Comments on: "Boring" pictures of Mars

By: Bill Galloway

Bill Galloway — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Human nature being what it is, the *second* person to walk on Mars will likely have to pay some sort of admission fee to the planet’s owner.

By: Little Mouse

Little Mouse — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:14:00 +0000

It’s this idea that always makes me expect to see SG-1 off in the distance. TV has ruined me forever!

By: bzishi

bzishi — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:47:00 +0000

Earthrises are awesome, but the only location you can see them from the surface would be the slivers on the edge where the libration brings the Earth in and out of view. The vast majority of the Moon has the Earth always in the sky or never in the sky.

By: Mark Burban

Mark Burban — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 01:28:00 +0000

Kind of reminds me of Andreas Gursky’s work. ;)

By: Jesse Yules

Jesse Yules — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:56:00 +0000

The real irony is that we’re interested in the potential of lifeless old Mars at the same time our own habitable planet’s ecosystems and mild climate are slowing collapsing.

By: penguinchris

penguinchris — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:48:00 +0000

People often ask me if I like rocks when they find out that I’m a geologist (well, they almost always phrase it as “so you must really like rocks, huh!”). The truth is that I’m bored to tears by them. I’m really not very interested – to me rocks are sort of a tool; a piece of data that tells me something else that is much more interesting (plenty of geologists are actually interested in the rocks themselves regardless of what they tell you, but not me).

When I look at photos from Mars, though, my eye is immediately drawn to one of two places – either to the mountains in the distance if they’re visible, or to any rocks that are close enough and big enough to see clearly. There’s just so much potential in these rocks, especially with the recent announcement of evidence of relatively recent active tectonics on Mars.

Moon rocks, incidentally, are cool but not that interesting to me scientifically. Mars rocks will surely seem as mundane as moon rocks eventually (barring the discovery of truly exotic stuff) but at this point they are the most interesting rocks in the graspable universe.

The scientific context, plus all the other reasons that these photos aren’t boring that have already been provided in the comments, means that even though you can go to Death Valley and see things that are very, very similar (and I do suggest that you go there even though it’s kind of boring), photos from Mars are never boring.

And yes – my mind and my eyes are trained to look at photos of visually boring things like the surface of mars in a very different way from anyone else. I’m not looking at the photo as a whole (and I am also a photographer and have trained myself to do that too, by the way), I’m scanning closely for the little details, looking for hints of interesting things they might tell us.

p.s. if you want to see really spectacular stuff from mars, check out images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/nea.php

By: Mark Dow

Mark Dow — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:48:00 +0000

The gulleys and lighter zig-zag in this image, dead center on the lower foothills of Gale’s rim, is thought to be part of a fluvial system, the path of water flowing into Gale Crater early in Mars history.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16052

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:20:00 +0000

I half expect to see someone ripping across the sand/dirt in a Baja Bug or sand rail.

By: Nagurski

Nagurski — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 22:16:00 +0000

Mars sucks, change it.

By: blindwanderer

blindwanderer — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:20:00 +0000

This was the point of a comic from last week.

http://amultiverse.com/2012/08/06/the-mission/

By: Redoubt South

Redoubt South — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:29:00 +0000

Hollywood has ruined our ability to imagine and conceive of things yet unknown. Our capacity for accepting an alien world as being less than the one’s on the big screen has reduced our ability to appreciate what is real.

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:04:00 +0000

idkwtf you are talking about. Star Wars is real, man. You didn’t have to change it all. What happened to the Star Wars that I used to know?

By: beemoh

beemoh — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:55:00 +0000

Going off the colour, I’m guessing this is the nougat layer, and we’ll see the much more interesting caramel and chocolate layers soon.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:44:00 +0000

Don’t blame me, blame the lighting technicians standing just off-set.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:18:00 +0000

The photo is boring in the sense that you wouldn’t spend more than a second or two looking at it if you didn’t know the context. It’s that context that’s exciting, not the image itself.

By: snowmentality

snowmentality — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:06:00 +0000

What?! Who thinks this photo is boring?!

It’s a Martian landscape. With gorgeous evocative mountains fading away into the distance and everything. You can imagine yourself standing there, looking at those mountains, knowing that you have this whole world. And this time, you really do — you’re not stealing it from people who already live there. It’s truly wide open and empty and ready to be explored. You’re experiencing something no one has ever experienced before.

How can that not be thrilling?

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:05:00 +0000

Oh, man. Your shadows lean in different directions. Otherwise I would have been totally fooled.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:32:00 +0000

I disagree. The surface of the moon is different enough that it’s not likely to be confused with a terrestrial desert. Plus, earthrises are AWESOME.

By: franko

franko — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:20:00 +0000

yeah, i can’t believe people say this. yes, it’s just “boring rocks”… ON ANOTHER PLANET. that we can see because we sent a robot there that we can control to take photos and send them back to us. how is that not AMAZING?

By: chaopoiesis

chaopoiesis — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:20:00 +0000

Endless dark punctuated with dirtballs…

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:18:00 +0000

I guess it’s still kind of boring, but I tried:

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:17:00 +0000

Adding to the boringness of the photos is that we’ve seen many rovers on the surface of Mars now. And they always send back photos that look like this.

By: RyRoBa

RyRoBa — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:16:00 +0000

I love this. My favorite thing to ponder as of late, is what if all this space exploration just leads us to discover that everything, and all ‘alien’ life is really just not very different from the exotic we have walking or swimming around on the earth. If life was seeded from space, maybe it all more or less comes out pretty much the same. Apart from the random sentient cloud, maybe star trek nailed it.

By: LaylaSV

LaylaSV — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Pleasantly surprised, for no logical reason, that rocks on Mars look just like rocks on Earth.

By: kiptw

kiptw — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:42:00 +0000

But mundane means “of this world, as opposed to a heavenly one,” so wouldn’t a coinage like, say, “areane” be more to the point?

By: ikelleigh

ikelleigh — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:51:00 +0000

This is one of my favorites so far.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00003/mcam/0003ML0000125000E1_DXXX.jpg

By: EH

EH — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:48:00 +0000

“Take a sweatah!”

By: brianary

brianary — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Mars always looks like my childhood summers in Electric City, WA.

By: Dan Clarke

Dan Clarke — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:28:00 +0000

Well played sir, but I went back and found some pictures from the earlier rover missions as well… =)
http://boringpicturesfrommars.tumblr.com/

By: Gary61

Gary61 — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:14:00 +0000

Actually, reply to Retep (below) – “people can do on Mars with a relatively simple pressure suit. ”
PLUS some overclothes – get’s awfully cold at night there.