Worth noting that these first pictures are sent in the first seconds after touchdown, you can even still see the dust in the air from the landing (even if it was craned down to reduce dust). It also explains the very low resolution in general, they want to get confirmation ASAP, no time for high quality high resolution images.
The low resolution and fuzz is also because they still have the lens caps on - they are of course transparent lens caps in case the explosive bolts that will release them fail. Redundancy!
This is one of the cooler things that I learned today.
Could they go even further: make the caps themselves lenses+filters. Take photos. And then blow them off for new photos.
At the very beginning of the film, Ming and his henchman are discussing "an obscure body in the SK system", which the inhabitants refer to as the planet "Earth", pronounced as if the word is completely foreign to them. However, at that moment, Ming activates a button on his console labeled "Earth Quake".
Right. One "proof" advanced by Moon landing conspiracy theorists was that dust settled much faster in videos than it should if it were really in Lunar gravity.
> the mixture of invisible odorless tasteless gases (such as nitrogen and oxygen) that surrounds the earth
> also : the equivalent mix of gases on another planet
I would naively guess yes to part one but it's complicated: Mars has less gravity, much less atmospheric pressure, colder temps, and greater gravitational influence from its moons than Earth. Wikipedia says the mechanism of the planet's dust storms isn't well understood.
