1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images
1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images
we should go there
We should have gone there 40 years ago.
actually though
if congress kept nasa at 5% of the national budget all those years, by now we'd have bases all over the solar system. And right now all they're getting is 0.4%
And they never should've canceled that nuclear rocket engine program, NERVA, like imagine of those on the space shuttle. It would probably be able to leave low earth orbit and maybe even reach the moon. And they totally should've launched the Sea Dragon, that wouldv'e been amazing.
I don't think I've ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
Sky colors are generally weather-dependent, even seasonal in nature. During dust storms (see, for example, the disastrous global storm of 2018) the sky gets darker and muddier. Cloudy days and evenings can add some different colors, and then of course there are the famous pale blue sunsets.
The question of whether Mars gets blue skies has been debated for decades. Personally, aside from the sunsets, I don't see what conditions could produce the blue skies you find on other worlds with much thicker atmospheres; the dust just never completely settles out enough to wash those reddish tones away altogether. The debate will continue, but there's probably only one to settle it - sending humans.
I should add that there are plenty of shots with the horizon included from every landed mission, in case you're curious.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
Here's a 360 movie (view full screen) that shows the horizon in all its glory, this one was take with the MastCam-Z camera and IIRCit was the rover's first MastCam 360 degree panorama in Jezero crater
Note the daytime colour of the sky :)
https://mastcamz.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Mastcam-Z_Sol4_Horizon_Delta_720p.mp4
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
The colour of the sky varies really depends on the amount of dust in the sky, as well as the time of day, and where the sun is in the sky relative to the camera.
The true colour of Mars is subject to much debate. I believe the colour of the sky when there are moderate levels of suspended dust in the atmosphere is a light butterscotch, but the higher you look in the sky the colour fades a little and the darker it gets as Mars has a really skinny atmosphere. When the rest of the image come down NASA / JPL will publish the full selfie, it may be a 360 degree selfie, if that's the case you'll see different shades of colour depending where the sun was in the sky at the time of day.
We do get blue skies on Mars, but only at sunset. Here on Earth we get reddish sunsets because of the way the light is scattered at sunset. On Mars the suspended dust in the atmosphere scatters light differently, hence Blue sunsets on the Red Planet, and Red sunsets on the Blue Planet. Here's a great comparison that won the APOD some years ago by Damia Bouic, she called it Two Worlds, One Sun.
APOD Explanation: "How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here side-by-side. A quick inspection will reveal that the Sun appears slightly smaller from Mars than from Earth. This makes sense since Mars is 50% further from the Sun than Earth. More striking, perhaps, is that the Martian sunset is noticeably bluer near the Sun than the typically orange colors near the setting Sun from Earth. The reason for the blue hues from Mars is not fully understood, but thought to be related to forward scattering properties of Martian dust. The terrestrial sunset was taken in 2012 March from Marseille, France, while the Martian sunset was captured in 2015 by NASA's robotic Curiosity rover from Gale crater on Mars."
IMAGE LINK https://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/TwoWorlds_OneSun_sunsetboardV2.jpg
Fun fact, our sky isn't actually blue, but it's the reflection of the oceans in the atmosphere that gives us a "blue" sky
Lord Rayleigh disagrees, I'm afraid.
Paul, do you by chance know why they took those WATSON images of the mast facing downward before they started shooting the selfie?
https://lemmy.world/u/SpecialSetOfSieves
In recent times it has become a fairly common occurrence when taking selfies to take an addition set of images with the mast head looking down. That way they can create a pair of selfies. Then use the 2 selfies to create an animated GIF for use in an outreach press release. See examples below eg. When it looked at the helicopter. In the sol 1500 selfie I believe it is looking at the sample hole it just drilled. If I'm right we'll see the animation of the rover in the JPL photojournal in the coming days after all the images are down
Looking down Examples:
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26344
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25681
I have nothing to add to your excellent, well-sourced and comprehensive reply, save this:
If the budget cuts do end up harming US (and int'l) research funding as much as some people clearly want them to, NASA and the science community has every right to use the "downward facing" shot to represent Percy being sad. And even sad Percy is more popular than the people behind these cuts.
Next rover will include a car wash