Old Mars photos from 2003: No, it's not going to be big in August.

Inspired by a query regarding the false meme going around about Mars, I took a look at some images I took of Mars during it's big opposition in 2003. That was a great opposition. Here's a couple of those images. The first one is a single image without manipulation, the second and third are Registax processed images from videos, and the last is one of those videos.
Mars at the moment is not approaching one of those awesome 17 year oppositions like 2003 or 1988. It's just fading away from its January opposition and currently visible in Leo in the evening.

The orange object next to the full moon tonight

The bright orange "star" next to the Full Moon tonight and Friday is the planet Mars, which happens to be closest to Earth tonight (ok last night) during this current cycle (Mars and Earth come close to each other every 2 years and 2 months). And closest in only the sense of currently: it's still 99 million kilometers away.

Martian swirly art

I am sure you've already seen this image from Mars of the swirly traces of dust devils removing the light dust from the darker surface. But here it is.


Click to enlarge to a 2560x1920 version
This is a dune field in a crater just off of Syrtis Major.

Links to other sizes.

Venus AND Earth from Mars

I missed something in the last post--the image is Venus and Earth from Mars. Venus is the bright point in the center, and Earth is the faint object moving to the lower right of Venus.


This is from fredk at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6042&st=60&start=60

Venus from Mars

Via Emily Lakdawalla @ facebook.

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=18408

UPDATE: I realize I missed something in this animation--Earth!

Re: Even more awesome Mars images?

As rumored, here's the awesome Mars Phoenix image. An image later in the descent as the spacecraft nears the surface. Heimdall crater is within twenty kilometers of the landing site but just in the background in the image (You can't see it from the landing site).




Via Planetary Society Blog.

P.S. Also see the image of Phoenix on the ground at HiRISE blog. Heck, see the full image to see the parachute and heat shield as well.

Even more awesome Mars images?

You've seen the amazing image of Phoenix descending in the Martian atmosphere as taken from MRO's HiRISE. (As Emily Lakdawalla puts it: "OMG!! Parachute!!!! Photo !!!!!" You might have seen the first false-color images. But now there is a rumor about another HiRISE image of Phoenix while it was still descending in front of Heimdall Crater.

Is this that image? Not spectacular enough after the first image.

One hour to Phoenix Mars Landing

One hour to go.

You should be reading Systemic

Systemic is a blog by Greg Laughlin at UC Santa Cruz about exoplanetary systems--the explosive new field with nearly 300 planets detected to date. The latest post is about the terrestrial analog of the island of Hawaii as Mars.

The landscape here resembles nothing so much as a habitable, terraformed Mars. Hardened ropes of lava run down to the water’s edge:

In the pre-dawn light this morning, the air was totally silent, and it was easy to imagine that I was actually on Mars, before the water was gone, when a Northern hemispheric ocean lapped up against the lava of the lowermost slopes of Elysium Mons:

Avalanches in Mars Polar Regions

This is neat: real processes captured by MRO.

Seen via the Bad Astronomer.

Latest Mars Asteroid update

The latest observations nearly exclude the possibility of 2007 WD5 colliding with Mars, dropping the probability to 0.01%.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news156.html

This unfolding story and the present results have been made possible by the tracking efforts of many astronomers at several observatories around the world:

* 2007 WD5 was discovered using the Mt. Lemmon 1.5-meter telescope by Andrea Boattini of the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, which is led by Steve Larson.
* Follow-up from archival images taken by the 1.8-meter telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona were provided by Terrence H. Brezzi of the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project, which is led by Robert McMillan.
* Andy Puckett of the Univ. of Alaska obtained pre-discovery measurements from archival images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s 2.5-meter telescope on Apache Point, NM.
* Bill Ryan of New Mexico Tech's Magdalena Ridge Observatory observed 2007 WD5 on several crucial nights, with critical support from university and observatory staff.
* Observations from the 6.5-meter Multi-Mirror Telescope (MMT) Observatory in Arizona were provided by a team consisting of Holger Israel (Univ. Bonn), Matt Holman (Harvard/CfA), Steve Larson (Univ. Ariz.), Faith Vilas (MMTO), Cesar Fuentes (Harvard/CfA), David Trilling (Univ. Ariz.) and Maureen Conroy (Harvard/CfA).
* The 3.5-meter telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain provided follow-up through a team consisting of Adriano Campo Bagatin (Univ. Alicante), Gilles Bergond (Calar Alto Obs.), Rene Duffard (Inst. de Astrofisica de Andalucia), Jose Luis Ortiz (Inst. de Astrofisica de Andalucia), Reiner Stoss (Obs. Astronomico de Mallorca and Astronomisches Rechen-Institut) and Javier Licandro (Inst. de Astrofisica de Canarias).
* Fabrizio Bernardi, Marco Micheli and Dave Tholen of the Univ. of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy observed the asteroid at its faintest using the 2.2-meter UH telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Update on the Mars asteroid

New observations reduce the possibility from 1/75 (1.33%) to 0.3%. (via the MPML). The error ellipse has moved from near the center of a large uncertainity to the edge of the ellipse. See a diagram here.

