**OFFICIAL**Sunday Night Curiosity Rover Landing Viewing Thread**OFFICIAL**

Blow a drummer

POPCORN FARTS!!!

That supposed Mars landing was all filmed at a sound stage, like the moon walk and 911. Never happened. Ask any French person.

NASA released the first color photo this am. Looks like a big old dust storm to me.

Curiosity's First Color Image of the Martian Landscape

This view of the landscape to the north of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was acquired by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the afternoon of the first day after landing. (The team calls this day Sol 1, which is the first Martian day of operations; Sol 1 began on Aug. 6, 2012.)

In the distance, the image shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater. The image is murky because the MAHLI's removable dust cover is apparently coated with dust blown onto the camera during the rover's terminal descent. Images taken without the dust cover in place are expected during checkout of the robotic arm in coming weeks.

The MAHLI is located on the turret at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm. At the time the MAHLI Sol 1 image was acquired, the robotic arm was in its stowed position. It has been stowed since the rover was packaged for its Nov. 26, 2011, launch.

The MAHLI has a transparent dust cover. This image was acquired with the dust cover closed. The cover will not be opened until more than a week after the landing.

When the robotic arm, turret, and MAHLI are stowed, the MAHLI is in a position that is rotated 30 degrees relative to the rover deck. The MAHLI image shown here has been rotated to correct for that tilt, so that the sky is "up" and the ground is "down".

When the robotic arm, turret, and MAHLI are stowed, the MAHLI is looking out from the front left side of the rover. This is much like the view from the driver's side of cars sold in the USA.

The main purpose of Curiosity's MAHLI camera is to acquire close-up, high-resolution views of rocks and soil at the rover's Gale Crater field site. The camera is capable of focusing on any target at distances of about 0.8 inch (2.1 centimeters) to infinity. This means it can, as shown here, also obtain pictures of the Martian landscape.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Bad move by NASA. People are idiots, this is the photo they'll remember. They should have waited a few days to release a good one.

Welcome to Burningman

There was a huge dust storm in the area for a while before landing. They were actually concerned it would cause issues. It calmed down some just before landing.

And they say the lens cap is still on the camera.

so they cheaped out on the camera???..$2.6 billion and they couldnt use a color camera????? who's the genius that said "hey...let's use a black and white camera".

It's a color camera. Just a rather monochromatic landscape. There will be some stunning pictures coming though.

Are you serious?

The color pictures you see of Mars are usually false color photos. Everything is this dull rust red.

In the distance, the image shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater. The image is murky because the MAHLI's removable dust cover is apparently coated with dust blown onto the camera during the rover's terminal descent. Images taken without the dust cover in place are expected during checkout of the robotic arm in coming weeks.

well the first pics from all of the other Mars rover's thru the years were all color pics right off the bat.

This is a color picture as well. The dust cap is on because there's a dust storm at the landing site, and the cap is coated in the dust.

ok...i'll take your word for it.

And the first photos from the other rovers were thumbnails that were in black and white. They were later run though false color filters.

4) Why were the first pictures from Spirit and Opportunity in black and white?
The first images of Mars were black and white because the first images were taken with engineering cameras, not science cameras. Engineering cameras are used to control and navigate the rovers. Basically, engineering cameras are looking out for objects, so these cameras do not need to be color cameras. Black and white images are just fine when you are trying to figure out how big and far away an object is. Engineering cameras have a larger field of view, so one image from an engineering camera shows a lot more of the area than an image from a Pancam would show. But, although the Pancams have a smaller field of view, they can capture much more of the detail in the scene than the engineering cameras can. So, after the engineering images are taken to get an idea of what is around the rover, the Pancam images are taken to get a view of the scene in more detail and in different colors.

Actually, all the pictures sent back from Spirit and Opportunity are black and white. Each camera's CCD (the part of the camera that the image is collected on) can only detect the brightness of an object in a scene. The relative brightness of the light detected by different pixels (different light measuring bins on the CCD) is saved as a series of numbers. Bright objects have high values in this series of numbers and dark objects have low numbers. Most of the cameras on the rovers do not have filters, so all we have is information about how bright objects are. The Pancam cameras have different filters that can be put in front of the lens of the camera so that only a certain color (called wavelength) of light is let into the camera. The CCD then detects how bright or dark an object is in one small range of wavelengths. Images taken through red, green and blue filters can be combined into a color image—an image that shows us colors close to what we would see if we were looking at Mars with our own eyes.

Geek

Shush you.

A picture from the Navigation camera. They are slowly preparing to deploy the High-res cameras... Everything is perfect so far.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/msl/120808mast/

That rover kicks ass. It's weird how interested I am in the damn thing, can't get enough.

It's amazing NASA landed this bitch on another planet.