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BREAKING NEWS - ROCKS DISCOVERED ON MARS

posted in Space by Cargo Cult on Sunday November 25 2012

I love the raw images service provided by the Mars Science Laboratory teams. Inexplicable lumps of an alien world appearing like jigsaw pieces, just asking to be reassembled into something more understandable.

So, more images got posted, this time from the 100mm narrow-angle MastCam. Strange glimpses of twisted rocks, distant dust-obscured mountains, the tea-coloured sky...

Cue the Hugin.

I should have become a geologist.
MSL Curiosity Sol 107 panorama of Glenelg (~7MB, 7k×3k JPEG) - the mission's geologists are effectively being set loose in a vast toyshop. For science! Computer-destroyingly-large version here. And to think people complained about the 2 megapixel cameras?

The weirdly squishy-looking rocks to the centre-right, the angular broken blocks, the distant hills, the layered, eroded outcrop to the centre-left... Rocks!

It's kind of pointless turning this into an interactive panorama, what with the field of view being ~60×30 degrees...

Edit 2012-11-27: now updated and extended with images from Sol 109, here's an increasingly gigantic, unofficial panorama:

That's a reasonable about of space-data.
MSL Curiosity Sol 107, 109 panorama of Glenelg (~10MB, 10k×4k JPEG) - even more science. Blinking heck. Internet-destroyingly-large version here.

There's thumbnails for yet more images arriving. Too much data...

Article comments (now closed)

cawhitworth's gravatar

1. This is definitely the best thing I have seen on the internet

Posted by cawhitworth at 10:42AM, Monday November 26 2012

today. Maybe even this week, although there was a pretty funny cat picture I saw last thursday.

Seriously, though, my mind is pretty thoroughly blown at this point. I might want a wall-sized printout of this on my wall so I can stare at it and imagine I live on Mars.

(I also don't seem to be able to sign in as 'parm' - how do I get me a password reset?)

Cargo Cult's gravatar

2. Password reset

Posted by Cargo Cult at 10:52PM, Tuesday November 27 2012

The automated password reset robot has sent you a completely randomly selected new password. At some point I'll get off my arse and write an *actual* password reset feature!

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