NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-56238018

by astdb • 5 years ago

1032 342 5 years ago

they don't look all that stunning to me.

What do you want before you'll call it "stunning"? Beaches with women in bikinis? Those are stunning for the amount of detail they show of the surface of another planet.

m463• 5 years ago

Are you saying women are from mars? I thought they were from venus.

Here are the images:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

medium_burrito4• 5 years ago

Microbes in bikinis, please

tiahura• 5 years ago

Thanks for having the courage to make this comment. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it’s not like these are mind bending technicolor panoramas. They look like every other picture of Mars we’ve seen since the first pictures of Mars decades ago. At some point someone needs to ask why we’re spending billions on more pictures of Mars and answering deep questions like “Is Mars soil 36.7 or 36.8% silicon?”

bsder• 5 years ago

The "science" mostly isn't in the images.

Images, however, are the easiest thing for the lay public to grasp.

perardi3• 5 years ago

This project will cost $2.8 billion…over the 10-year life of the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020

In government terms? That is nothing. We’ll burn that much on defective F-35 fighters in a year.

And we are not “just” assessing the mineral content of the soil—not even close.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/science/

(If you’re that offended by the cost, I will Venmo you the 0.1 cents per year this is taking out of your tax bill.)

NL8072• 5 years ago

Why? Because missions like these contribute to our understanding of extraterrestrial worlds, like Mars. The data collected will help with future space travel and potential settlement.

abledon• 5 years ago

yer dopamine circuits are fried brah! Take a tech detox for 2 weeks

jerkstate• 5 years ago

I remember a recent article on HN about being able to receive signals from Tianwen-1 with a homemade satellite dish - is it possible to receive these pictures over radio with the right equipment, or do they come down encrypted?

soheil2• 5 years ago

I would think encryption would slow down the transmission rate. So most likely are sent in the clear

hackeraccount• 5 years ago

I'm not saying they are encrypted but I thought that encryption is a close cousin to compression - that it generally doesn't add overhead.

ddevault• 5 years ago

If I recall correctly, the Tianwen-1 amateur signal reception was (1) shortly after launch, and (2) using a 20 meter dish. Receiving the downlink from a deep space object requires much more sophisticated technology than most amateurs have access to, both to track the object, and to listen hard enough.

That being said, I doubt that the transmissions are encrypted. Hell, I bet some amateurs with a very powerful transmitter might be able to transmit a software update and take control of the rover.

https://xkcd.com/1337/

azernik6• 5 years ago

Data comes from Perseverance through two channels:

* A low-bandwidth direct link to Earth (160bps-800bps depending on receiver dish- no, that's not a typo)

* A high-bandwidth link to orbiting satellites, which then forward traffic to Earth (~2Mbps for the rover->orbit hop, anywhere from 0.5-4Mbps for the orbit->Earth) .

I strongly suspect that the low-bandwidth telemetry signals - equivalent to the homemade reception from satellites I've heard of - are sent in the clear. Bandwidth is just too precious to waste.

I would not be surprised either way for the image data - on the one hand, computing power is relatively scarce, while on the other hand it already has to go through a compression pipeline.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/rover/communication/

milofeynman• 5 years ago

How close was the rover to its intended landing spot?

jcims2• 5 years ago

Nailed it - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/avoiding-hazards-at-jezero-c...

(A little more complicated than that of course. If I understand correctly, anything in blue was a candidate landing spot that it was free to select from. I'm pretty sure the header image is an artistic crop :) )

sp332• 5 years ago

It was almost that good. It had a five-mile-wide ellipse to search, and found a spot close to the middle. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/371/6532/870/F1.l... If you have a Science magazine subscription, the image is from this article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/870?rss=1/sh...

Cogito• 5 years ago

It landed quite close to the centre of its landing ellipse, which was significantly smaller than the landing zones of previous missions.

