Alien Anomalies

I thought you would all like to read the reply from a well-known NASA scientist about the images of the sun as taken by the Rovers. I have altered it slightly to include the links as clickable ones. I am sure he will not mind me posting this as it is educational for everyone to know these facts.

In response to my question about what the sun images were used for:

The short answer is that there's a LOT of information in those pictures, and that's why they are a regular part of the rover's imaging campaign.

For one, taking pictures of the Sun tells us how much dust there is in the atmosphere, because the dust blocks some of the (known) amount of sunlight hitting the top of the atmosphere, and results in less power on the rover's solar panels. Less power means less driving, photographing, and other science, and can even be dangerous is the power gets too low to recharge the batteries every day.  So imaging the Sun allows us to keep track of and even to do some modest forecasting of dust conditions, helping us plan for future science and driving campaigns.

Plus, finding the Sun allows the engineers to use the rover as a sort of high-tech sextant--knowing our latitude and longitude on Mars and then the position of the Sun in altitude and azimuth allows us to verify the time, position of the Earth in the sky (for communications), and the rover's heading.  Pretty important stuff, especially those times when a rover has had a reset or some other computer problem and it loses its onboard clock and orientation information.  It runs a "Sun find" program and then gets its bearings!

There are also general science reasons to be interested in the dust. Here, for example, is a link to a technical paper that provides a little detail of how/why we image to Sun to learn about dust

and a link to a web site about using Mars Sun and sky images to learn about the atmosphere:


and here's a link to a web site with more info , and a paper I wrote about using the images of the Sun to learn about the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos when they occasionally pass in front of the Sun during mini-eclipses.

As for bigger and more detailed copies of those, well, it's not really possible because the Sun is only about 20 pixels across as seen by the Pancams from Mars!

So from pretty tiny, seemingly boring photos, we're actually getting quite a lot!

Thanks for your interest in the (continuing) adventures of the Mars rovers.


Please start a new thread if you want to discuss this.