Starship Asterisk*

The First Color Panorama from Mars by Curiosity

Explanation: You've just landed on Mars and opened your eyes -- what do you see? If you're the Curiosity rover, you see a strange gravelly place with a large mountain in the distance. You've landed on target near the edge of 150-km wide Gale Crater, with Mount Sharp on the horizon being the rise in the crater's center. As a car-sized rover with six wheels and a laser, you prepare yourself to go on a two-year mission of exploration, climbing Mt. Sharp, and looking for signs that Mars once harbored life. Currently you sit motionless, check yourself over, and receive a detailed briefing from Earth on things you will need to know while rolling around, trying to avoid flipping over or getting your wheels stuck in sand. Your rolling explorations will likely start in a few days. What will you find? What's out there?

<< Previous APOD

This Day in APOD

Next APOD >>

[/b]

No,

The 'check yourself over' link on this APOD is showing a cat's photograph. Please correct the link. Thank you.

well, you will certainly find a lot of gravel from past MARS windstorms. It is after all a giant depression. Fantastic landing and will this method be the standard for the next landings ??

abhagwat wrote:The 'check yourself over' link on this APOD is showing a cat's photograph. Please correct the link. Thank you.

I think that was quite intentional. It's an example of the humor often found in some of the links of the APODs. The cat in today's link is certainly checking itself over. I, for one, like the cat!

Ann

Question - how did the joystick in the left/black section and the "desk" in the right black section get into this picture? Of course, it must mean that the whole thing was staged on a movie sound-stage, but I thought that they would have been more careful before releasing doctored photo

Seriously though - didn't this come from a digital image - or was someone photographing this off of a monitor somewhere?

srsly, trolls are everywhere, I can`t see the "desk" or the "joystick" in the left black section ... -.-
nice picture!
I would love to be there, awaiting more pictures

Way cool, looking forward to discoveries.

My only gripe about the photo is it showed too much foreground and not enough sky, I hope newer ones take and stitch in sky shots, the rule of 1/3's applies for these as well.

Wow ! Golly !! Gee wiz !!!

Why is the image of the rover blocked?

garym wrote:Why is the image of the rover blocked?

How often are you in pictures you take of a landscape when you're holding the camera?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a great, great APOD, image, text, and links.

Number FIVE is ALIVE!!!

Nice Picture...magnification is good...

:---[===] *

Very very cool…
opening the “eyes” and checking things out…

mtbdudex wrote:
My only gripe about the photo is it showed too much foreground and not enough sky,
I hope newer ones take and stitch in sky shots, the rule of 1/3's applies for these as well.

Try: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-bl ... avcam.html

mtbdudex wrote:My only gripe about the photo is it showed too much foreground and not enough sky, I hope newer ones take and stitch in sky shots, the rule of 1/3's applies for these as well.

That's quite deliberate, and was explained in a news conference a couple of days ago. They have three rows of photos they can take for these panoramas, and for this first one (and the B&W one which preceded it) they decided to take just the lower and middle rows. At this point the sky is of little interest. They really want to see how the MSL and the landscape around it looks. Later panoramas will be taken with all three rows in use. Patience grasshopper!

Rob

i know this place! it's in west texas!

Was the black layer at the base of Mt. Sharp, which I've never before seen, formed by a lava flow?
I did not know that Curiosity will spend its entire mission inside Gale. Was kinda hoping it might meander on over to Spirit, dust it off, maybe charge the battery, and give it a boost out of the sand trap. Here's hoping Curiosity's firmware contains instructions on how to avoid getting stuck in a bunker.

[We have more than enough sky shots from Opportunity. The interesting stuff is in the ground.]

mtbdudex wrote:My only gripe about the photo is it showed too much foreground and not enough sky, I hope newer ones take and stitch in sky shots, the rule of 1/3's applies for these as well.

