.. for HD streams. They have been able to keep up with demand for the last few big events that they've shown. I'd recommend logging in about 15-30 mins beforehand anyway.
Such a complex process to land it, I can imagine being one of the engineers who worked on this would be both incredibly exciting and incredibly terrifying.
Ah okay, i just jumped on ustream and noticed that they have a link to a broadcast of the landing. Though i just tuned in so i'm not sure what's happening and can't really turn up the sound. http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl
How bad would you have felt if you were the one guy on the team who's responsibility it had been for a part that failed.
Massively ambitious project that was, I mean really - "let's levitate a platform and hang a car from it to safely place it on the ground. Oh, and it's all going to be computer-controlled and automated". I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in that concept meeting, titled "How are we going to get a rover on to the ground?" - especially after episode 1 concluded with "we'll put it inside a giant Zorb and just let it bounce down".
Can someone quickly answer why previous Mars rover landings haven't received as much fanfare as this one? I know it is because this one had the tricky landing method, but why did previous missions not use this method?
Fuck it, I had to go out and missed it :( Is there a replay or something somewhere? Was there actually a camera or footage of it going through the whole landing process?
Fuck it, I had to go out and missed it :( Is there a replay or something somewhere? Was there actually a camera or footage of it going through the whole landing process?
In the stream, they just reported on the events but didn't show them, at most they showed outtakes from the simulation software I posted earlier. (You can run forward and back through time with that if you want).
Fuck it, I had to go out and missed it :( Is there a replay or something somewhere? Was there actually a camera or footage of it going through the whole landing process?
there you go. seeing the reaction of the progress of the landing was better than the animation imo. although i remember hearing more from the crowd and was smoother live.
I was watching the feed and at some point before it hit the atmosphere a guy said it was 2.something meters off course, and the WHOLE room gasped and went silent, until some other dude said 'it's okay, that's within tolerance' and everyone breathed again. Those people must have been so tense the whole time.
At least this beast wont have to worry about getting a recharge of the sun. Curiosity has a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Sounds fucking wicked.
2 meters off course sounds pretty bloody impressive to a layman, after the thing travelled about 570 million kilometers. Though with interplanetary spacecraft it's understandable those guys are tense, it'd be interesting to know how far within the tolerance that was. Maybe an extra meter off course would have been the difference between cheers & crash?
I think what helps make it tense is the fact that they're not getting the data in realtime; they're getting it late which means that if it crashed, they wouldn't have known till minutes later!
I was watching the feed and at some point before it hit the atmosphere a guy said it was 2.something meters off course, and the WHOLE room gasped and went silent, until some other dude said 'it's okay, that's within tolerance' and everyone breathed again. Those people must have been so tense the whole time.
They probably all thought, "Shit - I hope I didn't do my calcs in feet again!?"
What do you mean disagree with fanfare as well... what was the first thing you disagreed with? :P
NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Curiosity while the orbiter was listening to transmissions from the rover.
Pic below shows where the landing tolerance was.
Quite large. It was 2KM off course, not 2M.
Above pic from NASA and caption below:
The green diamond shows approximately where NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars, a region about 2 kilometers northeast of its target in the center of the estimated landing region (blue ellipse). The location of the diamond is based on Earth-based navigation data taken prior to Curiosity's entry into the Martian atmosphere, as well as data taken by the rover's navigation instruments during descent.
The Curiosity Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) captured the rover's descent to the surface of the Red Planet. The instrument shot 4 fps video from heatshield separation to the ground.
Sometimes I think "I've seen Mars pictures before", but then I think "Holy shit, that's a whole nother world, floating way over there" and am excited all over again.
I love google image search, did a search for "Penis di milo" and not only did it correct me and ask "Did you mean Penis De Milo", but it then went ahead and found this for me
I don't understand that. I think it only has enough power to run *everything* for one martain year. The RTU will still be at above 80% capacity after 14 years. IIRC the RTU provides 392W, and it will need 100W to move around.
In other words, they'll still be playing with it in 2040.
Worth noting that the maximum speed of Curiosity is only 130m/h.
I like how in that picture it looks like someone has taken Opportunity out and done some circle work with it. Doughies on mars; so bogan and yet so cool all at the same time.
This was taken with MAHLI but the dust cover is closed. Word on the street is that everything is working correctly so far.
The MAHLI camera was designed to acquire close-up views of rocks and other artifacts on Martian soil, but because it can focus from 2.1 centimeters to infinity, NASA can use it to take pictures of the Martian landscape as well.
Among other activities performed yesterday, the JPL engineers deployed the high-gain antenna, which sits on the rover's back. This antenna allows Curiosity to communicate directly with Earth. Initial tests showed that the antenna is not perfectly positioned, and a correction will be sent to the rover tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the plan is to deploy the rover's mast, which should be an exciting event -- Curiosity raising its head.
How is "a whole nother" tmesis?The correct statement would be "a whole other" - there is no hyphenated additional word or phrase. It's just flat-out wrong.
Seriously? It's tmesis because you take the word 'another' and then add 'whole' in the middle.
