Looks like CGI to me.
Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#12The 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.
Really? I had heard the issue was Curiosity was to be heavier than past probes, and they weren't confident the old airbag method could handle the weight gently enough.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah, I missed that part, so I'm not crazy.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#14It'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.
Here you go this might help
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMsdobLq1-4&feature=plcp
A split screen view of the computer simulation with the original MARDI images synced up.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really? I had heard the issue was Curiosity was to be heavier than past probes, and they weren't confident the old airbag method could handle the weight gently enough.
Airbag has other issues too, like you might not land right side up, and you have to drive off the airbags / landing platform.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#16This should give every coder a moment of pause.
Consider. Here we have a $2.5 billion interplanetary mission that is easily the most ambitious space exploration mission since the Apollo project. And it's using a completely new and untested landing system. Only bits and pieces of the landing system have been physically tested, and not even remotely all together. Because it turns out it is rather non-trivial to simulate an atmospheric reentry from an interplanetary trajectory, in the Martian atmosphere, under Martian gravity. In the end it came down to relying on our prior understanding of the Martian environment and simulations and measurements of the landing system and trusting the software to do its job. Because the round-trip delay for a human to be able to effect some part of the landing is nearly half an hour, and the entirety of the landing would take about a quarter that much time. Indeed, by the time we on Earth would receive a signal indicating that the atmospheric entry had begun in reality the entire landing would have already occurred several minutes in the past.
If you ever thought that a lot was riding on your code, this will certainly put that in perspective.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#17It'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.
[deleted]
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#18This should give every coder a moment of pause. Consider. Here we have a $2.5 billion interplanetary mission that is easily the most ambitious space exploration mission since the Apollo project. And it's using a completely new and untested landing system. Only bits and pieces of the landing system have been physically tested, and not even remotely all together. Because it turns out it is rather non-trivial to simulat…
This is nothing compared to medical software, for example. All you can lose here is some money, but no human life in danger. Some more perspective.
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really? I had heard the issue was Curiosity was to be heavier than past probes, and they weren't confident the old airbag method could handle the weight gently enough.
Additionally, the "violently tumble while marginally protected by airbags" plan isn't a viable method for eventually landing humans on Mars! One more reason to come up with a "gentler" descent :)
Re: Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent
#20This should give every coder a moment of pause. Consider. Here we have a $2.5 billion interplanetary mission that is easily the most ambitious space exploration mission since the Apollo project. And it's using a completely new and untested landing system. Only bits and pieces of the landing system have been physically tested, and not even remotely all together. Because it turns out it is rather non-trivial to simulat…
This is nothing compared to medical software, for example. All you can lose here is some money, but no human life in danger. Some more perspective.
I disagree. 2.5 billion dollars is worth a lot of lives. Consider how many people you could save from, say, malnutrition with that money. I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot. And we as a society have decided that space exploration is actually more important than saving those people. Now, you can agree or disagree with society on that point, but either way, a lot is riding on this, even measured in units of human life. If the thing crashes into the ground, we wasted money we could have done something else with. A lot of something.