Every pixel that shows sky is a pixel with little or no scientific value, but which costs resources: time, energy, bandwidth, processing, and ultimately money. I have no doubt that the mission planners are as interested as the rest of us in the occasional aesthetic image, but that's the end of it. I don't think anybody is worrying much about photographic composition rules in the majority of images to be collected.

Anyone notice the 2 large spot that appear to be cleared of debris. Did the rockets do that?

TimR wrote:Question - how did the joystick in the left/black section and the "desk" in the right black section get into this picture? Of course, it must mean that the whole thing was staged on a movie sound-stage, but I thought that they would have been more careful before releasing doctored photo

Seriously though - didn't this come from a digital image - or was someone photographing this off of a monitor somewhere?

The "Joy stick" (visible in the lower left corner of the initial APOD image) in the left side right black area below the "Top of the Mast" appears to be a ghost of This Image
As for the "Desk" on the right side???

skildude wrote:Anyone notice the 2 large spot that appear to be cleared of debris. Did the rockets do that?

Yes. There are 2 on the left side of the image and 2 on the right side. These were caused by the "Sky Crane" thrusters

BMAONE23 wrote:

TimR wrote:Question - how did the joystick in the left/black section and the "desk" in the right black section get into this picture? Of course, it must mean that the whole thing was staged on a movie sound-stage, but I thought that they would have been more careful before releasing doctored photo

Seriously though - didn't this come from a digital image - or was someone photographing this off of a monitor somewhere?

The "Joy stick" (visible in the lower left corner of the initial APOD image) in the left side right black area below the "Top of the Mast" appears to be a ghost of

Click to view full size image

Click to view full size image

This Image
As for the "Desk" on the right side???

YES - that is it. What I called the "Desk" is really the "left side" of the picture you showed. So on the LEFT BLACK space of the MARS image is the RIGHT SIDE of the picture you showed. And on the RIGHT SIDE space of the MARS image is the LEFT SIDE of the picture you showed. Looks like that one image was ghosted in the overall MARS image, and then split in the fashion we are seeing. My question is - how was this "ghost" accomplished...and why? I assumed that the BLACK spots in the image were null data - areas in the picture with nothing from Mars. Seeing this GHOST of an image just throws things off.....I'm surprised that the editors of this image kept that in....

TimR wrote:YES - that is it. What I called the "Desk" is really the "left side" of the picture you showed. So on the LEFT BLACK space of the MARS image is the RIGHT SIDE of the picture you showed. And on the RIGHT SIDE space of the MARS image is the LEFT SIDE of the picture you showed. Looks like that one image was ghosted in the overall MARS image, and then split in the fashion we are seeing. My question is - how was this "ghost" accomplished...and why? I assumed that the BLACK spots in the image were null data - areas in the picture with nothing from Mars. Seeing this GHOST of an image just throws things off.....I'm surprised that the editors of this image kept that in....

Probably just residue of the alignment process, since the left and right sides of the image are actually adjacent (and at the range of things on the rover, might be overlapping). My guess is that they simply didn't notice the residual image. Its brightest pixels are only a few counts above zero, which means that on a properly calibrated monitor, they aren't even visible unless you're working in the dark. If you're seeing the ghost well enough that it interferes with your viewing, I think your monitor needs calibration. It's also possible to see things wrong if you're using an older Mac OS (pre Snow Leopard), which didn't handle color very well with an image like this that has an undefined color space.

Meh!

Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!!

Not long ago I went outside with my circa 2007 digital camera and lens combination that together cost me about $1,500 retail, and with Photoshop on my PC made a 17566 x 4049 pixel panorama of the view of my entire front yard in which I can see individual blades of grass in crisp detail, and with no stitching remnants - and nothing much looks distorted.

This rover ought to be making images as much better than that as the Hubble makes images better than my Meade telescope!

Images from Curiousity should make us feel like we're practically standing there, shivering in the cold, thin air.

In this day and age frankly this is incredibly disappointing.

-Noel