Smile
Mars from a mere 4,700 miles away.
Image of #Mars captured from a distance of 4,700 miles by #Marco pic.twitter.com/RPYWlJewSs
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 26, 2018
Tip Jar
Mars from a mere 4,700 miles away.
Image of #Mars captured from a distance of 4,700 miles by #Marco pic.twitter.com/RPYWlJewSs
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 26, 2018
And the bugger’s landed safely and sent back a snapshot within minutes of doing so.
The things we can do when adults are running things, eh.
“”within minutes”
I like that. How far away is Mars now? What is the time-lag?
Just over 3 minutes at light-speed.
I see there’s a plan to send a crewed mission to Mars. I hope they don’t all fall asleep and fly past it. Has been known to happen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/27/plane-flies-29-miles-past-australian-destination-after-pilot-falls-asleep
Omar, the other possibility is to do a ‘Cunningham’ and end up on one of Jupiter’s moons..
In the early days of long-distance aviation an Englishman named Cunningham announced plans to cross the Atlantic solo. The aviation authorities forbade his effort on the grounds that his craft was bot airworth and certainly not up to an Atlantic crossing.
Shortly afterwards, Cunningham took off from Ireland for a scheduled flight to France but somehow landed a few days later in America. His excuse, which he maintained for life, was that he must have taken a wrong turn and just carried on untill sighting land.
Posterity has him known as ‘Wrong-way Cunningham’.
Anyway, three cheers for the ESA. Bloody geniuses the lot of ’em.
Addendum to above: it’s a NASA probe but with a lot of European gadgetry.
That first picture, taken with the translucent lens cap still on. Sort of a ‘Dear folks at home, arrived safe and well’ snapshot.
Link (idiot!)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/27/nasa-mars-insight-lander-sends-back-first-picture-from-red-planet
[I swapped your ten billion character link for a more reasonable one. OB]
I went over to here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi (JPL’s Horizons planet-position system), and I got the numbers for today, December 2.
Mars’s distance = 1.02 Astronomical Units (size of Earth’s orbit) = 152 million kilometers = 95 million miles = 8.5 minutes by radio message. That distance takes about 170 years by highway driving and 19 years by airliner flying, all nonstop. It took the InSight spacecraft about 6 1/2 months to get there, though it used a somewhat indirect route.
It never fails to bend my little mind.
NASA JPL also has this very cool real-time status page for their Deep Space Network (DSN) of ground-based antennas communicating with their spacecraft. The page has 3 rows for their 3 sites (Madrid, Goldstone, and Canberra, spaced equally by 120° around the Earth), and each row shows 4 antennas (although each site really has 5 or 6).
When a communications link is active, a spacecraft name appears above an antenna as a short name in capital letters. I recently clicked VGR2 for Voyager 2, and when I clicked + more detail, I saw Canberra’s big 70 meter antenna was receiving 160 bits per second and transmitting 16 bits per second at a range of 17.9 billion kilometers. Sure, 16 bits per second is really slow — but 17.9 billion kilometers is really far!
It is SO FAR.
And yet we can see Mars from here with just our eyes.
All of it bends my mind.
I’ve seen Mars — it looks like an orange-yellow star, much like what a “red” star looks like. Mars is easiest to see when it is at opposition, on the other side of the Sun. It was last at opposition a few months ago, and it is at opposition every 2 years 1 1/2 months. So it will next be in opposition in the fall of 2020.
I’ve seen the planet a small telescope — I could resolve it at a disk, but I could not see much more surface detail than that.