Starship Asterisk*

NoelC wrote:Meh!

Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!!

Not long ago I went outside with my circa 2007 digital camera and lens combination that together cost me about $1,500 retail, and with Photoshop on my PC made a 17566 x 4049 pixel panorama of the view of my entire front yard in which I can see individual blades of grass in crisp detail, and with no stitching remnants - and nothing much looks distorted.

This rover ought to be making images as much better than that as the Hubble makes images better than my Meade telescope!

Images from Curiousity should make us feel like we're practically standing there, shivering in the cold, thin air.

In this day and age frankly this is incredibly disappointing.

-Noel

Curiosity's cameras have a maximum resolution of two megapixels.
So why does Curiosity have such a low-tech camera on board?
There are two big reasons, says camera project manager Mike Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems:
--the rover's long developmental period
--limitations on the transmission of interplanetary data.
http://betanews.com/2012/08/09/mars-rov ... ll-phones/

NoelC wrote:Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!!

Not long ago I went outside with my circa 2007 digital camera and lens combination that together cost me about $1,500 retail, and with Photoshop on my PC made a 17566 x 4049 pixel panorama of the view of my entire front yard in which I can see individual blades of grass in crisp detail, and with no stitching remnants - and nothing much looks distorted.

Your camera would not have survived the trip to Mars. Its electronics would be fried. All space hardware is "old" technology, because it needs to be well tested and robust. So the camera resolution is relatively low. Beyond that, much of the quality of the image is in the processing (since this is a mosaic). These guys grabbed some quick shots, knocked together a mosaic and published it quickly, to whet all our appetites. I guess it would be better if they had spent hours creating a beautiful,high resolution, compositionally perfect panorama for their first release... oh wait, then a bunch of people would have been whining about the slow data releases. Jeesh!

owlice wrote:
It is far better to dare mighty things even though we might fail than to stay in the twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. ~ paraphrase after T. Roosevelt

"Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars".

It's hard to imagine that they couldn't think to leave the camera design to the last possible minute. Hell, they could have put a consumer dSLR in a box of lead glass and done way better than this. Don't laugh, a dSLR in a box is how red light traffic cameras are implemented.

Limitations on the data bandwidth I can understand, but there have been decent compression techniques around for quite a while. And what's the purpose of an exploration vehicle if not to return the best possible imagery and other data? Look at what comes back from Cassini.

And regarding image processing... Even consumer software does a HUGELY better job stitching panoramas than what we're seeing here.

In my mind this illustrates yet again how NASA has fallen down big time.

I was hoping to have my socks blown off by the APOD today. Hopes dashed.

-Noel

possibly the price you pay for using four rocket motors to land the beast ? The earlier photo shows quite a sandstorm being blown about

NoelC wrote:It's hard to imagine that they couldn't think to leave the camera design to the last possible minute. Hell, they could have put a consumer dSLR in a box of lead glass and done way better than this. Don't laugh, a dSLR in a box is how red light traffic cameras are implemented.

No, it wouldn't work. I've designed space-borne cameras (guiders), and I know something about this. A consumer DSLR would be dead after a few months in space without extreme shielding. If the electronics survived, the sensor would be a mass of defects. Electronic devices need to be robust and radiation hardened. New devices are neither... consumer devices push the boundaries of fabrication technology. Every electronic device you own is living on the edge of failure. That's simply not an acceptable option for something like a Mars mission. So the electronics is fabricated using large chip scales and packaged and certified for a high radiation environment. These circuits bear little resemblance to what is found in consumer electronics.

In addition, the way probes like this are designed does not allow waiting to the last possible minute for anything. Everything has to play together perfectly, and has to be tested together from a fairly early stage. Tacking on some separately tested component late in the process would simply be asking for disaster.

Limitations on the data bandwidth I can understand, but there have been decent compression techniques around for quite a while. And what's the purpose of an exploration vehicle if not to return the best possible imagery and other data? Look at what comes back from Cassini.

99% of what comes back from Cassini is aesthetically awful. All of it requires extensive post processing to even begin to look reasonable to the eye. The "best possible imagery" does not necessarily equate to the most aesthetically pleasing imagery. I would guess that the mission planners would consider it a waste of time to produce a very high resolution, undistorted panorama... especially this early in the mission. The panorama was produced to provide an idea of the lander's environment. That it's a cool image in its own right is secondary. With an overview of the terrain, the rover can be repositioned, or the camera can be aimed and zoomed on something of interest. This panorama is primarily a tool, not an important dataset in a scientific sense.

And regarding image processing... Even consumer software does a HUGELY better job stitching panoramas than what we're seeing here.

If you use it. But it isn't the mission of these people to produce panoramas. I expect they're just using Photoshop to combine the images. Later, I'm sure they'll be using custom software to provide a mapping between pixel position and the actual angle of the ray it represents... in effect, undistorting the images. That's not something consumer software does in any well characterized fashion.