The Mars asteroid thingy

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/071220-asteroid-mars.html

Speaking of 2007 WD5, the orbit is weakly constrained because the observations extend to only 29 days. The object was discovered on November 20th after it passed Earth some 4.5 million miles away on November 2th. It's currently only magnitude 22 and fading, and the moon is getting brighter in the same part of the sky, so there will be no observations for at least a week. In fact, the moon will be two moon diameters away from 2007 WD5 on Saturday evening, if you'd like an idea of where the minor planet is now in the sky. Mars is unmistakable at opposition in the East in the constellation Gemini in the evening. At time of possible impact, Mars will be in the horns of Taurus.

Usually these sorts of things tend to clear up after just a few more observations constrain the orbit better. Since it's so faint, a number of the observatories doing this sort of work (and a lot of them are amateurs doing it for free) won't be able to see it.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news151.html
A good press release, with the error ellipse, which you can see is very, very long.


Play with this java orbit visualizer: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007%20WD5&orb=1

My old-fashioned planetarium program has a miss by quite a distance, but I wouldn't really be shocked at that.

Anyways, go out and see the Moon and Mars close together on Sunday night. It'll be beautiful. In the right place on Earth, the Moon will occult it.

P.S. This wouldn't be the first impact seen on Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor found 20 new craters over the course of it's mission.

Mars

They took this yesterday?

Incoming asteroid--errr, satellite

Astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson discovered an object on November 7th and when the orbit was calculated it was a Near Earth Object (or NEO) and would barely pass by Earth in only five days time. By barely, it was calculated at only a Earth's diameter away--a little under 8,000 miles.

Photometric measurements suggested the object was 20m in diameter, which is pretty big as things go--the Meteor Crater parent body was estimated at 30-50m.

But as Russian astronomer Denis Denisenko noted on the MPML, the object had a peculiar orbit: it passed quite close by Mars at nearly the same time as an ESA orbiter called Rosetta. See a view at Mars here. And, Rosetta happens to have the largest solar panels short of the ISS, two 14 meter long panels that make 64 square meters in total, matching the expected brightness of the object. Sure enough, Rosetta is due at Earth for a orbit changing interaction with Earth in five days so it can rendezvous with a comet in 2014. The people in charge of maintaining minor planet orbits decried the lack of coordination between the artificial satellite organizations and the minor planet community--as satellites are launched it's easy to watch them go away, but the NEO watchers are rightfully concerned about inbound objects, and the data about spacecraft outside of near-Earth space is skimpy.

Mars color

A commenter on this image asked about the "blue" sky in my synthesized image, composed of UV, green, and near-IR frames. Color was suspect, but it's all I had at the time.

I took much more recent data from a few days ago (sol 1321) and used subframes that were actually blue, green, and red. With equal strengths you get the image above. The sky is essentially overexposed.

Without further investigation I'd guess the gradient across the frame is from dust accumulation on the camera lens.

Earth and Jupiter from Mars

An older image, but cool nonetheless. Earth and Jupiter visible from Mars, taken by the now-deceased Mars Global Surveyor. Make sure you see the orbital diagram.

You have the chance to see Saturn and Venus close together, from right here on Earth, on Saturday evening, the same evening as the Full Moon.

Martian caves

There are Martian Caves--large skylights into a world we nothing of.

The Planetary Society's Blog has the article.

The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter's HiRISE imager and the Mars Odyssey's THEMIS IR imager worked together to confirm these are caves--dark during the day, cooler than sunlit surfaces during the afternoon (but still warmer than surface shadows), warmer at night. These are huge skylights--over 300ft in size, and they overhang, meaning the cave is bigger than the skylight. The caves found are all big, partially because the THEMIS imager has a resolution limit of 100m, so they couldn't use it to refine candidate holes found in the visible HiRISE data. The diameters of the caves were from 100 to 252 meters.

One of the caves, on the northeast flank of Arsia Mons:



They were all found on the slopes of Arsia Mons, the southernmost Tharsis volcano. A global view here; it's the circular blob in 5 o'clock position from the center. These caves are likely the result of lava tubes, formed when lava cools on the surface and emptying out below.

On one of the seven skylights, they saw the floor lit; this allowed them to calculate the depth of the cave at 130 meters. The lit cave is shown below.


As Cushing, Titus, Wynne, and Christensen wrote in their conference paper, these caves offer sanctuary from all sorts of radiation, both UV and cosmic rays, that exist on the surface of Mars and would be the primary limiter of life at Mars. The caves' existence is enough to spring to life the imagines of the unseeable world inside of them; we will likely never know the wonders of what they contain in our lifetimes. It is unfortunate that they are currently only known on the slope of a Tharsis volcano--high in the thin Martian atmosphere, we are limited in our ability to land a spacecraft there easily.


Images courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Two very lonely images

Two images that evoke loneliness, both from Mars. Both are from the Mars Rovers--one from Opportunity, one from Spirit.
Click on the images for the full-size versions.

Mars photo filler

I've been bad about posting, so here is an image I assembled from a video taken of Mars on July 30th, 2003. The prominent peninsula to the bottom of Mars is Syrtis Major, the darkest feature on Mars visible from Earth. It's a region scoured clean of any dust, leaving only dark basaltic rock exposed. Extending to the right is Sinus Meridiani, location of the still running Mars Opportunity rover. The bright polar cap is the South Polar Cap. The color fringes are real--real on Earth, that is. Mars was low in the sky, and the Earth's atmosphere acted like a weak lens and bent the colors slightly differently, enough to create fringes (North is to the bottom in the image). Here's a map of the landing sites, and an interactive Google Mars link.