Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mars Curiosity's first images

mars.jpl.nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 176 posts

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#21

Post by ars »

haeikou wrote: post #11

I had the impression that the whole "control" room was nothing but show. Estimating the travelling times of a radio wave, nobody on earth could have had any control about the spacecraft, and none of the engineers in the control room could have done anything other than watch. So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these peop…

I think they were there in case of problems. Plus the post landing checklist, which they are doing now.

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#22

Post by jessriedel »

glimcat wrote: post #14

Images are up now on the raw feed. They're getting F5ed hard, so actually seeing anything may take a bit. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ Images are grouped by Martian solar days (sol 0 == day 0, length 24h 39.6m).

Has anyone mirrored these yet?

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#23

Post by ars »

angersock wrote: post #16

Did anyone grab the image with some purple on it in a grid pattern? I didn't get a good look at it.

I saw that too, I don't know what it was.

Best guess is, they talked about finding a flat surface to land on, so my guess is that's a grid showing the options.

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#24

Post by DanBC »

This is amazing. I hope that school children are given time to watch this. I hope that parents and teachers have the skills and knowledge to foster the Curiosity-driven curiosity of those children.

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#25

Post by damncabbage »

artursapek wrote: post #5

From a screen recording I took: http://i.imgur.com/C5Y6P.jpg I actually shed a tear. That was beautiful. Edit: Raw images being put on Twitter by NASA: http://p.twimg.com/Azl6LRUCMAAU1GK.jpg:large http://p.twimg.com/Azl9hyXCEAE5_Hw.jpg:large http://p.twimg.com/Azl7LXOCUAAJT5z.jpg:large

Is that... a Tcl/Tk app being run in GNOME?

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#26

Post by ars »

joshontheweb wrote: post #20

What innovations from this vehicle can we expect to see trickle down into the consumer space?

First you need a time machine.

These types of trickle down are not identified till much later. If you knew what it would be in advance you wouldn't need it to trickle down - you could just use or develop it directly.

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#28

Post by lusr »

haeikou wrote: post #11

I had the impression that the whole "control" room was nothing but show. Estimating the travelling times of a radio wave, nobody on earth could have had any control about the spacecraft, and none of the engineers in the control room could have done anything other than watch. So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these peop…

What did you expect them to do? Go home and go to sleep and come back in the morning to check the logs? Come on. They'd hardly close their eyes for a second with all the excitement.

They're all there monitoring the various systems because they're all responsible for various components of an incredibly complex piece of equipment.

Assuming the landing goes well, they all still need to be there to continually monitor the operation of the systems they're responsible for and provide feedback if things don't like how they expected - it's not just about landing there.

This is normal even when releasing a tiny piece of software; it's hardly surprising NASA do the same for a multi-billion dollar project.

Re: Mars Curiosity's first images

#30

Post by marvin »

joering2 wrote: post #13

I took those during landing sequence.. http://i45.tinypic.com/353eemc.jpg http://i46.tinypic.com/ej95s5.png http://i49.tinypic.com/2qicoqq.png http://i50.tinypic.com/2hd8j13.png edit: its just fun to watch those. also, according to NASA there is 500,000 lines of code behind those 38 steps.. would love to see some parts of it!

That's really cool. Would love it if they had some video, or alternatively made a visualization of the entire landing sequence using received data. Like for instance a video of the telemetry you took screenshots of.
Post reply on HN