Mars!

hear about this?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ID/3855168/

It was on the morning news.. They only had a 1 megapix cam stitched together for that huge 12 megapix photo..

you can almost see the strip in the background!

(its not nevada you dolt :P)

oh :\

That's pretty cool.

I wonder where Marvin's place is? (Hold for groans)

I hope they actually get some real scientific information from this mission. The last one was admittedly just a camera on wheels, and was said by nasa to be a for the most part a means of testing the airbag landing system.

[QUOTE=sidez]It was on the morning news.. They only had a 1 megapix cam stitched together for that huge 12 megapix photo..[/QUOTE]


1 megapix ?! what ? they ran outta money when it came to the cam ?! they had to do some savings so NASA scientists started browsing eBay for cheap 1MPix digicams ?!
what's the story behind the 1MPix cam ? Or does this have to do with the fact that mars is about 20 light minutes away and the way they have to recieve the pics. (smaller packets/pics are better the one huge pic file that is corrupted ?)

[QUOTE=TCorp]1 megapix ?! what ? they ran outta money when it came to the cam ?! they had to do some savings so NASA scientists started browsing eBay for cheap 1MPix digicams ?!
what's the story behind the 1MPix cam ? Or does this have to do with the fact that mars is about 20 light minutes away and the way they have to recieve the pics. (smaller packets/pics are better the one huge pic file that is corrupted ?)[/QUOTE]

The initial view released, a mosaic of 12 separate pictures, was taken from the front of the rover. At 12 million pixels, the image and the rest that followed are the highest-resolution pictures ever obtained from Mars. It is a 45-degree field of view of the terrain in Gusev Crater.

I'm just assuming that from another article about a Gigapixel photo taken by a bunch of stitched up photos.

12 separate picture = 12 million pixel pic.
1 pic = 1 million pixel pic.

They may not have been up to the 5mp cameras we have now, when was that sucka launched?

good point. Don't forget, even with today's technology, mars is so far away that it takes years and years to just get a probe ON the planet.

That probe was just launched in about July. Not years and years fellas. We are more technologically advanced than that.

edit: (or what TCorp said :D)

We are more technologically advanced than that.

exactly.....except for downloads. What i mean is......they probably used a 1 megapixel camera (which we all know kinda sucks)....because downloading 5 megapixel images from mars would take a long time (**note edit below) (especially if its in any kinda raw format. i cant imagine nasa using jpegs). I mean this isnt a satelite 2 miles above the earth. This sucker is out there.

Edit: Raw 5mp is like 9mb's
Raw 1mp....well its small
and im guessing (from the press releases) it takes about 2 days to download color pictures.


Also its nice to finally see whats on that crappy little dot next to the moon that we've been looking at for the last 6 months lol