APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul 31)

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Expand view Topic review: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul 31)

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by ta152h0 » Tue Aug 07, 2012 12:52 am

I picked out my vegetable plan for the next month starting with cauliflower

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by neufer » Tue Aug 07, 2012 12:41 am

ta152h0 wrote:
BMAONE23 wrote:
Too bad they didn't include a Video Camera in the Sky Crane for footage of the actual landing
I think they do have a descent camera
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/08061652-mardi-video-thumb.html wrote:
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
First look at Curiosity MARDI's descent animation (WOW WOW)
Posted By Emily Lakdawalla, 2012/08/06

<<MARDI -- the Mars Descent Imager -- has already lived up to its promise, and it's hardly begun. Let me set the scene for you briefly. MARDI is a HD color camera bolted to the front left side of the rover, pointed down. It started recording images at a rate of 4.5 frames per second shortly before the heat shield was jettisoned, and shot photos all the way down. The full-resolution images are 1600 by 1200 pixels, and the full video will be breathtaking when it's available. That won't be for a while.

What we have on the ground now from MARDI is incredible, and it's nothing like what we'll eventually get. What we have now is a stop-motion animation of 297 individual frames. The frames are "thumbnails," downsampled versions of the full-resolution data. Curiosity sent these thumbnails to Earth in order to give the MARDI team a sense of when the most important images were taken, so that they can make good choices of which full-resolution frames to send first. So the animation will get way, way better than this.

It begins with the heat shield about 15 meters below the rover, glinting in the Sun. It falls away quickly, vanishing into invisibility. We see red Mars below it, spinning as the rover spins. At one point there's a sudden change in perspective, likely a result of the "divert maneuver" that Curiosity executed after it cut its connection to its parachute. As Curiosity approaches the ground, we start to see a plume of dust being kicked up. The Skycrane maneuver begins, and simultaneously the wheels deploy; one wheel (the left front, I think) pops into view in one corner. As the rover settles to the ground and the wheels take up its weight, the wheel moves out of the field of view again.>>

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Beyond » Tue Aug 07, 2012 12:32 am

So now it's a 2-feater. Something solid to stand on. However... even a broken clock has perfect time... twice a day. So we'll just have to wait till the 3rd shoe chute drops, to see if mars is really that well instrumented. :yes: :mrgreen:

Re: "All right, MR. O, I'm ready for my close-up,"

by NoelC » Mon Aug 06, 2012 10:42 pm

neufer wrote:Now it's repeated the feat, with Curiosity.
Wow, the feats of precision just keep on coming! No doubt this was planned.

I think it's amazing that we have Mars instrumented so well as to be able to photograph one probe with another.

Just wow.

-Noel

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by BMAONE23 » Mon Aug 06, 2012 9:13 pm

Here is another MSL site to whet your curiosity for images from Gale Crater
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/

"All right, MR. O, I'm ready for my close-up,"

by neufer » Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:35 pm

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/08060824-hirise-curiosity-parachute.html wrote:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE has done it again!!
Posted By Emily Lakdawalla, 2012/08/06

<<In 2008, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped
an amazing photo of Phoenix descending
to the surface of Mars under its parachute.

Now it's repeated the feat, with Curiosity.

I think this image pretty much speaks for itself.
Absolutely stunning.>>
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/mars-orbiter-plans-for-a-curiosity-close-up.html wrote:

Mars orbiter plans for a Curiosity close-up
by Eric Hand NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona, 05 Aug 2012

<<The MRO will slew into position and take a snap of Curiosity’s parachutes 60 seconds before landing, just before the rover is released from the back shell. It could even be possible to discern the heat shield on the ground. “We get one shot,” says Alfred McEwen, principal investigator of HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

This time, the chance of catching Curiosity on camera is only 60%, says McEwen. With Phoenix, there was about an 80% chance. The difference is because of the relative paths of the spacecraft. For the Phoenix landing, HiRISE’s long and narrow field of view was closely aligned with the path of the lander. For the Curiosity landing, the MRO will be much closer and looking almost directly down at Curiosity. But the paths are nearly perpendicular, which means that HiRISE’s field of view — a narrow north–south track about 6 kilometres wide on the ground — might not contain Curiosity, which will be barreling east along its 20-kilometre-long landing ellipse.

There is a silver lining, however. Not only will the MRO be closer, but Curiosity’s parachute is about twice the size of Phoenix’s. In the Phoenix snap, the parachutes were just 10 pixels across. McEwen says that Curiosity’s parachutes could cover 50 pixels, making for a black-and-white image as detailed as 35 centimetres per pixel. And McEwen estimates that there’s a 20% chance Curiosity will fall along the central swath of HiRISE’s field of view, where there are colour detectors. “If we’re really, really lucky we’ll catch it in our colour strip,” he says.

