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Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

#4

Post by hartror »

thomasf1 wrote: post #3

The final drop is quite messy, there´s a lot of dust. I wonder how happy NASA is with the sky-crane solution - would they do it again as the new standard for mars rovers or is it in the "nice try" category?

The dust & gravel situation was only one reason the sky-crane was used. The other options of traditional lander or air bags have worse issues beyond dust and gravel and in the case of a lander the dust and gravel issues are worse.

Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

#5

Post by mbell »

thomasf1 wrote: post #3

The final drop is quite messy, there´s a lot of dust. I wonder how happy NASA is with the sky-crane solution - would they do it again as the new standard for mars rovers or is it in the "nice try" category?

From the press conferences I've watched there seems to be more debris on the rover than expected so its possible it wasn't as successful as they wanted. It could also just be that they landed in an area particularly prone to debris, I'll let the experts sort that out.

Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

#6

Post by dhughes »

It's hard to get a sense of scale, one minute it's wow so high up look way down at the craters then suddenly oh! That's not a crater that's the ground.

Beautiful I didn't know they had such high quality video I figured like it seems on all the others missions data is kept to a minimum and we'd only see black and white 640x480.

Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

#7

Post by mbell »

dhughes wrote: post #6

It's hard to get a sense of scale, one minute it's wow so high up look way down at the craters then suddenly oh! That's not a crater that's the ground. Beautiful I didn't know they had such high quality video I figured like it seems on all the others missions data is kept to a minimum and we'd only see black and white 640x480.

I think some of this is that the video is sped up. Best I can recall from being nerd-locked into the data coming back from MSL the decent camera only captures 5 frames a second at this resolution. This video is obviously replaying at a much higher frame rate so they are either playing it back at faster than real time or they interpolated a lot of frames, I'm guessing the former.

[EDIT] And now that I stop playing the video on repeat I realize this was covered in the article and the video description...

Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

#8

Post by MetallicCloud »

mbell wrote: post #7
dhughes wrote: post #6

It's hard to get a sense of scale, one minute it's wow so high up look way down at the craters then suddenly oh! That's not a crater that's the ground. Beautiful I didn't know they had such high quality video I figured like it seems on all the others missions data is kept to a minimum and we'd only see black and white 640x480.

I think some of this is that the video is sped up. Best I can recall from being nerd-locked into the data coming back from MSL the decent camera only captures 5 frames a second at this resolution. This video is obviously replaying at a much higher frame rate so they are either playing it back at faster than real time or they interpolated a lot of frames, I'm guessing the former. [EDIT] And now that I stop playing the…

Yep, it's captured at 5fps, and played at 15fps. So it's running at 3x.
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