:39 am
Wow!! I didn’t know how BEAUTIFUL Mars is!!
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:57 am
I wonder if there are similar pictures _somewhere_ that show the various Apollo landing sites and rover excursions.
May 20th, 2007 at 2:24 am
[...] with some of its tracks) in the photograph (remember, it’s taken from orbit). Check out Bad Astronomy for more, including links to the closeup pictures showing the [...]
August 24th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I’m sick of the governement wasting all my hard-earned money. I want my money back. NASA, like the rest of the government, is nothing more than a bunch of THIEVES. Arrest them all, I say.
August 26th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
[...] Bad Astronomy.) This was written by amosquito. Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007, at 4:42 pm. Filed under [...]
October 18th, 2007 at 9:37 am
awsome !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!thats amasing how ur site sucks!!!!!!!
December 15th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
I have recently been looking at images on a lot of websites for Mars, the moon and everything else. I am not an expert, I just admire the results of the technology. (I see some people would still be killing their food with a stick and living under a tree.)
The question I have is why we don’t see some glancing blows? Craters that show hits that came in from an angle are seldom seen. Even with wind or some water erosion, you would think some would show. Even the moon shots show only a couple and there isn’t any wind there.
Any comments?