January 06, 2004

Mars: raw images

Sending humans to Mars is still a dream.

At the moment Robots go to Mars so that we can learn as much as we can about the Red Planet. So orbiters look at the planet from on high and landers sit in one spot and investigate a landing site. But rovers can be commanded to look around, move to an interesting location and examine the soil and rocks in fine detail.

A raw image from the Mars Exploration Rover Mission:

SpaceMars2.jpg

The gallery is here. Some panoramic images are here.

When the above photo is connected to the first color panorama we have a stony plain with a range of hills in the distance. An old river bed?

The Mars exploration mission is really is about technology isn't it? The rovers become the feet, hands and eyes of explorers on Earth; a reinvented prothesis: a technology in place of our body.

There is so much faith, promise and utopian longing built into this technology. It really is about mastery human beings going to Mars.

And exploration, judging from our own earthbound history, is about colonization. Colonizing space is the dream.

Perchance I am just reading some remarks on technology made by Derrida at the Sydney Seminars when he visited Australia in 1999.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 6, 2004 10:33 PM | TrackBack
Comments

The robotic rover on Mars is commanded from above, instructions are beamed to it from earth via satellite, though it also functions automatically in many ways.

The resemblance of such prosthetic processes to the psychoses of folk like Schreber, who claimed that he was being transformed by rays being beamed to him from above, is uncanny. And it is still insane that humans exploring Mars.

Posted by: charles on January 10, 2004 02:00 PM
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