Postcard from Mars

[DanS]

One of the coolest true-color non-fisheye pictures of the Mars landscape from the rover Spirit. It feels like you're right there.

Large image warning. ~ 200K

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0605/bumpyboulder_spirit_big.jpg

Let's Go!

[KrazyHorse]

Looks like a closeup of my cat's litter box.

[DanS]

Oh God. Not another NASA conspiracy theory.

[KrazyHorse]

Well, my salary does come from them, so I'll let them get away with that.

But I'll be watching them

[MarkG]

the camera is broken. there is no green or blue

[KrazyHorse]

You have to wait for the next two books for that.

[FrostyBoy]

Thanks for that DanS.

I like the fact that the sun lights it up like Earth. Just curious, does the suns light, light up planets (or moon) as far as Pluto, similar to Earth? Or am I just being stupid again?

We should be thankful we have a planet like Mars, imagine the possibilities of having no "landable" planets surrounding us, we would truly be alone and would probably never find our way to another solar system (without practice bases like Mars to challenge us). It's almost as if someone WANTS us to figure out how to travel to other solar systems.

[KrazyHorse]

I like the fact that the sun lights it up like Earth. Just curious, does the suns light, light up planets (or moon) as far as Pluto, similar to Earth?

The amount of energy reaching each square meter of platary surface from the sun goes as approximately 1/r^2 where r is the planet-sun distance.

Mars is approximately 1.5 times further from the Sun than the Earth is, so it receives sunlight which is about 45% as intense. Jupiter gets sunlight about 3.7% as intense as Earth's.

Saturn 1.1%
Uranus 0.3%
Neptune 0.1%
Pluto 0.06%

A full moon on Earth provides ~0.0002% of the sun's light intensity. Since human vision is logarithmic (approximately) if you classified moonlight as a 0 and sunlight as a 10

pluto 4.3
neptune 4.7
uranus 5.6
saturn 6.6
jupiter 7.5
mars 9.4

similarly, you would get

venus 10.5
mercury 11.4

[KrazyHorse]

You would probably be able to read by sunlight on Pluto. You might be able to distinguish colours. Not sure about that though.

[KrazyHorse]

The brightness of the sun on pluto would be like having a single 100W bulb in a room ~6 meters = 20 feet on a side (and 20 feet high) (and no fair having white walls)