Opportunity Snaps a Self-Portrait As It Preps for the Martian Winter

So the fad of taking Myspace pics finally reached Mars. Now it can die.

For some reason, this is really morbid to me. At the very least, sad.

Good night friend see you in the morning. I have known Opportunity since its first wheel tracks on Mars. This is a time of sadness for me because there will be no more armchair exploration after Opportunity.

I've made over five thousand color images from the NASA JPL raw image website from the MER rovers and thousand from Cassini, Galileo etc etc. , some of those images like all the meteorites found by Opportunity were used in published papers, I posted over one thousand of them here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

The days of the armchair Photoshop explorer's is coming to an end. Someone like me doing this to other public NASA obtained raw images is ending after Opportunity because exploration programs like the Mercury probe and Dawn have refused to allow the public rights to obtain the raw images in real time like the MER rovers. Mercury you have to wait six months, super secret Dawn "just forget about it" - they won't released any raw images. Now before we see any image from these public financed probes a committee will have to be formed, there is no better way to cripple press freedom than that. Yea you will hear all kinds of excuses why there not making them readily available to the public, I am sure some people are satisfied with their super secret organization excuses. All this because there is big money in publishing papers and not by letting the people who paid for it see these images in real time.

Curiosity has better color imaging cameras than anything before it so they won't need people like me to take RGB filters and make color images out of them. The cameras are made for color, for the first time real color images are processed within the camera of the Martian landscape since Viking real analog color images. No more false color images, we will see an un-doctored color image of Mars.

I don't know what the working agreement is with Curiosity and NASA, hopeful they will release them in real-time???

Ron Bennett

rlb2,
Your comments are very interesting and appreciated!!!

..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!

It possible worthwhile to send a landing probe robot to Opportunity for the single purpose of dusting it off and possible putting in a set of new batteries if possible. This probe just seems to never die! Major Applause to all the engineers!

..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!