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Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

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Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#171

Something I don't understand: when they say "X is 1 minute from happening", does that mean it's really 1 minute from happening or does that mean "in 1 minute we'll receive the signal that X has happened"? Maybe my question makes more sense in the case of "X is happening right now", because then I should either understand "we infer that X should have happened right about now" or "we have confirmed via signal that X ha…

Yes, those are all Earth Receive Time, that is, when they were saying that eg. entry interface is two minutes away, in reality the rover was already sitting on the surface and we were just waiting for the radio signal to get here.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink would most certainly be of little direct use here. What I could imagine is having Starlink satellites around Mars that allow to route data from rovers anywhere on the planet to a dedicated high-performance communications platform that handles communication with Earth.

In fact that's exactly what they're doing: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is serving as a communications relay, as it did for previous landers. It's just that since there have never been more than a handful of spacecraft active on Mars at any given time, there's currently no point in spending huge amounts of money to launch a whole constellation of satellites for continuous coverage.

Could be still a nice exercise if someone could compute how many Starlinks could a Falcon Heavy throw to Mars transfer orbit & if they could be able to actually capture into Martian orbit by their default means of propulsion (do they actually have any high thrust engines ?).

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#173
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would dust stay in the air longer or shorter than on Earth? also is it technically correct to call the Martian atmosphere "air"?

Dust falls much, much faster on Mars. The density of Mars's surface atmosphere is ~160x lower than on Earth.

Right. One "proof" advanced by Moon landing conspiracy theorists was that dust settled much faster in videos than it should if it were really in Lunar gravity.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#175

Something I don't understand: when they say "X is 1 minute from happening", does that mean it's really 1 minute from happening or does that mean "in 1 minute we'll receive the signal that X has happened"? Maybe my question makes more sense in the case of "X is happening right now", because then I should either understand "we infer that X should have happened right about now" or "we have confirmed via signal that X ha…

Doesn’t relativity tell us it doesn’t matter?

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#176
post #149

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.

> Watching these is always a stressful experience, I can't imagine what it would be like sitting in that room 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 seve…

what if those people were tested for covid and there was no risk?

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#177

First surface photo is in too! https://i.imgur.com/C2s1job.jpg

N00b question: why is it black & white?

Other posters have pointed out that it's the hazard avoidance camera, but they haven't said why the hazard avoidance camera is black and white.

When you do computer vision, the first step you do is convert your color image into a black and white image, and run your CV algorithms on the black and white image. This is because when you're looking at objects and shapes and stuff, it's contrast that tells you where the boundaries between things are. This is true even in a human world of human objects, which tend to be many colored. It's even more true on Mars where basically everything is varying shades of orange. So having color doesn't help a whole lot, and you also have to do the additional step of converting the color image to black and white, which takes CPU power and adds latency. Remember, the purpose is hazard avoidance- latency is bad.

Additionally, color camera sensors aren't actually color sensors. They're black and white sensors. In front of every pixel on the black and white sensor is a filter that is either red, green, or blue. Pixels are grouped into sets of four, and there are two pixels with green filters, one pixel with a blue filter, and one filter with a red filter. (sometimes one of the green filters is omitted, giving red, green, blue, and b&w, or sometimes one of the green filters is a filter that allows IR, or something like that.) So if you have a 16MP camera, the camera has 8M green, 4M red, and 4M blue pixels. This means two things; first of all, if you just wanted a black and white image in the first place, a color sensor gives less detail than the equivalent black and white sensor, and second, you need to do additional processing to convert the raw output from the sensor into an image that's usable for anything. The additional processing adds latency.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Yes, but it's not technically correct to call Martian seismic tremors "earthquakes".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/goofs

Flash Gordon (1980) Goofs

At the very beginning of the film, Ming and his henchman are discussing "an obscure body in the SK system", which the inhabitants refer to as the planet "Earth", pronounced as if the word is completely foreign to them. However, at that moment, Ming activates a button on his console labeled "Earth Quake".

http://bobcanada92.blogspot.com/2020/10/flash-gordon-logic.h...

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N00b question: why is it black & white?

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…

FYI - the HazCams on Perseverance are in fact in color (this is new, they were black and white on Curiosity)! Stereo precision was a concern based on the switch to color sensors, so there was some algorithmic work done to make sure it wouldn't cause an issue. (Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 - "The Mars 2020 Navcams and Hazcams offer three primary improvements over MER and MSL. The first improvement is an upgrade to a detector with 3-channel, red/green/blue (RGB) color capability that will enable better contextual imaging capabilities than the previous engineering cameras, which only had a black/white capability.")

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink would most certainly be of little direct use here. What I could imagine is having Starlink satellites around Mars that allow to route data from rovers anywhere on the planet to a dedicated high-performance communications platform that handles communication with Earth.

In fact that's exactly what they're doing: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is serving as a communications relay, as it did for previous landers. It's just that since there have never been more than a handful of spacecraft active on Mars at any given time, there's currently no point in spending huge amounts of money to launch a whole constellation of satellites for continuous coverage.

Not only the MRO, but other orbiting assets as well, particularly NASA's MAVEN and ESA's TGO. Even the venerable 2001 Mars Odyssey is still used as needed, I think.
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