141–150 of 517 posts
Watching the stream, it's striking the difference in employee age between NASA and SpaceX. I won't speculate on the reasons, but I wish the best to the Perseverance team!
It's a great achievement with some really interesting work done on the landing algorithms with terrain recognition and it seemed to have worked exceptionally well. Looking forward for the next landing in May of the Chinese rover and all the science these robots will produce. Also, the test of Ingenuity, the helicopter, will be very interesting to watch, that could really pave the way for a different exploration style…
Ingenuity is maybe the most interesting and coolest advance for space travel. The idea of a remote drone to explore Mars is just rad! I can totally nerd out about that!
Shout out to the team member with the "This is fine" plush dog on their desk.
Also on https://www.twitch.tv/nasa They were showing off a model of the rover, I did not realize just how large this one is!
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My guess is lower image size, which means image can get transferred faster.
Anyone know the bandwidth they're working with, at least roughly?
https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communications/#data
"The data rate direct-to-Earth [from Mars] varies from about 500 bits per second to 32,000 bits per second"
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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.
would dust stay in the air longer or shorter than on Earth? also is it technically correct to call the Martian atmosphere "air"?
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#Dust_and_ot...
They have a live telemetry animation web app, but I am currently getting a 503 from cloudfront. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mars2020/
Yeah, it was accessible until they mentioned it in the livestream. To their credit, I've watched NASA spend decades getting better at Internet services and generally being an online presence. Improvements year-over-year have been noteworthy. But I still have to chuckle a little bit that they triggered a DDOS protect by name-dropping themselves. Ad Internet Per Aspera, you crazy spacers ;)
It's a great achievement with some really interesting work done on the landing algorithms with terrain recognition and it seemed to have worked exceptionally well. Looking forward for the next landing in May of the Chinese rover and all the science these robots will produce. Also, the test of Ingenuity, the helicopter, will be very interesting to watch, that could really pave the way for a different exploration style…
Ingenuity is maybe the most interesting and coolest advance for space travel. The idea of a remote drone to explore Mars is just rad! I can totally nerd out about that!
Watching these is always a stressful experience, I can't imagine what it would be like sitting in that room, praying that the object you spend years of work on is able to land by itself 7 light-minutes away. I'm looking forward to what Perseverance will teach us.
Sitting in any closed space like that one, with other people, masks or no, is stressful right now. It's a shame that NASA can communicate with a rover 125 million KM away but their staff have to all be crammed into one small enclosed space. You'd think we'd be able to communicate just as effectively over several kilometers.
I imagine that people will look back on videos from this time period where ~3M people died (mostly unnecessarily) and wonder what on Earth people were thinking, carrying on like that.
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The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.[1] The lower "HazCams" hazard avoidance cameras (which captured those initial photos) are there to detect hazards (rocks, trenches, etc.). They are stereoscopic, lightweight, and high resolution. My guess is that using color sensors would have either increased the 3D mapping precision or added weight/power/bandwidth requirements, or otherwise been less robust in that environm…
> My guess is that using color sensors would have either increased the 3D mapping precision or added weight/power/bandwidth requirements, or otherwise been less robust in that environment. I think you meant to say decreased? In which case I think you would be correct! Camera pixels are made up of these things called photosites which don't by themselves record color, only brightness. In order to record color informati…
That way you get high regulation as well as color. You can also have some special (infrared, ultraviolet, etc.) Filters on the carousel, not just RGB.