Pheonix Lander SUCKS!

IT has been on mars for over a week now and its sent back like 10 black and white images? what is takeing so long? what was the point of watching the boring live landing if a week laater we still dont have any good images, break out the high res camera nasaand start takeing some pictures, come on. Any one agree or have a reason for the long wait?

Phoenix Mission Objectives

Objective 1: Study the History of Water in All its Phases
Currently, water on Mars' surface and atmosphere exists in two states: gas and solid. At the poles, the interaction between the solid water ice at and just below the surface and the gaseous water vapor in the atmosphere is believed to be critical to the weather and climate of Mars. Phoenix will be the first mission to collect meteorological data in the Martian arctic needed by scientists to accurately model Mars' past climate and predict future weather processes.

Liquid water does not currently exist on the surface of Mars, but evidence from Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey and Exploration Rover missions suggest that water once flowed in canyons and persisted in shallow lakes billions of years ago. However, Phoenix will probe the history of liquid water that may have existed in the arctic as recently as 100,000 years ago. Scientists will better understand the history of the Martian arctic after analyzing the chemistry and mineralogy of the soil and ice using robust instruments.

Objective 2: Search for Evidence of Habitable Zone and Assess the Biological Potential of the Ice-Soil Boundary
Recent discoveries have shown that life can exist in the most extreme conditions. Indeed, it is possible that bacterial spores can lie dormant in bitterly cold, dry, and airless conditions for millions of years and become activated once conditions become favorable. Such dormant microbial colonies may exist in the Martian arctic, where due to the periodic wobbling of the planet, liquid water may exist for brief periods about every 100,000 years making the soil environment habitable.

Phoenix will assess the habitability of the Martian northern environment by using sophisticated chemical experiments to assess the soil's composition of life-giving elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and hydrogen. Identified by chemical analysis, Phoenix will also look at reduction-oxidation (redox) molecular pairs that may determine whether the potential chemical energy of the soil can sustain life, as well as other soil properties critical to determine habitability such as pH and saltiness.

Despite having the proper ingredients to sustain life, the Martian soil may also contain hazards that prevent biological growth, such as powerful oxidants that break apart organic molecules. Powerful oxidants that can break apart organic molecules are expected in dry environments bathed in UV light, such as the surface of Mars. But a few inches below the surface, the soil could protect organisms from the harmful solar radiation. Phoenix will dig deep enough into the soil to analyze the soil environment potentially protected from UV looking for organic signatures and potential habitability.

www.nasa.gov...

In the list of Phoenix Mars Lander Objectives there is not "to take hi res images" of the martian surface, also because it would NOT make sense to take a huge series of hi res images from a static location.
Phoenix is a LANDER, not a ROVER, it's NOT there in order to take hi res photograps: and btw, where did you read that so far it has sent back "like 10 B & W images"?
www.nasa.gov...
You can take a look here and count them by yourself

I understand your disappointment, though

the lander has sent quite a few images, waaay more than 10. They've pieced together the images to make quite a neat landscape, you can even see hills in the background.

As for "the Phoenix Mars Lander sucks"...

Lets see you make it better, eh? Then maybe NASA can pay you the big bucks.

reply to post by tylerc25211

There has been many more than 10 images -- plus ALL of the raw images from the Panoramic Camera will come from the lander in black and white. The color images are later created on Earth using the various filitered black and white images sent from Mars.

This is the same way it was done for the Mars Rovers -- all of there raw images were in black and white, as seen through various filters, then coverted to color images by imaging scientists here on Earth.

[edit on 6/2/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

k, now please be kind in your response to the question i am about to pose bc i admit, i am not that knowledgeable in how this works?

so, basically you are saying they are going to "color" the pics? how is that scientific? why not just use color photography in the first place so we don't have the equivelent of a coloring book as done by scientists who have never even actually been there? just curious

Originally posted by justamomma
k, now please be kind in your response to the question i am about to pose bc i admit, i am not that knowledgeable in how this works?

so, basically you are saying they are going to "color" the pics? how is that scientific? why not just use color photography in the first place so we don't have the equivelent of a coloring book as done by scientists who have never even actually been there? just curious

ALL digital cameras (even the one you may own) are "color blind" -- that is their light detectors can only detect light in varying shades of grey od "Black and White". The digital cameras on Phoenix's panoramic camera (and Spirit and Opportunity) are also like this. It takes various filters and your camera's "CMOS" computer to compile this information into a near-true-color image.

When a picture is taken with a digital camera, the light passes through various filters that produce several different "Black and white" images. Each color will show up as a different shade of grey with a different light intensity when viewed through these various filters.

In your personal digital camera, the CMOS computer looks at these different images with different black and white intensities and compiles what it thinks is the "best guess" at what the colors should actually be (usually a very good guess). Your camera does all this in less than a second, so you don't even notice.

