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NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

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Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#291
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marvin McMarsface is to take a close-up look at the Face On Mars in 2023 and then implant an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator to eliminate Mars because it obstructs our view of Venus.

> I doubt a NASA suggestion box open to the internet will be very fruitful. The two resectful and fun comments between 'this' comment and your comment. I can imagine a Tumblr/Reddit re-post would be more fun, but-yes-not for the NASA suggestion box. They would have 1 diamond idea every 100k unusable ones. I can imagine every gaming company would LOVE to have the original Mars sound in their games (e.g. "No Man's Sky"…

In a world where the sounds of sports on TV is not even the true sound of what's happening in the stadium because it's boring, I highly doubt they would pay a single penny for what would probably be a highly disappointing wind-like monotonous sound.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#292
post #284

This mission is an incredible achievement. The images are as advertised (stunning) and I'm sure all the sciences - and even art - will benefit from the data. What I find a little sad is that we seem incapable of doing this without leaving a particularly human signature wherever we go. We arrived on Mars with jets of pollution https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25672/black-and-white-smoke-... followed by the dumping of t…

I have an opposite view of this. Cosmos and Mars, Sun whatever else was there long before us an will be still there long after us. From cosmic point of view humanity does not matter much. From that 1000ft view humans and whatever we built is natural and not different than colony of ants. We are just sand grains that will be crushed when next big asteroid comes by. Having pristine planet like Mars has no value besides…

What if in the future we could examine the contents of a particular rock from space? Have instruments sensitive enough to detect the remnants of Vogon breath from their visit millions of years ago?

A pristine planet has value beyond 'I want this' IMO - it is an opportunity to perform experiments in an almost perfectly isolated test tube.

As a human, I also find it beautiful. As you say though, this is an anthropocentric view.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#293
post #285

Mars surface looks pretty much like Earth surface :)

Like Venus as well. IMO Venus is more interesting destination because it's more active and diverse, with Earth like gravity, but high temp and pressure is the reason we don't land there, Mars is just simpler to explore with current tech.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#294

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Incredible for me, too. The power of building the civilization, one generation after another, and of working together, sharing the knowledge.

But according to Ancient Aliens, the large stone Pyramids were built by aliens, but the TV cameras recording the show's hosts, with CCDs, and likely 10nm chips inside, were built by humans. In all seriousness, it's impressive what knowledge sharing and cooperation achieves.

It is highly unlikely that the cameras being used to produce Ancient Aliens are CCDs unless they are also using ancient camera tech. Most likely, the camera's image sensors are CMOS. 3 chip CCDs reached their pinnacle as 90s/early 00s tech. CCDs can only sense one color, so they put three of them behind an RGB splitter.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#295
post #265
post #260

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10/10 satire

yeah, but as someone not educated in those matters, could someone compare the "fake" computations from the comment to real ones ? So we could see how wrong they are...

I don't have figures for you, but some food for thought - a) 'wind-carved' rocks are not really carved by the wind itself but by particles carried on the wind, and Mars is regularly subject to large dust storms (see https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/the-fact-and-fiction-of... - sorry it's a NASA link, hopefully everyone can see through the grifting, or whatever), b) the vast timescales involved - who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years that rock has been sitting there, slowly weathering away?

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#296
post #136

"And we made it to Mars! I stepped out of the lander and took a look around. It turns out the place is just a bunch of rusty looking rocks. No hot green chicks, no angry little green men. I guess I was kind of hoping there would have been someone here to shoot it out with, or at least make out with." - From the unpublished short fiction of itbeho Seriously though, this is fantastic. Imagine being a kid today, seeing…

Are you serious? First Vikings landed there 50 years ago. Kids of 70th and 80th did seeing first images, there were many colorful books about solar system. It's pitty how badly slow is space exploration of last decades. No wonder everyone and its dog are now so excited about this mission.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But according to Ancient Aliens, the large stone Pyramids were built by aliens, but the TV cameras recording the show's hosts, with CCDs, and likely 10nm chips inside, were built by humans. In all seriousness, it's impressive what knowledge sharing and cooperation achieves.

[Ancient Aliens] Ah but the cameras and chips are only possible -because- the aliens built the pyramids and inspired humans technologically and a mere 4450 years later, voila! CCDs and computer chips!

Well, given the fact that we still know relatively little about most of the observable universe (dark matter & energy), I don't think you can completely rule out the several unlikely hypotheses. For example, that earlier civilizations instead of electricity used a completely different form of energy - and that basically directed their development into a completely different direction, not leaving many material artefacts. I don't believe this actually happened, but a part of me knows that I can't be 100% sure it didn't.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#298
post #214

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Could you explain why such a processor is 1000x more expensive than a non-rugged one ? I mean, considering the future of earth, I'd certainly welcome a processor that could withstand a lifespan of decades (including the harsh "I'm going to unsolder it to put it in another device" environment).

Part of it is low demand, so you don't benefit from economies of scale. Also the customers buying this type of equipment are able to bear such costs. They aren't gonna haggle over $100k on a critical component to a $3B mission.

a $100k here, a $100k there, suddenly, we're talking real money.

Re: NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use the same kind of compression as the last mission. JP2, I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 I'm not sure that data compression has progressed that much since Curiosity in 2012 or Insight in 2018. There have been some formats that have improved compression at the expense of large amounts of memory or processing power, but neither of those are abundant on a rad-hardened processor. Neither is elec…

I can't find references to JPEG 2000 on this report: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 Are they being re-encoded into regular JPG files when being shown online?

Look for “JP2”. It is used for other spacecraft that are part of the Mars fleet.
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