REAL TIME FACE OF MARS CODE

There is a lot to glean about our own planet's past - and future - by studying Mars in greater detail, and often through pictures of Mars like these. For one, Mars was likely much warmer and wetter which means that perhaps life had the potential to arise in this time. About 3.8-3.5 billion years ago, Mars and Earth shared a lot of similarities. In fact, Mars' formation and evolution are comparable to Earth's. One key element in its mission is also to identify ice, water, and any other clues for the potential of life. This camera is unique as it can discern something as small as an office desk on the planet below. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter surveys the planet with close-up Mars pictures and features the largest camera ever included on a planetary mission. Both devices arrived at the red planet about a year after their launch.

The Mars pictures in the gallery above are shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched from Cape Canaveral in 2005, and also from Mars' Curiosity Rover, which is the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars and was launched in 2011. 'We're basically doing a more sophisticated version of 'Paint by Numbers' when we reconstruct the images,' reported Eric De Jong, one of the team members responsible for processing photos of Mars.

REAL TIME FACE OF MARS CODE

When the rover sends Mars pictures back to earth, each pixel in the image is coded in zeros and ones, this binary code is then translated into color and brightness once it's picked up by earth's deep space antennas. The colorization in these Mars pictures is altogether pretty accurate. Though the red planet now is a fairly hostile environment for humans - with freezing temperatures and air of mostly carbon dioxide - NASA forges ahead with plans to send people there - possibly by the 2030s. Mars features the remnants of what once were volcanoes, meteors and craters, flash floods, and frost. Through pictures of Mars, we have been able to discover that the fourth planet from the sun is not so unlike the roughest conditions on our own home planet. Now, it's easier than ever before to witness the celestial beauty that resides on the red planet with the help of modern orbiters and rovers. Ever since NASA's Mariner-4 spacecraft collected the first Mars pictures by way of flyby in 1965, the public has been enraptured by the red planet.

Real time face of mars