Perhaps most impressive is the success of the terrain relative navigation. During descent a specific landing site was chosen, after going through atmospheric entry. That site had to be reachable based on where they ended up after entry, needed to be safe to land in, and should land as close as reasonable to scientifically interesting sites. The system chose a pixel from the initial images taken during descent, and the final landing was within 5m of that spot.

duxup• 5 years ago

Is there a single good official site to get Perseverance media from?

uomo• 5 years ago

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ Would be the best place to get images/videos from Perseverance.

rsj_hn5• 5 years ago

I want to see that little helicopter fly! I scoured the site and as yet can't find any images of it, when I thought they were going to take mutual selfies -- heli of the rover and vice versa.

WalterSobchak• 5 years ago

Also, InSight: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/

hanniabu6• 5 years ago

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

Shared404• 5 years ago

This is the link I came to the thread looking for.

Many thanks.

etaioinshrdlu• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what type of data compression is being used to transmit these images? There's been huge progress since the last rover.

NL8072• 5 years ago

I'm speculating here, but I think these images are transmitted in some kind of raw format, or close to it, making them more resilient to data corruption. Compressed images will incur greater data loss when compressed, compared to raw images where you might lose a few image blocks at a time.

Robotbeat6• 5 years ago

They compress them but transmit with forward error correction. They do have the ability to retransmit if the images are too damaged.

Totally uncompressed images are not a very efficient way to transmit images if you want to ensure they're scientifically accurate.

kadoban• 5 years ago

Naively, I'd doubt that. There are all kinds of error correcting codes to deal with that and you'd end up with a substantial increase in effective bandwidth (with the compression). There may be error correction built in to the protocol itself already.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

Compression can also include backup/padding/parity data to correct for errors and transmission losses.

Robotbeat6• 5 years ago

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 electricity. Neither are the toolchains to process such images very widespread or as well understood.

hanniabu6• 5 years ago

Any idea how much storage it has? I would think it'd have to be TBs to store all these images, logs, and other data for years while making sure they have enough memory so that they're not limited and if the rover stays there for longer than intended.

walrus01• 5 years ago

One of the obvious constraints is that for science reasons they transmit each image in a lossless format, so we're up against the limits of what a lossless image compressor can do.

If there were a future mission's requirement to send back lossy images first, and CPU power was significant, something like AVIF or JPEG-XL would likely be a candidate.

https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-c...

ICER appears to be what they're using now for lossless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICER

ptstomp• 5 years ago

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?

Denvercoder92• 5 years ago

There's been huge progress since the last rover.

One thing that changed in the last 8 years is that there are now two new orbiters around Mars (MAVEN and ExoMars TGO), which can retrieve data from the rovers faster, cache it and send it to Earth faster.

idiocrat• 5 years ago

All the extraterrestrial expansion, dream of Men to conquer Space, star track enterprise! I'm pessimistic that we will ever leave our solar system, and if so in 1000 years, I do not care.

Hopefully people learn how tiny our bubble is and protect our environment more. The Martian environment looks so boring -- as a replacement for polluted Earth. (We will pollute Mars faster than Earth).

I'm living at the ocean, trying to keep my vicinity free of garbage. Today I pulled out pair of trousers and some plastic bands out out water. Sometimes I'm having fights with my elderly village neighbors, who are burning household trash (paper, wood) on the ocean shore. I take their garbage out their hands and carry it to my home, later drive to the garbage processing center.

moltar• 5 years ago

I admire your efforts to clean. But unfortunately it’s pointless. There are entire million and billion population countries that treat oceans as waste baskets, simply because they don’t know better.

I’ve talked to fishermen in rural Thailand and they don’t have waste collection. So they take their trash every day and just dump it in the middle of the ocean somewhere. They didn’t understand why that was a problem when I discussed it with them.

jcims2• 5 years ago

My imagination has a pretty big range for 'rural Thailand', do they have a safe way to dispose of it inland? Subsistence folks, to the extent that it might apply here, get a pass from me.

neolog2• 5 years ago

What could they do with the waste instead, if they don't have collection?

0x0034• 5 years ago

One person doing something in the face of billions of others is the entire opposite of pointless. Giving up because you're one person and you can't magically transform the entire world is cynical, a cop-out and completely misunderstands the nature of the problem.