Again, almost ALL digital cameras work like this, even the ones on Mars. The difference with those camera's are that the computer that deduces the colors from the different filtered black and white images is here on Earth instead of in the camera. That's because the different raw black-and white images (as seen through different filters) can be of more value to NASA's imaging scientists than an image in which the colors have already been compiled. With the raw images, NASA can manipulate the colors to create false color images in which a material is assigned a certain color so that it can stand out better in contrast against other materials. "Blue" is often used in false color images by NASA on Mars, since blue contrasts very well against the reds and yellows of Mars. These are usually labeled as "false color images". The images that are what NASA thinks is "true" color are usually labeled as "approximate true color image".

Edit to add:
There is another kind of camera in Phoenix's shovel and in the microscopic imager. These are UP-Close cameras that will bathe the subject in red, green, and blue light while taking photos instead of using filters. This can only work close-up, since it would be nearly impossible to bathe a panorama with colored lights, since the subject of the picture may be 100 meters away or more.


[edit on 6/2/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

[edit on 6/2/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

reply to post by justamomma


OK. Here's a simplified, crash course on digital photography...

The sensors (the CCD chip or CMOS) in a digital camera, whether it's your Cannon SLR or the SSI camera on the Phoenix lander, do not "see" in color. All these sensors can measure is light intensity and assign a numerical value to this intensity.

Let's just say the chip assigns a value of 0 for no light (black) and 100 for maximum light intensity (white). All the measured intensities between 0 and 100 will be interpreted as a shade of gray.

So when you take a picture, you end-up with a big grid of numbers that are between 0 and 100. Each of these numbers represent an image pixel. Software interprets this grid and creates the grayscale image you often see from space probes.

So how do we get color images?

When a digital camera takes a picture it actually takes three pictures. Each picture is taken through a series of filters that only let a certain color of light hit the sensor. So, the first picture is taken through a filter that only lets red light pass to the sensor to be measured. The filter is changed and the second picture contains the green light intensity information and the third picture has the blue information.

Seen individually, the three pictures are "black & white" but now you have the information (red, green and blue intensity maps or "channels") that software can use to create a color picture.

That's basically it.

Now, your typical space probe has many more filters than just red, green, and blue such as infrared, ultraviolet, even x-ray. Which filters are used depends on what the scientists want to see.

So, no, NASA isn't "colorizing" black and white pictures the same way that old movies are colorized.

The real artistic license is in combining these color channels in the right way to best represent the desired output. Sometimes this means adjusting a channel's light values to bring-out details not seen in a "true color" representation or making a normally non-visible channel, say infrared, visible as red. This is called a "false color" image and are often more scientifically valuable or beautiful than a true color image. Believe me, the famous "Pillars of Creation" picture doesn't look anything like that to the naked eye.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


LOL. I knew you'd beat me. Damn my slow typing.

reply to post by IAttackPeople

No problem -- the more the merrier!

The lander also carried bacteria resistant to nearly everything including UV light. See below

/5zd2ty

Not sure if anyones posted anything about this , but ive checked about Pheonix there and saw it stopped in december`08.

And following this post, Yeah it totaly sucked haha.

It dug a little hole, took 1000s of photos and jigsaw`d them together.
And a few 3 second black & white .gif animations.
A standard sony handycam video camera with an electric blanket would have looked better!

Searching for water and microbial life in the soil. What a waste of time.
One the previous missions could of included stuff to do that.
And they can see its got ice n *snip*on it from space! So why look for a tiny bit iof water in the sand

Plant some seeds, see what happens, would be alot more intresting.
The planets dead, give it a bit life instead of *snip* about.
I cant live for 4 billion years + .. for sumthing to hit mars and chancly start life.

For the money spent on the thing i think that mission was totaly poinless.


[edit on 3-2-2009 by MarktheSkepticUK]

Mod Note: Profanity/Circumvention Of Censors – Please Review This Link.

[edit on Tue Feb 3 2009 by Jbird]

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
The lander also carried bacteria resistant to nearly everything including UV light. See below

/5zd2ty

Why not send a microscope with a digital camera attached to SEE life forms, if any, instead of these stupid ,pointless chemical tests which will be subject to a near infinite number of possible interpretations due to the near infinite combinations and permutations of the the multitudious possible chemical reactions possible with a 100 elements therefore making the whole mission exercise pointless and self defeating.

Remember the Viking chemical experiments 30 years ago and the endless SPECULATION of the chemical results sent then?

well?

i see that everyone is so dumbfounded by my so very practical suggestion, leaving them speechless and unable to respond.



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[edit on 11-2-2009 by esecallum]

I suppose your idea would be far too practical! I mean, whats the harm in spending billions on sending a piece of technology to do worthless speculative experiments?

The whole thing is an enormous joke.

reply to post by dodgygeeza


Yes you are right.The people at NASA spend all their time repeating the same mistakes at ever increasing cost to no benefit.

They send a static probe to the poles to look for water which has already been confirmed from orbital probes and which must exist anyway due to the extreme cold as ice.

Now they are going to repeat the Viking experiments again with results which will
again be inconclusive due to above reasons.