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…
Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
171–180 of 517 posts
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#172Earlier 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.
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#173Earlier 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.
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#174Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#175Something 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…
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#176Watching 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…
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#177First surface photo is in too! https://i.imgur.com/C2s1job.jpg
N00b question: why is it black & 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]
#178Earlier 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"?
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]
#179Earlier 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…
Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
#180Earlier 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.