The world won't change overnight, it won't immediately flip from the actions of one individual, or two, or even 1 thousand or 1 million. But that doesn't mean the action is pointless.

Change requires momentum, momentum requires the actions of an individual diligently living the change they want to see and sharing it with others. That sort of change builds slowly, often imperceptibly. But before you know it things begin actually changing. So no, this binary attitude of "You can't change everything by your actions so you may as well do nothing" is such an apathetic, cynical cop-out and I hate seeing it spouted everytime you see someone do something positive. As an idea it literally does nothing but harm and it has no value in being said.

blondie9x• 5 years ago

If one million people make a little effort the impact will be huge. Dont't be pessimistic. Lead by example. The simplified, minimalist, sustainable living style is contagious because it is as we are meant to actually live. In balance with the energy of the planet we depend upon and are part of.

heavyset_go• 5 years ago

One rural fisherman's garbage production doesn't scale, though. A company owned by a handful of people can put out more pollution than that of millions of rural fishermen.

wait_a_minute3• 5 years ago

The only solution is the spread of information and education. That's the only thing that will help. We must reach all people and present them with the evidence on environmental degradation. The planet is ours to protect and cherish, and I'm confident this is an achievable goal if we act fast. By advocating for access to internet and education at global scale! Starting with our homes.

mLuby2• 5 years ago

"One person's trash is another's treasure."

The other solution is make it more profitable to collect and sell your garbage than to dispose of it. Which means it has to be worth it for a business to collect your trash from you. Better recycling and distribution technologies can enable this.

I dream of the day when businesses fight for the privilege of hauling away your trash. Maybe delivery drones could bring back garbage to make their return trips less, uh, wasteful.

Trasmatta• 5 years ago

We will pollute Mars faster than Earth

I don't see how this is possible. At most, Mars might have small, organized colonies someday. Earth has billions of people.

sytelus• 5 years ago

Most people are unable to realize distances in space. Humans are simply not designed to travel in space. For a space ship that can be self-sustaining in every way and capable of multi-year travel, it has to be almost like a city. Even when you get to planets, they are even less hospitable than Mars. I think future life forms which will colonize other planets will be machines, not humans.

yellowapple• 5 years ago

I think future life forms which will colonize other planets will be machines, not humans.

Tardigrades seem like likely candidates, too.

nostromo• 5 years ago

Most people also don't realize how slow the speed of light is in relation to the size of the universe and the distance between stars. It's quite easy for a person to look at two galaxies in a telescope that will never be able to even observe each other's existence, let alone visit one another.

People often argue that we'll find a way to travel faster than light -- which is curious given how rarely people argue that we'll find a way to travel backwards in time.

soheil2• 5 years ago

Nasa's image gallery UI is such a pain to use, I wish someone would upload these into a more user friendly photo viewer tool.

hanniabu6• 5 years ago

What's difficult about it?

asdff• 5 years ago

Multiple clicks to get to the full resolution image. 50 thumbnails able to be viewed at a time, many uninteresting to lay people (solid gray screen, dozens of repeated images of of a portion of the rover itself, etc), for the monumental task of sifting through the 6407 images the rover has transmitted so far in mere days. Wholly unusable in a few months I imagine.

teleforce• 5 years ago

This is a video presenting ten milestone images that revealed what we've learned about Mars after decades of exploration prior to the landing of Perseverance [1]. It's nice to see the evolution of image resolutions of the Red Planet.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1eFMzO3iPc

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

Similar, a gf capturing the evolution of our knowledge of Puto in somewhat less than a century: https://i0.wp.com/www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fu...

TeMPOraL5• 5 years ago

Great. Sometimes it feels like there's little progress made in space exploration. But such a compilation is a good reminder that - yes, maybe it's a bit too slow for the impatient, but progress is being made, and it shows.

snicker7• 5 years ago

Any good desktop wallpapers out of this?

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

Curiosity took pretty nice pictures that you can very easily turn into wallpapers.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/curiositys-1-8-billion-pixel...

Take the second one from that page, for instance, zoom in, and just take a screenshot and use it as your wallpaper.

11thEarlOfMar• 5 years ago

Stupid question, but where is Perseverance's energy source?

