Science
Welcome to Mars! Caltech’s Jaw-Dropping, 5.7 Terapixel Virtual Expedition Across the Red Planet
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Both scientists and the public can navigate a new global image of the Red Planet that was made at Caltech using data from <span class=”glossaryLink” aria-describedby=”tt” data-cmtooltip=”
Caltech has used data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to create the highest-resolution global image of Mars ever, a 5.7 terapixel mosaic. The mosaic is designed to be accessible to everyone, from scientists to schoolchildren and the general public, and captures cliffsides, impact craters, and dust devil tracks in stunning detail.
Cliffsides, impact craters, and dust devil tracks are captured in mesmerizing detail in a new mosaic of the Red Planet composed of 110,000 images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Taken by the veteran spacecraft’s black-and-white Context Camera, or CTX, the images cover nearly 270 square feet (25 square meters) of surface per pixel.
That makes the Global CTX Mosaic of Mars the highest-resolution global image of the Red Planet ever created. If it were printed out, this 5.7 trillion pixel (or 5.7 terapixel) mosaic would be large enough to cover the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.
The product of Caltech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization, the mosaic took six years and tens of thousands of hours to develop. It is so detailed that more than 120 peer-reviewed science papers have already cited a beta version. But the mosaic is also easy enough for anyone to use.
“I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone,” said Jay Dickson, the image processing scientist who led the project and manages the Murray Lab. “Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”
CTX is among three cameras aboard MRO, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. One of those cameras, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) provides color images of surface features as small as a dining room table. In contrast, CTX provides a broader view of terrain around those features, helping scientists understand how they’re related. Its ability to capture larger expanses of the landscape has made CTX especially useful for spotting impact craters on the surface. A third camera, the Mars Color Imager (MARCI), led by the same team that operates CTX, produces a daily global map of Mars weather at much lower spatial resolution.
Mars Up Close
Snapping away since MRO arrived at Mars in 2006, CTX has documented nearly all of the Red Planet, making its images an optimal starting point for scientists when they’re creating a map. A bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack and putting together a puzzle at the same time, mapmaking requires downloading and sifting through a large selection of images to find those with the same lighting conditions and clear skies.
To create the new mosaic, Dickson developed an algorithm to match images based on the features they captured. He manually stitched together the remaining 13,000 images that the algorithm couldn’t match. The remaining gaps in the mosaic represent parts of Mars that hadn’t been imaged by CTX by the time Dickson started working on this project, or areas obscured by clouds or dust.
Laura Kerber, a Mars scientist at <span class=”glossaryLink” aria-describedby=”tt” data-cmtooltip=”
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”]”>JPL, provided feedback on the new mosaic as it took shape. “I’ve wanted something like this for a long time,” Kerber said. “It’s both a beautiful product of art and also useful for science.”
Kerber recently used the image to visit her favorite spot on Mars: Medusae Fossae, a dusty region about the size of Mongolia. Scientists are unsure exactly how it formed; Kerber has proposed it might be a pile of ash from a nearby volcano. At the click of a button on the CTX mosaic, she can zoom in and admire ancient river channels, now dry, winding through the landscape there.
Users can also jump to regions like Gale Crater and Jezero Crater – areas being explored by NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers – or visit Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, adding topographic data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor mission. One of the mosaic’s coolest features highlights impact craters across the entire planet, allowing viewers to see just how scarred Mars is.
“For 17 years, MRO has been revealing Mars to us as no one had seen it before,” said the mission’s project scientist, Rich Zurek of JPL. “This mosaic is a wonderful new way to explore some of the imagery that we’ve collected.”
The mosaic was funded as part of NASA’s Planetary Data Archiving, Restoration and Tools (PDART) program, which helps develop new ways to use existing NASA data. The scientific products of extended missions like MRO are exactly what the program was designed to make more accessible.
More About MRO
MRO is managed by JPL on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, with Caltech acting as JPL’s managing agent for NASA. The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was constructed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp in Boulder, Colorado. Malin Space Science Systems, headquartered in San Diego, constructed and operates the Context Camera.
Science
SpaceX sends 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
Science
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
Science
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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