Help find a bright object on Mars

Not directly apropos, but the current best answer on that page is probably good enough to have been worth money to NASA, and somebody just did it for free because it was a neat problem to solve and they could.<p>This is probably my favorite thing about the internet.

I'm not sure if very tiny and close objects like this one are something anyone has focused on. At the moment, the MSL team has so many very well trained eyeballs that they don't need much automation of relatively high level tasks like this one. After the initial 90 days, the team will shrink, and automation will be more important.<p>Detecting objects in medium to long range Mars rover imagery is a problem that has received a lot of attention, including systems that run <i>on board the rover</i>.<p>The people who have pushed this the farthest are here:<p><a href="http://aegis.jpl.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://aegis.jpl.nasa.gov/</a><p>Just a recognition algorithm is not enough. You also need to integrate prioritization, planning (is it OK to pivot the camera to point in that direction, do we have enough room to store the data, ...), and acquisition to have a system that actually gathers quality data without sacrificing other mission objectives. The described algorithm has been run on Opportunity.<p>The selling point for on board automation in this context is light time. By the time you send the images back, analyze them, and upload a new command sequence to take the data, you would have driven past the interesting rock. So you have to do some things on board. Limited bandwidth also plays a role.

The next time some alien life form comes to earth and wants to destroy us for all the pain and suffering we are causing each other, lets just point it at this link.<p>It is by far the best example of "Why the human race deserves to exist" that I've seen this week.<p>Edit: this guy is responsible for this as well: <a href="http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/5676/how-to-peel-the-labels-from-marmalade-jars-using-mathematica/5695#5695" rel="nofollow">http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/5676/how-to-p...</a><p>Awesome stuff.

This is why I both love and hate reading hacker news / stack exchange. On one hand this is one of the most amazing posts I've seen and made me want to learn Mathematica and image analysis, but on the other hand, it made me want to learn Mathematica an image analysis. (which has no real connection to my day job or side projects)

Interesting that one of the responders advises the asker to leave the question open to garner stronger responses - in stark contrast to SO where quick turnaround (by both parties) is strongly encouraged. Different models for different communities.

I am a bit lost here as I am not at all familiar with image processing and the Math behind it. Can someone please shed light?

A mod named "rm -rf" lock-protected the thread. That's a terrible username. Can you imagine thinking you're logging into your account but the focus is accidentally on a command line window?

I would think NASA spotted that bright spot using an algorithm. Do they have people staring at each photo looking for such small anomalies?

How can these sorts of problems be posed to a wider audience?<p>Is NASA and SpaceX's work so narrowly defined that the community could not help in other ways?<p>How great would that be? Get great industry minds involved in government work furthering the space program and encouraging open source spirit all the while?