This is delightful. NASA has put up a ebsite whereby you can rove Mars. The news claims the following:
The website called Marsoweb had been designed to help scientists select possible landing sites for the Mars Exploration Rovers. By making the web pages more user friendly, NASA hopes that space enthusiasts will electronically survey the red planets terrain for interesting geological features.
However, many Mars lovers already know about the site. About a half million people have visited Marsoweb. "Armchair planetary astronomers probably found it through Google," said Glenn Deardorff, a computer scientists, who has worked on Marsoweb for over four years. In January, the site recorded 26.7 million "hits" when the first rover, Spirit, landed. The updated pages offer a number of computer tools. On a global map taken during the Viking mission, users can zoom in on certain spots that were imaged by the Mars Orbiter Camera with a resolution between two and 12 meters per pixel. Included with the visual images are topographical, geologic and thermal inertia maps. The thermal inertia, which quantifies how a material holds and conducts heat, gives researchers an estimate of the granularity of the surface.
Also on display are the candidate landing sites for the Mars Exploration Rover 2003 missions. Laypersons can try to discern the selection process that mission organizers went through. "It isnt easy to find an overlap," Deardorff said, "between something scientifically interesting and a good landing spot from an engineering perspective."
So far I haven't been able to do much with it, but it's there for you to study. :)
- Art Neuro
No comments:
Post a Comment