McEwen expects to get the data back to Earth by 1 a.m. Pacific daylight time on 6 August. His team will spend a frantic few hours trying to spot Curiosity and process the image before delivering it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, by 3 a.m. So forget the fish-eyed, fuzzy thumbnails that Curiosity’s hazcams are supposed to return first. By the time of the 9-a.m. press briefing on Monday morning, the JPL could have a beautiful surprise waiting for the public: a memento (hopefully not mori) of the most complicated landing ever attempted in the Solar System.>>

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by orin stepanek » Mon Aug 06, 2012 11:26 am

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by johnlbee » Mon Aug 06, 2012 6:27 am

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by neufer » Sun Aug 05, 2012 2:18 pm

Bix Dugan wrote:
Why not just safely splash down in one of the Canals?
. Maybe they will just do that.
http://www.universetoday.com/96617/curiositys-target-martian-destination/ wrote:
<<Where will the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover land? This annotated image of Mars by Efrain Morales shows where on Mars Curiosity will set down, if all goes well, at about 05:31 UTC on Aug. 6 (10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, 1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6). The landing site is 4.6 degrees south latitude, 137.4 degrees east longitude, near base of Aeolis Mons, also known as Mount Sharp, a layered mountain that rises 4.8 kilometers (3 miles), inside Gale Crater.>>

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by neufer » Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:15 am

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Case » Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:45 pm

Baaaab wrote:What is 500,000 lines of COD3 ?
Q: Why is it useful to count the number of Lines Of Code (LoC) ?
A: The idea is that LoC should never be used to measure productivity, but more to do test coverage estimation and software deadline estimation.

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Baaaab » Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:14 pm

What is 500,000 lines of COD3 ?

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Bix Dugan » Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:09 am

Boy, this is complicated. Why not just safely splash down in one of the Canals? Put some spider legs on that probe and walk right out of the water.?

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by neufer » Wed Aug 01, 2012 6:51 pm

ta152h0 wrote:
I think they do have a descent camera
  • On Curiosity, itself, pointing down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSL_Curiosity wrote:
Image
<<MSL Mars Descent Imager (MARDI): During the descent to the Martian surface, MARDI will take color images at 1600×1200 pixels with a 1.3-millisecond exposure time starting at distances of about 3.7 km to near 5 meters from the ground and will take images at a rate of 5 frames per second for about 2 minutes. MARDI has a pixel scale of 1.5 meters at 2 km to 1.5 millimeters at 2 meters and has a 90-degree circular field of view. MARDI has 8 GB of internal buffer memory which is capable of storing over 4,000 raw images. MARDI imaging will allow the mapping of surrounding terrain and the location of landing. JunoCam, built for the Juno spacecraft, is based on MARDI.>>

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by ta152h0 » Wed Aug 01, 2012 6:07 pm

BM
I think they do have a descent camera

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by neufer » Wed Aug 01, 2012 5:31 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.
geckzilla wrote:
NoelC wrote:
There's nothing wrong with the audio/video sync. Chances are they use better computers than yours.
The audio gets out of synch slightly for me at the end. I don't think it's my computer.
It's like a tenth of a second off and gets worse towards the end.
By the time you start hearing the narrator he will either have stopped moving his lips or have been dead for at least 7 minutes.

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by BMAONE23 » Wed Aug 01, 2012 5:12 pm

Too bad they didn't include a Video Camera in the Sky Crane for footage of the actual landing

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by geckzilla » Wed Aug 01, 2012 4:18 am

NoelC wrote:There's nothing wrong with the audio/video sync. Chances are they use better computers than yours.

-Noel
The audio gets out of synch slightly for me at the end. I don't think it's my computer. But I also didn't notice it until Vonskippy pointed it out. It's like a tenth of a second off and gets worse towards the end.

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Beyond » Wed Aug 01, 2012 3:27 am

NoelC wrote:Ambitious and impressive! Best of luck.

Did anyone else see/get this little joke?
HalfMil.jpg
HalfMil.jpg (25.52 KiB) Viewed 4376 times
As a software engineer I got a good laugh out of it. :D

-Noel
At first, i thought there was something 'fishy' about this. It wouldn't play or anything. Then i noticed that the 'fishyness' is the joke :!: :lol2:

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by saturno2 » Wed Aug 01, 2012 2:44 am

In this mission I worry about the weight of Curiosity Rover.
This robot is very " heavy"

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by NoelC » Tue Jul 31, 2012 11:43 pm

Vonskippy wrote:Makes me worried when the Nasa engineers can't sync a simple audio track to the video track on a 5 minute youtube video.

Lets hope they did a better job on the 7 minute landing sequence.

I wonder if Vegas has a betting pool for this landing?
There's nothing wrong with the audio/video sync. Chances are they use better computers than yours.

-Noel

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by NoelC » Tue Jul 31, 2012 11:35 pm

Ambitious and impressive! Best of luck.

Did anyone else see/get this little joke?
HalfMil.jpg
As a software engineer I got a good laugh out of it. :D

-Noel

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by minkfarms » Tue Jul 31, 2012 8:55 pm

OK kiddies, I remember when we couldn't even hit the moon. In my humble opinion, in this very new century, this feat will stand as one of the great technological achievements of space exploration. Its intricacies and payoff should thrill the public and that is so important for future robotic exploration.

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by ta152h0 » Tue Jul 31, 2012 7:20 pm

and enjoy an ice cold one on the evening of the 5th. And have a 5th ????????

Re: APOD: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes... (2012 Jul

by Anthony Barreiro » Tue Jul 31, 2012 7:09 pm

This is a very exciting video. I'm looking forward to the moment of relief and joy when we get the first signal from Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity transmitting from Gale Crater. Thanks and best wishes for a successful mission to the folks who have worked so hard to get this craft to Mars.

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