The new "face" of Mars research?
5/22/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) announced Monday afternoon that it has published 20,000 new Mars images, available in a format that the operator of unmanned spacecraft calls a .Web-based photo album..
Going back to September 1997, the image archive spans one Mars year (687 Earth days). The Mars Orbiter Camera photo archive concludes in August 1999, when the Global Surveyor was undertaking a mapping mission. A prepared statement from NASA states, .Many of the pictures have such high resolution that objects on the surface the size of a school bus can be seen..
In the statement, Dr. Michael Malin, principal investigator for the camera system at MSSS, explained, .Putting these data into perspective is very difficult. We have focused on 'themes.' Layers on the Martian surface are the biggest 'theme' or 'finding' of the imaging investigation so far. To a geologist, layers record history and they are the most geologically important, profound thing we have seen."
Malin continued: "We see layers in the walls of canyons, craters, and troughs. We see layers in both the north and south polar regions. We see them in the craters on top of volcanoes, we see them in pits at the bottoms of impact craters, we see them virtually everywhere that some process has exposed the subsurface so that we can see it from above."
Not surprisingly, no mention was made of there being a "face" on Mars.
This is a watershed moment in the history of Mars research. At The Real Mission to Mars forum held in Scottsdale, Arizona May 7, Enterprise Mission director Richard Hoagland repeatedly reproached MSSS for not handing over Mars images to the public sooner.
Questions remain: What took so long? And does this image archive represent all there is, in terms of Mars Orbiter Camera photography?
Sites carrying the Mars image archive:
Malin Space Science Systems: http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery
A subset of the images can be seen at: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/new and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs