The purpose of those first pics were to give immediate feedback of state of landing. The purpose was not to send a hi-res, 64k colors, picturesque Mars landscape image back. I don't think it had anything to do with protecting the lenses from dust. It's a matter of making sure they get an image back of any resolution. They wanted the image to be as small as possible to suit the purpose and have highest chance of making it back to Earth on that fly-by. That's why they called it a "thumbnail." The first image was even worse resolution. These I believe are 64x64 pixels at 256 resolution.
Heard all Mars robot and Hubble pics are black&white and just colorized by NASA afterwards, no colous are really true. Don't know if that's the case with their newest robot, but was in the past.
I saw Laurie Anderson in concert once. She explained that NASA hired her once as an "artistic director" or something like that. Her job was indeed to colorize galactic photos. Certainly any image (like radio telescopes) that are off the visible spectrum require colorizing. Hubble does take ultraviolent and infrared images as well as visible spectrum. I assume the visible images don't require coloring unless NASA wants to send them back to Earth in Black and White to decrease the transmission size. I know they have concerns with data sizes traveling that far in low bandwidth transmissions. My guess is they will take some color photos to satisfy the thirst of people back home for cool images, but the research photos might all be b&w???
^^ Read an interesting article on that: http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/ Some quotes: “The colors in Hubble images are neither ‘true’ colors nor ‘false’ colors, but usually are representative of the physical processes underlying the subjects of the images,” he said. “They are a way to represent in a single image as much information as possible that’s available in the data.” In the case of the Hubble, Levay explained, the images are further adjusted to boost contrast and tweak colors and brightness to emphasize certain features of the image or to make a more pleasing picture. Hubble can also produce color-calibrated images. Its “UniverseDial” would be standard stars and lamps within the cameras whose brightness and color are known very accurately. However, Hubble’s mission is not to produce images that faithfully reproduce colors. “For one thing that is somewhat meaningless in the case of most of the images,” said Levay, “since we generally couldn’t see these objects anyway because they are so faint, and our eyes react differently to colors of very faint light.” But the most important goal of Hubble is produce images that convey as much scientific information as possible. The rover Pancams do this as well. “It turns out there is a whole variety of iron-bearing minerals that have different color response at infrared wavelengths that the camera is sensitive to,” said Bell, “so we can make very garish, kind of Andy Warhol-like false color pictures.” Bell added that these images serve double duty in that they provide scientific information, plus the public really enjoys the images.
My brother who works at Nasa (not part of this program) said it was just for immediate feedback that everything looked ok first. So...I guess we'll see some more colorful, by colorful I mean red, pictures soon.
This is fantastic news. Anyone who says that NASA has "lost it" simply hasn't been paying attention. The agency can still uncork a brilliant technological and scientific achievement from time to time. This certainly looks like one from where I sit. Can't wait to see what I ardently hope is a highly successful and unprecendented exploration of the Red Planet unfold over the next couple of years, and possibly beyond. Check this out. That we could even take this image is amazing! NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Sunday. http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/tech/mars-rover-curiosity/index.html
It was obviously staged in a studio. Has anyone actually seen this "mars" for themselves? Its clearly a ploy by this socialist administration to get some more funding for nasa.
You're right. Those cameras were just the cameras used by the rover to look around and avoid obstacles, apparently. It has bigger cameras on top. Apparently one can take 10fps video.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/D8lZxb-cgss" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Couldn't stop imagining all those NASA folks singing this song this morning...:grin:
Live footage from Mars: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ML1OZCHixR0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