Answer: Plutonium

It powers a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.

The plutonium decays at a few % per year, so that means it should be able to bring Elon a sandwich when he lands.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...

marshmallow_12• 5 years ago

a glowing green sandwich covered in red sand. But seriously, this stuff is powering those voyager probes 40 years later. Which makes me ask: why do we have to send there technologies 10 billion miles away to make them work? Why can't my fridge be powered this way?

AnimalMuppet4• 5 years ago

What's powering Voyager is a plutonium pile. Pretty sure you don't want that in your fridge. 10 billion miles from me? Sure, knock yourself out. 10 feet from me? No way.

ryandvm2• 5 years ago

Are you really asking why we can't power your fridge with plutonium?

oconnor663• 5 years ago

You know I was about to say something about how your fridge draws so much more power than these probes, but actually I just googled it and they're pretty close. Today I learned.

(I don't know how much power the probes actually use, but anyway the wattage of the RTG itself is pretty close to the steady state power consumption of a fridge.)

neolog2• 5 years ago

I'd be interested in a real answer to this if any nuclear engineers are around

shkkmo• 5 years ago

The 8 figure price tag for a RTG makes consumer use uneconomical.

vharuck• 5 years ago

Smoke detectors rely on a circuit powered by atomic fission ionizing the air. It isn't their power source (they still need batteries), but it is a safe way to get continuous electricity.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/s...

There's probably a way to get a little more power out of it without being too dangerous. But then we'd have ordinary citizens buying things over-the-counter that could be abused in bulk. And I don't see any hassle being worth an extra free outlet or not replacing batteries.

souprock• 5 years ago

We used to power pacemakers this way. There might still be a person with plutonium inside.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

Surely it would be a horrible idea to distribute radioactive materials to the general population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

King-Aaron• 5 years ago

Aside from the high cost of a consumer grade plutonium RTG, and the size constraint issues with putting one in the base of a fridge, or the health risks with having a reactor in your house under your food, one reason might be to prevent people exploding them.

mLuby2• 5 years ago

Back in the 60's, people thought everything would be nuclear-powered; atomic cars, planes, trains, houses, etc. But like with building-sized computers, we've chosen a different path through the tech tree.

There were terrestrial exceptions though, like "the Beta-M is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that was used in Soviet-era lighthouses and beacons." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M

But people happened across them and got radiation poisoning, so imagine that happening a lot more often if they were powering all manner of home appliance. Also a lot more dirty bombs.

idlewords3• 5 years ago

The Russians tried powering a bunch of remote stuff with plutonium batteries during the Soviet era. It did not end well, and cleaning those up has been an ordeal. Pu-238 was also used in pacemakers. The basic problem is just that plutonium is toxic as hell.

jb775• 5 years ago

Because if you can power a fridge this way, you can power an automobile this way. They won't let this happen.

The current power structures in the world (petrodollar, etc) and world economy as a whole (massive employment within oil industry and throughout supply chains catering to oil industry) are too intertwined with the oil industry to allow any other technologies to swiftly disrupt that.

Johnny555• 5 years ago

Why can't my fridge be powered this way

The MMRTG is a cylinder 25" in diameter and 26" high, it's going to seriously impact space in your 'fridge. Plus it weighs nearly 100 lbs.

It outputs around 100W of power, which might be enough for a small refrigerator, but it also emits around 2000W of thermal energy, so your kitchen's going to get a little warm (probably a good thing in the winter, not so much in summer).

Though probably the biggest drawback is the cost -- the MMRTG costs around $100M to manufacture. The US Department of Energy makes the plutonium for it.

malwarebytess2• 5 years ago

Stunning? Boring is the truth. They look as haphazard and unconsidered shots of earthly, unremarkable, landscape.

NASA needs artists and poetic photographers to capture inspiration on Mars if they want to snare the hearts of the public. What a waste of fortunes if they cannot do that.

