201–210 of 365 posts
I get how exciting this is for planetary scientists, but the last few robotic missions have really driven home that Mars is kind of an armpit. Here's to sending rovers somewhere with cooler visuals. I will stay up all night to see what the Io Lander can send home before it falls into a volcano.
Not kidding someone could add filters to the images to see different aspects of the view.
Stupid question, but where is Perseverance's energy source? Answer: Plutonium It powers a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. The plutonium decays at a few % per year, so that means it should be able to bring Elon a sandwich when he lands. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...
a glowing green sandwich covered in red sand. But seriously, this stuff is powering those voyager probes 40 years later. Which makes me ask: why do we have to send there technologies 10 billion miles away to make them work? Why can't my fridge be powered this way?
The current power structures in the world (petrodollar, etc) and world economy as a whole (massive employment within oil industry and throughout supply chains catering to oil industry) are too intertwined with the oil industry to allow any other technologies to swiftly disrupt that.
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Dude, it's a scientific experiment, not a fucking Instagram shoot
That's not what this is. I didn't impugn the project did I? I criticized the public relations blitz and a falsely descriptive title on the BBC. Don't pretend public outreach isn't part of the plan here.
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Multiple clicks to get to the full resolution image. 50 thumbnails able to be viewed at a time, many uninteresting to lay people (solid gray screen, dozens of repeated images of of a portion of the rover itself, etc), for the monumental task of sifting through the 6407 images the rover has transmitted so far in mere days. Wholly unusable in a few months I imagine.
The site isn't great, no. But the reason there's so many repeated images is because NASA doesn't want to be accused of hiding anything. If they're taking photos for calibration, we get those, just like if they're taking stunning panoramas.
I honestly don't mind government sites, they are usually thoroughly boring and very conservative with their design, which means that even old people like my dad can click around and use it. I think that's a good thing.
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The site isn't great, no. But the reason there's so many repeated images is because NASA doesn't want to be accused of hiding anything. If they're taking photos for calibration, we get those, just like if they're taking stunning panoramas.
And to a science agency, I don't think their top priority is selecting the best 4k wallpaper for easy download. I honestly don't mind government sites, they are usually thoroughly boring and very conservative with their design, which means that even old people like my dad can click around and use it. I think that's a good thing.
All ya'll complaining that you can take better pictures with your iPhones than Percy can on Mars, please read this: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/cameras/ These are ENGINEERING cameras for taking incredibly precise measurements. Not for populating an Instagram page.
> SuperCam fires a laser at mineral targets that are beyond the reach of the rover’s robotic arm, and then analyzes the vaporized rock to reveal its elemental composition. Like the ChemCam on rover Curiosity, SuperCam fires laser pulses at pinpoint areas smaller than 1 millimeter from more than 20 feet (about 7 meters) away. Holy shit, that rocks.
Anyone has insights on how data in such volumes can be transferred from Mars to Earth in the absence of a direct link? Do the intermediate nodes have gigabytes of available storage to emit data to the next available node once it becomes visible ?
From my layman's understanding, it's relayed via the orbiters. There are a few orbiters around Mars. NASA appears to have an arrangement with the ESA to upload data from the rovers to the ESA's orbiters, depending on whose orbiters are within line of sight at any given time. Then the orbiter sends the information back to Earth, which are received by NASA's Deep Space Network During the time when line of sight between…
Stupid question maybe but like is there a reason the picture quality seems worse than a decent dslr photo? I'm so curious what that photo would look like, taken with an everyday camera, without the bizarre 'scientific' look of these shots.
Generally, these cameras are many years out of date. They don't load up the rovers with the latest gear from today, but with the latest gear from when the design review process was closed. I don't know when that was for Perseverance, but it would not surprise me if that was a decade ago. The cameras are also not specifically designed for image capture, but for scientific study. In that they take images at a wider ran…
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The 8 figure price tag for a RTG makes consumer use uneconomical.
The reason for that high of a price tag is that the engineering costs are spread over a very few units. If they made 100,000 of them, the costs would be much closer to the materials cost.
Which is? Not cheap. And it's not like you can buy in any corner store.
And no, while an "economy of scale" would make it cheaper, it doesn't mean it would be cheap.