I was hoping to have my socks blown off by the APOD today. Hopes dashed. :(

Personally, I think anybody who isn't blown away by an image like this should just shoot themselves, because they have no real sense of wonder left. What's amazing about the image isn't its abstract quality, but what we are actually seeing!

Well, my socks WERE blown off. I can't even find them!!

This is a great image, a great APOD. This isn't someone's front yard; this is MARS!

MARS!!!

yeah, and yesterday they crashed a vehicle here on Earth under real time control. Over there on Mars it was completely automastic, no " driftiong to the right a little " Wish you well, Mr Armstrong..

Just speculating...but it could also be that they used that image to align the edge sides by placing it in the image where it belonged (in the black areas on both sides of the image) then aligning the two sides so the joy stick images overlapped. Finally and hastily blacking out the joy stick image though not completely.

Great APOD.
It takes some time to realize we are seeing another planet, the rocks, the soil they look so familiar. It's fantastic to have eyes in another planet, a humbling experience.

eltodesukane wrote:

owlice wrote:
It is far better to dare mighty things even though we might fail than to stay in the twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. ~ paraphrase after T. Roosevelt

"Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars".

Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars?

Right! It's one and a half light seconds from the Earth to the Moon. If you fail to hit the Moon, you've only got four light years more to go to get from the general vicinity of the Moon to the nearest star (apart from the Sun).

I think that my favorite line from the Apollo 13 movie was this one: "Aim for the Earth!" (The Earth was over on the right side, I think, and you could see it, looking very small, when you looked out of one of the windows.)

Wonder where Apollo 13 would have landed if it had missed the Earth? Maybe we would have had people landing on Mars about now if Apollo 13 hadn't made it back to Earth.

And by the way... today's image is an interesting-looking panorama, and it is of course an extremely topical picture, so it is a good choice for an APOD.

Ann

Chris Peterson wrote:

TimR wrote:YES - that is it. What I called the "Desk" is really the "left side" of the picture you showed. So on the LEFT BLACK space of the MARS image is the RIGHT SIDE of the picture you showed. And on the RIGHT SIDE space of the MARS image is the LEFT SIDE of the picture you showed. Looks like that one image was ghosted in the overall MARS image, and then split in the fashion we are seeing. My question is - how was this "ghost" accomplished...and why? I assumed that the BLACK spots in the image were null data - areas in the picture with nothing from Mars. Seeing this GHOST of an image just throws things off.....I'm surprised that the editors of this image kept that in....

Probably just residue of the alignment process, since the left and right sides of the image are actually adjacent (and at the range of things on the rover, might be overlapping). My guess is that they simply didn't notice the residual image. Its brightest pixels are only a few counts above zero, which means that on a properly calibrated monitor, they aren't even visible unless you're working in the dark. If you're seeing the ghost well enough that it interferes with your viewing, I think your monitor needs calibration. It's also possible to see things wrong if you're using an older Mac OS (pre Snow Leopard), which didn't handle color very well with an image like this that has an undefined color space.

WOW - interesting. Here I am looking at a picture of Mars and it leads me to the fact that one of my monitors is not calibrated correctly. Thanks!!! I have a second computer at home, and when I looked at the image on that computer, I could barely see the "left" image, and could not see the "right" image at all. I would not have thought that my monitor was out of calibration - thanks for taking a detour with my post. Didn't mean to side-track things from the very cool picture of Mars......which is amazing.

BMAONE23 wrote:Just speculating...but it could also be that they used that image to align the edge sides by placing it in the image where it belonged (in the black areas on both sides of the image) then aligning the two sides so the joy stick images overlapped. Finally and hastily blacking out the joy stick image though not completely.

Thanks - that makes sense. Reading some of the discussion here, my question did seem a bit frivilous when you think about it. I guess we just "expect" NASA to be flawless.....and don't even think about what went into this. I'm sure the explanations of putting things out there quickly to satisfy people's curiosity means that an artifact like this can easily be left behind. Doesn't in any way detract from the special nature of what we are looking at!!! I certainly didn't mean to be critical of NASA - I just thought that it was truely "missing pixels" - I didn't think of the alternatives... Anyway - thanks for taking the time to answer a somewhat off-topic question.

Is this a type of landing system a human could survive or you need an SR71 type vehicle ?

ta152h0 wrote:Is this a type of landing system a human could survive or you need an SR71 type vehicle ?

I don't think any sort of winged aircraft currently around could land on Mars. With its extremely thin atmosphere, you'd need supersonic or hypersonic speed to generate enough lift, which poses heating problems, and doesn't allow for touchdown.

This landing involved accelerations greater than 12 G, which would be very uncomfortable and potentially dangerous for humans. I imagine a similar system would be considered, however... aerobraking, followed by a supersonic parachute, followed by a controlled rocket descent.

