Manchurian Taikonaut wrote:
No, I've missed them for some reason but thanks, looks awesome.
If only we got landers on areas like these, but I realize there's not much point going to Mars just for the view, no matter how
cool it would be.

...And there goes the claim by some uninformed know-it-alls that ESA always has crappy images!

That perspective view is sooo cool 8)

(edited to add thanks, then to remove it because that belonged to another mars thread )

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The Mars Express images are great; they're just too few of them. This mission has been going for a year, and we can't have more than fifty examples here.

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The ESA Mars Express site currently has 190 public images. They could have released more images indeed. The ones that are released are in most cases really nice however.

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Finally, from the center of Valles Mariness:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...asma_Hires.jpg

Can't wait we get this resolution pictures of the polar ice's or Cydonia.

MGS has better resolution than Mars Express - 1.5 m/pixel versus 2.3.

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ToSeek wrote:
I wasn't aware of that. It seems that the Mars Express' strength lies in it's
"unprecedented pointing accuracy achieved by combining images at the two different resolutions. Another will be the 3D imaging which will reveal the topography of Mars in full colour." More here: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Exp...C75V9ED_0.html

Here's a "frozen sea"
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Exp...HPYEM4E_1.html

And did said "let there be wallpaper," and there was, and it was just funkengroovin' cool!

did

The MarsExpress images have been great, there is so much more that this craft can tell us about the Red Planet over the next few months aswell. Did you hear about the Venus Express mission ? its an ESA craft that's built using the same technology as the Mars Express except for a little modification, it launches this year in 2005
http://sci.esa.int/science-e-media/i...4%20screen.JPG
It will spend 500 days in Venus orbit. We now have many missions to the inner solar system, 3 Mars orbiters from ESA and NASA, the Rovers, a mission to Venus by the Europeans, and the USA's Messenger to Mercury. Now if the Venus pictures are like this Mars Express it will be fantastic

They just keep getting better:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMX67D3M5E_index_1.html

Wow, that top one is nice.

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Well, there's been criticisim that ESA don't release enough pictures from Mars Express but there's a lot of eye candy in those images.

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8)
http://www.esa.int/images/180-170305-0451-6-an-01_L.jpg

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...-Hourglass.jpe
Hour glass crater on Mars

The 3-D view is awesome, we should get these every day.

Agreed, but I think they need a little more than one day of photographing/radar measuring+post-processing to get the final quality of those 3D views! 8)

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Of course, it was just wishful thinking on my part.

I already hoped (and assumed) you saw that the quality was a very good excuse for the interval . But I love them indeed!!

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this one is making the news, there a bit of talk on the ESA's express on the new mars site also.

a lot of the design for the Mars craft is likely to be repeated in Europe's VenusExpress

Manchurian Taikonaut wrote:
Any idea if it's optics will be able to penetrate Venus' atmosphere or are we talking about "only" radar images?

I'm not sure
ToSeek has Venus Express info posted here

http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...ighlight=&

here's more info on the Mars crater
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMN3IRMD6E_index_0.html
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMJ9RRMD6E_index_0.html
Aurora mission 2 Mars ?

Medusa Fossae:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Exp...SZRMD6E_0.html

A strange formation with interesting detail. Considering ESA's usual pace of releasing these pictures, they've practically drowned us recently.

Yep, perhaps a few lessons learnt since the success of Huygens and signs of growing confidence at ESA. Keeping themselves in the public eye will be a good thing for maintaining funding and embarking on future missions.

I also think as time goes on we will start to see evidence of changes in the Martian surface (weather, geologic, small impacts) turning up as successive areas are re-imaged.

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By the way, some of the Mars Express data is available to the public (access the archive link near the upper left of the page). You have to register before retrieving data, though. If I understood correctly, the datasets are huge, around 2000 GB for HRSC data. Don't know what data formats they use.

The HRSC data is only about 170GB. It contains all the images from orbits 10 though 600. The images are stored in a regular uncompressed raster with an embedded text header, surrounded by a standard PDS header (that means NASAView can read them). Holger Isenberg has written and publised a Gimp plugin that can also read them. (http://registry.gimp.org/list?name=pds).

The HRSC data is radiometrically calibrated (sort of), but not orthorectified. This means you can't (easily) make RGB images out of it. Some of the data is really difficult to work with because the files are 250,000 lines long and 3.5GB in size. Their delivery system (a java application) also leaves something to be desired.

Thanks, Bamf, always good to see you here!

It's kind of amazing that our standards have been raised so much that one can honestly refer to remote sensing data as being "only about 170 GB" without the guys in the white coats showing up.... This is a good thing!

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I meant 2000 MB, of course. ops:

170 GB is not that much. I have lots more disk space.

OT, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is going to have an output of 10 Terabytes per night, or 20 Petabytes over 10 years. Not a small challenge. And all that is going to be publicly available.

Of course, that'll still take you over a week to download at the nominal 50kB/sec you can get from them.

Yup, about 5 weeks over a week :)


170GB =~ 174000 MB =~ 178000000 KB

@ 50KB/s, is ~3570000s, or ~991hr, or ~41.3 days, or ~5.9wks

/nitpick

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