How come there's so much dust and haze in all the photos? Is this just regular dust/sand storm activity, have they churned it up when they landed and it takes ages to settle, or is this some kind of property of the crater?
Unfortunately, after riding many a dirt road in my time... just looks like a dirt road in outback australia.
Yes, the terrain is somewhat surreal in that you could imagine standing in a similar place on earth because of the high res photos.
But you have to remember, regardless of how boring it looks. It's another freakin' planet!!!! That in itself, with that quality of imagery is absolutely astounding in it's own right and damn exciting!
Wow, 32MB total data transfer a day - Vodafone must have the contract for their satellites :P
Hehe :) Voda are thieves, but they're not that bad. The mission time is 1 martian year (~687 days), so best case scenario that's just under 22GB of mission data back from Mars. Over the life of the $2.5B mission that's approx $114M per gigabyte. Voda's worst business plan is around $150 per gigabyte.
Man, NASA's world seed sucks. There's no trees for miles, no trees means you can't build a crafting bench, no crafting bench means you can't build good tools and no tools means mining iron, gold & diamond ore is impossible. Their best bet is to keep driving the rover into they reach the next biome.
So like pffft, they could have spent all the money they spent on this for more schools, or cells for those boat people or something. How does this help US ie. me exactly?
So like pffft, they could have spent all the money they spent on this for more schools, or cells for those boat people or something. How does this help US ie. me exactly?
Should you climb back up a tree and throw poo at the rest of us or would you rather come along for the ride?
Humans are curious by nature Fpot, without curiosity we don't have much drive except sexual, and if we act upon that but not curiosity we are left with an Earth full of people with nowhere to put the cunts.
Plus Three titied bitches. Full fucking Stop. End of Story. Do not proceed past go, directly to Jail.
the image faceman posted isn't dust on the lens. it's an impact cloud caused by the rockets crashing after they lowered the rover to the ground. nasa confirmed it.
Between the descent footage, the skycrane explosion and the parachute sequence been shot from space, they've been insanely lucky at catching some of the most interesting moments of the mission. Happy Camper!
Those images have far too dramatic stereo effect since they are close up. They are basically useless as stereo images IMO - the cameras are too far apart and the range too close.
Select input Side-by-Side 50% and then go to Stereo-> Red/Cyan if you want to view anaglyph or you can try page flip mode if you have shutter glasses and nVidia 3DVision.
Below is an update video from the project leaders about the info they received from Curiosity and the orbiting satellites during and after landing. Good detail about what the flight hardware was doing and how well the location/speed estimates were throughout the descent, and how the videos/pictures correlate to what was going on.
Also details how the rover was launched with mainly flight software and minimal surface software (only enough to look around after landing and accept further software), and hey they're uploading more complete surface software remotely so that it can then drive around and use its robotic instruments.
Jump to 8mins if you want the intro. Or instead jump to 11mins for the technical part of the talk:
really? it sounds like they only put a few megs worth of storage in the thing, is it that hard to make Mars-ready storage that they prefer to do an apt-get across space?
still it's a cool video, it's interesting how they fine tuned the trajectory etc
You have radiation belts while leaving earth, cosmic rays and solar particles on transit and on mars, etc. They really mess with electronics, which is why they are usually made from specific materials, heavily shielded and also incorporated in redundant topologies (identical systems may 'vote' for a calculation result or have a backup kick in when something goes wrong).
That's only looking at radiation ... they have to operate in stupendously vast temperature ranges without missing a beat too. Very challenging stuff.
White-Balanced is basically - Pick some thing you know is actually white, Auto-Adjust everything to suit. So basically 'fuck with the colours until it looks more natural' as you're use to seeing colours with a very specific filter (Earth Ozone) and Mars has different 'filters'.
People do it all the time with Scuba photos for the same reason.
Wow it's covered with crap. I wonder if that is because of wind or because it's moving so fast and kicking stuff up.
It moves very slowly and AFAIK it has not moved at all yet The rocks and stuff would have been kicked up during the descent from the sky-crane - the eight sky-crane rockets created the four greyish indents in the surface on the above colour panorama.
Need to put some streetview tech on the next rover, and create a drive-around-mars webapp..
TBH the place is pretty freakin boring. I'd still volunteer for a manned mission though.
The article goes into detail about the optics and photographic sensors on the rover and shows the white-balance/calibration target that's used for the adjustments. If you see really dull and orange images without any sort of sunlight "brightness"/glare, chances are it's a raw image that hasn't been processed yet.
Conspiracy theorists poop their pants every time 'processing' is mentioned, thinking there's some sort of coverup involved.
^ to be fair, there are conditions that would allow the martian sky to be some shade of blue - but that's only in a certain time of the day and only if there is no dust floating around and depending on cloud cover, etc. It's not like on earth where the sky is blue for 90% of the day ...
Good idea, mental, but there's nothing to see. Would be better if there was actually stuff at the different sites to see. Even coarsely drawn, simplistic versions.
Heh, NASA surely just freed up their entire recruiting budget to go towards actual science because that YT should about do it to get the next generation of JPL techs. "We're fucking awesome, come be fucking awesome with us."
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