NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover

[colin79666]

Footage also now on Youtube in higher res than was streamed.
https://youtu.be/4czjS9h4Fpg

[robsco]

My mind is blown by this. It is absolutely unbelievable. The talent of these people to able to pull off something of this magnitude is astounding.

[louiechevy]

Mind blowing footage! Almost as amazing is the fact that the cameras are pretty much of the shelf with minimal modifications

[ChocolateFrog]

Stunning imagery and an awesome technical achievement.

Not all Americans are brain dead morons after all.

[ChocolateFrog]

They mentioned a camera with a zoom lens too.

That should help them decide what to go and investigate and what to give a miss, looking forward to the updates over the next few years.

[Ian974]

Amazing footage, even if it's difficult to judge how high it is before deploying perseverance!

Is this likely to be the furthest away that there has ever been "video" sent from? I know there's been photos and data received from all over the place (and I guess there could be a fuzzy area between video and high frequency photos), but I don't recall seeing any videos from any further than the moon?

Edit: answered my question to an extent, there was a similar video received from curiosity; though the difference in camera technology that has occurred over this time period is fairly obvious!

https://youtu.be/8GBzEvRNi8Q

Edited by Ian974 on Monday 22 February 22:50

[r159]

I think I might need one of those Tiverton parachutes if I ever try skydiving...

[Teddy Lop]

Terminator X said:

robuk said:

Beati Dogu said:

I gave up on it too. Why bother to even have a press conference if the speaker is going to wear a muzzle the whole time. They'd have been far better doing it via a Zoom meeting frankly. That said, it's more the utterly retarded and inane questions from most so-called journalists that did it for me.

Muzzle? Are you an actual idiot? Amazing!

Tbf though you can't hear what they are saying. Watched a YouTube vid the other day, 2 people in car with masks and not one idea what was being said.

TX.

even sports TV presenters have worked out masks are unnecessary and more than a little bit silly much of the time.

That aside, well done chaps.

[Fabric]

Ian974 said:

Amazing footage, even if it's difficult to judge how high it is before deploying perseverance!

Is this likely to be the furthest away that there has ever been "video" sent from? I know there's been photos and data received from all over the place (and I guess there could be a fuzzy area between video and high frequency photos), but I don't recall seeing any videos from any further than the moon?

Edit: answered my question to an extent, there was a similar video received from curiosity; though the difference in camera technology that has occurred over this time period is fairly obvious!

https://youtu.be/8GBzEvRNi8Q

Edited by Ian974 on Monday 22 February 22:50

Good question, actually. I seem to remember New Horizons having the crown for furthest image, but video has me stumped - I think it must be a tie between, as you say, Curiosity and Perseverance.

Genuinely in awe at the quality of the Perseverance landing though - well worth the wait.

[Oilchange]

ChocolateFrog said:

Stunning imagery and an awesome technical achievement.

Not all Americans are brain dead morons after all.

Yeah, not all.
Some of them even managed to put a man on the moon.
51.5 years ago.

[rxe]

CraigyMc said:

2 Megabits uplink from the rover to the orbiting satellites.

MRO (the thing the rover is using for primary comms) has been on station around Mars since 2005.

2 megabits? That’s rubbish, I’ve got 180 megabits in my back garden on a phone.... er ....

I’ve always thought that MRO was a really good idea - you’ve got a whacking great channel back home that you need a much smaller radio to talk to, less need to worry about alignment and power etc. When Elon is testing rockets to Mars, they should load up a fistful more of these as backup. Seeing pictures of something landing on another planet from MRO was just amazing.

[Eric Mc]

Ian974 said:

Amazing footage, even if it's difficult to judge how high it is before deploying perseverance!

Is this likely to be the furthest away that there has ever been "video" sent from? I know there's been photos and data received from all over the place (and I guess there could be a fuzzy area between video and high frequency photos), but I don't recall seeing any videos from any further than the moon?

Edit: answered my question to an extent, there was a similar video received from curiosity; though the difference in camera technology that has occurred over this time period is fairly obvious!

https://youtu.be/8GBzEvRNi8Q

Edited by Ian974 on Monday 22 February 22:50

Pah - Mars is in our back yard.

How about this video. This was filmed by the Huygens probe as it descended onto the surface of the moon Titan. Titan orbits the planet Saturn. At the moment, Mars is around 40 million miles from earth.
Saturn and Titan is always around 1,000 million miles away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA

[CraigyMc]

Eric Mc said:

Pah - Mars is in our back yard.