The "Joy Stick" & "Desk" don't appear to be in the NEW (but incomplete) HiRes image or at least they aren't visible on my home monitor

Chris Peterson wrote:

mtbdudex wrote:My only gripe about the photo is it showed too much foreground and not enough sky, I hope newer ones take and stitch in sky shots, the rule of 1/3's applies for these as well.

Every pixel that shows sky is a pixel with little or no scientific value, but which costs resources: time, energy, bandwidth, processing, and ultimately money. I have no doubt that the mission planners are as interested as the rest of us in the occasional aesthetic image, but that's the end of it. I don't think anybody is worrying much about photographic composition rules in the majority of images to be collected.

I respect what you are saying Chris, my point is besides the 99.9% photos purely for scientific value, those 0.01% images that cause all of us to "pause and wonder" serve to invoke the public's passion for supporting these missions........
I hope APOD staff will consider that for another APOD when it shows up.
Peace.

The black-and-white 360° VR panorama shows a lot more of the rover. It has quite a bit of rubble on the rover. I expected some sand-like dust, but these “stones” look pretty big, although the scale isn't very obvious.
I was also surprised to see (electrical?) wires running over the top, where I would expect such to be shielded, safely under the hood, or something.
This panorama does make me feel “like we're practically standing there, shivering in the cold, thin air.”

Case wrote:The black-and-white 360° VR panorama shows a lot more of the rover. It has quite a bit of rubble on the rover. I expected some sand-like dust, but these “stones” look pretty big, although the scale isn't very obvious.

I was also interested in the gravel on top of the rover, so I downloaded that pic, zoomed in on the largest pieces of gravel, adjusted the brightness and contrast, and here it is.
Judging only indirectly from other objects around them, I'd say those largest few pieces of gravel (in the top-right quadrant) are about 1 cm to 1.5 cm along their greatest dimension. (If someone knew the exact size of that dark square near the largest gravel, we'd be able to derive a much better estimate of size.)

The rocket blasts that lowered the rover the last few meters were very strong, of course, but I do wonder if this gravel was anticipated.

Rob

Chris Peterson wrote: Personally, I think anybody who isn't blown away by an image like this should just shoot themselves, because they have no real sense of wonder left. What's amazing about the image isn't its abstract quality, but what we are actually seeing!

Thank you for the suggestion, Chris.

But I think I'll just ask for better pictures instead.

I won't call for your death, as you did mine, but personally I think anybody who rationalizes a lack of continual improvement from those spending their tax dollars should just go live somewhere else.

-Noel

Oh, and by the way, a more appropriate and gentle response to "Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!!" might have been to point out that much higher resolution images ARE being obtained, for example:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia1605 ... r-full.jpg

-Noel

NoelC wrote:I won't call for your death, as you did mine, but personally I think anybody who rationalizes a lack of continual improvement from those spending their tax dollars should just go live somewhere else.

Please, I'm hardly calling for your death! Lighten up!

And where, remotely, did I suggest we shouldn't expect later missions to improve over earlier ones? The MSL mission hardware is a dramatic improvement over the MER hardware. The science objectives of the MSL Mastcam cameras are different from those of the MER Pancam cameras. The Pancam system uses unfiltered CCDs with a filter wheel, while the Mastcam uses Bayer filtered CCDs (with a more limited filter wheel). This makes the newer cameras more effective for some imaging tasks, but less effective for mineral identification... but MSL has dedicated instruments for that task that MER does not. The Mastcam system utilizes two focal lengths, so it can take both high and low resolution images, something Pancam can't do. With its 100mm FL lens, Mastcam is approximately diffraction limited at 15"/pixel, so a higher resolution sensor would provide little gain. The 34 mm FL camera is undersampled at 45"/pixel, as are the MER cameras at 57"/pixel. The Mastcam cameras are capable of much higher frame rates than the Pancam cameras.

MSL seems to be returning much better imagery than either MER rover, much earlier in the mission. I see nothing to suggest that the MSL isn't a substantial improvement over the MER rovers.

mtbdudex wrote:I respect what you are saying Chris, my point is besides the 99.9% photos purely for scientific value, those 0.01% images that cause all of us to "pause and wonder" serve to invoke the public's passion for supporting these missions........

Sure. But it's not realistic to expect the first pictures that come in to be all that polished. Give them time.

The decision to go with a Bayer array color camera on Curiosity, which is far less suited to returning scientific data than the cameras on the MER rovers, suggests that they see these cameras playing a somewhat different role- more as conventional imagers, the way most people think of that. This makes sense, since much of the materials analysis performed by the MER rovers using their cameras will be performed by much more sophisticated analyzers that Curiosity carries... so it doesn't need that capability in its Mastcam cameras- at least, not to the same degree.

Thanks for your high-resolution picture of pieces of gravel on the rover, Rob, and thanks for the high-resolution panorama of Mars, Noel.

Ann

don't forget Mr Peterson's high resolution answers, as well as Art, Ann and those who my 64K memory stick is failing right now.