Sooooooo... you want to go to Mars...

Curiosity does have a million watt laser....

 

It's probably just Venus or chinese lanterns and an over-active imagination.

 

If they are dead pixels or aberrations in the camera lens, shouldn't they be in every picture?

 

I did have a closer look at it and there is definitely something moving across the image. It doesn't look like a dead pixel which would stay in one place, it doesn't appear to be a fleck of dust on the lens as it doesn't move around like it would when the lens moved during focusing.Not sure it's an artifact because of image compression or similar either.

Could it have been a passing satellite though? But I guess if that were the case, Nasa would have said so. There do seem to be quite a lot of these weird occurrences, first the moon, then the space shuttle in orbit, then the space station and now this on mars.

Any serious speculation?

 

Great pic.

Ah...don't worry about the sun...it's the human virus on the planet that is killing it. Smith was right.

 

You sound so hopeful, Ammo... but as said in the mouseover text for this comic:

 

Re: photo posted @ top of thread

I've been there. Some of those Martian dust storms can mess with your head when they kick up in the spring, and sometimes enough to convince you that you've seen things like walking At At's. I even thought I saw the Titanic once going down into a ravine, but again... and shame on me - just another dust storm. Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them.

 

The joke on this WEEK in TECH 368 | TWiT.TV was that the pics look like that of New Mexico... and that's where the lander is. Then again, Adam Curry (a guest for that ep) believes the moon landing was a hoax...

 

lol well that picture does appear to have two halves to it; a very clear and focused near ground, then an alien almost photoshopped landscape added on top. The moon pics were similar too - all clear foreground and then the distance looked like it was dumped on. do not know bout you, but when I take a landscape picture from my camera it gets everything in clearly. (playing devils advocate here).

Was never one for the consiracy theories but then you hear things like Nasa 'losing' the original video tapes of the moon landings. Hmmm. Of all the tapes to lose eh? Did the Americans actually fake the first moon landing just to beat the Russians and then the rest were genuine? Were they all genuine, all faked or something inbetween?

We last went to the moon nearly 40 years ago! 40 years ago. What were tv's and cars like back then and then look at what we have now, yet it's still way too hard and expensive to go back or to mars? I get the feeling the western world is at the stage the Romans were in about 312 AD.

 

Well, foreground being in focus and background being blurry has to do w/a camera's aperture (setting, if possible) and resulting depth of field, or lack of. Many photographers intentionally make their background blurry.

 

We could go back to the Moon. We could probably do it for less than the last time (let's call that $175 Billion in today's dollars, a small fraction of the bank bailouts, or 18 months worth of the Afghanistan war). We don't seem to be willing to give up either of those in order to go back to the Moon. What would you want to do once you got there?

Mars is at least 240 times more distant than the moon. Rockets go up exponentially based on how much they have to carry (for example food, etc.). There is the problem of bone loss due to zero-gravity. There is the problem of solar radiation. There are many problems, all of which need solutions before we can go. None of them appear to be solvable by just having smaller, faster computers.

 

We could go back to the Moon. We could probably do it for less than the last time (let's call that $175 Billion in today's dollars, a small fraction of the bank bailouts, or 18 months worth of the Afghanistan war). We don't seem to be willing to give up either of those in order to go back to the Moon. What would you want to do once you got there?

Mars is at least 240 times more distant than the moon. Rockets go up exponentially based on how much they have to carry (for example food, etc.). There is the problem of bone loss due to zero-gravity. There is the problem of solar radiation. There are many problems, all of which need solutions before we can go. None of them appear to be solvable by just having smaller, faster computers.

 

I sure would love to get the center of that planet molten and spinning again... We could then build up the atmosphere and get some rain going and then... Oh the forests I could plant on that planet... Total tree planter heaven! Hopefully we'll figure out how to do that soon!

 

NASA is a government organization. That should provide a total and complete understanding of losing stuff.

As for faking, the Apollo 11, 14, & 15 missions placed mirrored refectors at each landing site. If these landings were faked, then covert missions to the moon were executed to place these in position so that all the laser ranging experiments could be run successfully by different universities and observatories all over the world. (The Soviets also placed similar reflectors on their lunar rovers that we detected, so we proved their stuff was not faked.)

Would we have even gone to the moon if there was no space race with the Russians? It's actually a serious question. Maybe one day we will find something in space or on a planet that does not belong there. Then it gets fun.

 

....Mars is no place to raise your kids.

In fact it's cold as Hell

And there's no one there to raise them if you did

And all this science I don't understand...