How about this video. This was filmed by the Huygens probe as it descended onto the surface of the moon Titan. Titan orbits the planet Saturn. At the moment, Mars is around 40 million miles from earth.
Saturn and Titan is always around 1,000 million miles away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA

It's a nice video, but I think it was made by tweening stills together rather than an actual video. The difference is moot anyway, it's still cool.

[Eric Mc]

All moving images are made by stitching frames together - whether it is from film, analogue video or digital video.

Back in 1979, the Voyager probes provided "moving images" of its approach to Jupiter (5400 million miles away). They were crude by modern standards but they were breathtaking when first seen 40 odd years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nf9nBtd2dM

It did the same at Saturn in 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWnVnxYaAw4


More recently, the current Juno probe has taken some stunning video as it orbits Jupiter. The interesting thing about Juno is that it orbits over the poles of Jupiter, rather than in line with the equator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWnVnxYaAw4

[Leithen]

Eric Mc said:

Pah - Mars is in our back yard.

How about this video. This was filmed by the Huygens probe as it descended onto the surface of the moon Titan. Titan orbits the planet Saturn. At the moment, Mars is around 40 million miles from earth.
Saturn and Titan is always around 1,000 million miles away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA

Not wanting to nitpick Eric, but the data from the Huygens descent was one of the primary mission goals wasn't it? Whereas, whilst impressive, the Perseverance descent had been done before, and any video is bit of a side bonus rather than the prize?

[FunkyNige]

rxe said:

2 megabits? That’s rubbish, I’ve got 180 megabits in my back garden on a phone.... er ....

I’ve always thought that MRO was a really good idea - you’ve got a whacking great channel back home that you need a much smaller radio to talk to, less need to worry about alignment and power etc. When Elon is testing rockets to Mars, they should load up a fistful more of these as backup. Seeing pictures of something landing on another planet from MRO was just amazing.

Yeah, the MRO is 20 year old+ technology now so if long term we're going to be sending more probes and humans to Mars a decent relay station does seem like a good idea to me.
The NASA website tells me it has a 20 GB hard drive and if my Googling is accurate the processor is about the same speed as a Nokia 6110 and the original iPod (46 MIPS, Wiki tells me the ARM7 processor was 40 MIPS) so I hope we can beat that now!

[Eric Mc]

Leithen said:

Not wanting to nitpick Eric, but the data from the Huygens descent was one of the primary mission goals wasn't it? Whereas, whilst impressive, the Perseverance descent had been done before, and any video is bit of a side bonus rather than the prize?

Nitpick all you like.

Time moves on and the capabilities undoubtedly improve. The best comparison with what Perseverance can do is with its close relative, Curiosity. They are basically the same machine - but we can already see the imaging advances that have been made since 2012 and 2021.

I can't wait to see the surface images from Perseverance when they start coming in properly. I have to say though, that the scenery where Perseverance has landed is not as spectacular as Curiosity's landing spot, Gale Crater.

[Fundoreen]

Percy landing was a great achievement but the whole thing is dressed up in a fug of confusion as usual.
Well educated idiots at the bbc still couldn't comprehend that its not real time communication even after all these years
of mars missions.
Mission control monitoring and reading out decent speeds etc gives the impression they are in control of the critical events.
In reality if they fell off their chairs and pulled a power cord out the thing would have still landed the same.
So a big salute to the people that engineered the craft and designed all the automated systems that worked so well.
We need to drop the pretence that man will ever go there.

[Smiljan]

Ever?

[CraigyMc]

FunkyNige said:

Yeah, the MRO is 20 year old+ technology now so if long term we're going to be sending more probes and humans to Mars a decent relay station does seem like a good idea to me.
The NASA website tells me it has a 20 GB hard drive and if my Googling is accurate the processor is about the same speed as a Nokia 6110 and the original iPod (46 MIPS, Wiki tells me the ARM7 processor was 40 MIPS) so I hope we can beat that now!

MRO has the capacity for more than 2Mb/sec, but I think it likely varies in data transmission rate with distance from Earth. It can go as high as 5, I think.

The CPUs used in most of the probes and orbiters are hardened IBM PowerPCs -- the RAD750 is an example. That design is decades old, but for good reason -- when you are in space, bits get flipped really easily and as a result smaller circuitry becomes problematic. The older CPUs use bigger lithography (so each transistor and each line is simply bigger). Even modern equivalents use huge litho compared to modern stuff (extreme examples as of today - 5nm for the pple M5 core, versus 45nm for the PowerPC RAD5500). Besides, if you are putting something on a one-way trip to Mars, it needs to work, so you always want spaceflight-proven stuff.

For higher-bandwidth comms, there are several interesting theoretical advances. Twisted laser light, if it works outside of a lab (it does, but dunno about interplanetary space), would be cool.