The Musings of Chris Samuel

The Planetary Societys Emily Lakdawalla has blogged about an interesting project up on their website at the moment, trying to rope in volunteers to help NASA locate Mars Polar Lander using images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Emily writes:

What I would really love is if any of you readers out there who wanted to join in the search would write to me and let me know which image you’re searching, or ask me to assign you one, so that we can spread out the effort of all the volunteer searchers and make sure each image is examined by multiple people. I’ve also given some guidelines on how to report anything that you think might be a piece of the missing Mars Polar Lander. So if you want to join in the search, go check out that page.

Currently there are 18 images to search through, and the full resolution JPEG 2000 images are over 1GB a shot..

This doesn’t sound good..

An analysis of images taken during Wednesday’s lift-off in Cape Canaveral, Florida, shows that the shuttle’s underbelly was hit by a piece of ice - rather than foam from its external fuel tank as previously believed, he said. The impact left what appeared to be a 19 square centimetre gouge near the hatch of one of the shuttle’s landing gears.

Hopefully carrying teachers on the shuttle isn’t bad luck..

The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.

My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.

Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.

Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.

Here’s some interesting news:

India has gone into business in outer space, launching its first commercial rocket. The rocket was carrying an Italian astronomical satellite that will be used to gather information about the origins of the universe. India is the fifth entry into the commercial satellite launch business after the US, Russia, China, Ukraine and the European Space Agency.

I hadn’t realised Ukraine was in the business too..

SBS World News just announced a news flash that Iran claims to have launched a space rocket. They said no other details were available.

See Update 4 - they didn’t it turns out..
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After a bit of stochastic web-enabled research¹ I found this little piece of information from the UNSW Law Journal that everyone should bookmark away just in case they need it..

There’s A Satellite In My Backyard! - Mir And The Convention On International Liability For Damage Caused By Space Objects.

But what is the legal position in relation to damage caused by the return to Earth of a space object such as Mir? Are there any rules in place to cover such an eventuality? Under what circumstances would Russia have been responsible at international law for any such damage? What would be the extent of its liability? How is damage to be measured and what procedures (if any) are in place to facilitate compensation claims and to arrive at a determination of responsibility and its consequences? Once a determination is made, is it a legally binding and enforceable decision?

Just remember where you read it when you need it..

1. i.e. random searching looking for the conclusion of this case triggered by catching up on a story of Rich’s. [back]

An interesting news article from the BBC, it is believed that the Chinese military did an anti-satellite weapons test against an old weather satellite of theirs and successfully destroyed it with a surface launched ballistic missile.

The report said that a Chinese Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite, launched in 1999, was destroyed by an anti-satellite system launched from or near China’s Xichang Space Centre on 11 January.

There is the usual outrage over the test, but I do wonder whether they would have said anything if it was the US who had done the same..

Update: China has confirmed that this test took place.

Donna and I went out tonight to see if we could see Comet McNaught, but the smoke haze from the bushfires meant it was obscured.

The BOM is forecasting clearer conditions tomorrow (asides from possible thunderstorms) so that might work out - though it will be 39°C!

This is an excellent demonstration of the power of the MRO’s HiRISE camera, it has managed to return a beautiful full colour image of Victoria Crater and capture a view of the Opportunity rover from orbit.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the sub-image of the rover:

Yay! After months of waiting NASA’s MRO has reached its science orbit and taken its first snap with its HiRISE camera. NASA has a press release with a link to the gallery page of the image which has a scale of about 1 foot per pixel. They also have an 8MB TIFF “sub-image” available for download from the MRO’s calibration gallery.

But for the very latest you’ve got to check out the HiRISE team blog where they already have the fact that the second image is down, of layered deposits at the Martian North Pole.

Below is the first image!

Update: the page with the full image from which the above sub-image was taken is also available, but be warned, the full size JPEG is 23444 x 23377 pixels and ways in at a hefty 111.8 MBytes!