If only the images were as great as the feat and engineering itself.

kgrimes29• 5 years ago

Dude, it's a scientific experiment, not a fucking Instagram shoot

malwarebytess2• 5 years ago

That's not what this is. I didn't impugn the project did I? I criticized the public relations blitz and a falsely descriptive title on the BBC. Don't pretend public outreach isn't part of the plan here.

bregma4• 5 years ago

Mars exploration is first and foremost a human experience. Dry observation and engineering wet dreams are OK for a few elite but what we're looking at here is a legacy for all humankind. It should be treated that way, and that includes emotional interpretations.

miguelmota• 5 years ago

If anyone is curious about the technology powering the Perseverance rover, there's this great video on YouTube explaining the incredible engineering behind it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqqaW8DCc-I

gtm1260• 5 years ago

Stupid question maybe but like is there a reason the picture quality seems worse than a decent dslr photo? I'm so curious what that photo would look like, taken with an everyday camera, without the bizarre 'scientific' look of these shots.

phonethrowaway• 5 years ago

speculation, but it's probably compressed before transmission to earth... for obvious reasons.

alpaca128• 5 years ago

It would surprise me if they used lossy compression. However I once read about a space probe using a custom image compression and transmission format which does not require 100% data integrity for proper decoding. So if the transmission is cut off after 60% NASA will still be able to view whatever they received. I assume such methods are still applied.

Balgair3• 5 years ago

Generally, these cameras are many years out of date. They don't load up the rovers with the latest gear from today, but with the latest gear from when the design review process was closed. I don't know when that was for Perseverance, but it would not surprise me if that was a decade ago. The cameras are also not specifically designed for image capture, but for scientific study. In that they take images at a wider range of wavelengths than what humans can see. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. Additionally, the cameras' chips are not what we have commercially. They are designed to withstand the vacuum, the solar radiation on the long transit, and for use on the Martian surface for many years. You can't swap them out, ever. As such, they are much more 'rugged', which may effect image quality as well.

reilly30003• 5 years ago

Yep, that’s the same reason why it runs on a PowerPC750 chip. They cost $200k+ for under 200Mhz on a 150-250 nm process, but can withstand up to 1,000,000 rads of radiation and function within extreme temperature ranges for decades. They have been proven to work in the harshest environments on prior missions, and the risk of an unproven processor is giant; a CPU failure could jeopardize the mission just as much as a crash landing. Design constrains are so very different when you shoot something 140M miles away!

antmldr• 5 years ago

Scott Manley recently did a pretty good ELI5 on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wah1DbFVFiY

dmix3• 5 years ago

It takes 15min but this plus the comment section on CMOS (can’t link directly) is excellent. The other comment about being made a decade ago is also relevant and accurate. They will certainly be better next time with evolutions in camera tech thanks to smartphones.

TLDR worth a listen

dmix3• 5 years ago

My question is why was the “sound of Mars” release only 18 seconds long?

Why not record hours of what it sounds like to be on another planet? Even the sound recordings from decades ago on (I think Titan) was only a short creepy clip.

I understand it’s mostly going to be wind and interspliced with the robots sounds but I still don’t get how we don’t have hours of Mars already.

histriosum• 5 years ago

My guess would be bandwidth. Every bit of bandwidth is precious, so they probably dont have the spare budget to send long audio files without obvious scientific value...

athul7744• 5 years ago

Perseverance is the first rover with microphones on Mars. This is why we don't have audios from prior missions.

carapace2• 5 years ago

One of the most beautiful and haunting things I've ever heard was a tape cassette that had EM signals recorded by Voyager transposed into human-audible sound domain somehow. It was like whale song of space.

Symbiote• 5 years ago

Is it simply dusty/hazy?

Some of the fuzzy photos remind me of the Sahara Desert when there was a little wind.

OrbitRock• 5 years ago

Dusty. Gives the sky a dull reddish color. Also makes Martian sunsets blue.

pkaye3• 5 years ago

In some interviews with the mast cam engineers, they say they can capture higher resolution images later on. Maybe they were reducing the image size to get then transmitted quicker.

mojomark• 5 years ago

What are the "dark spot anomalies" that appear to be floating in the air in some images (1, 2)? Dust on the camera lens? I've never looked at any rover images so I assume someone knows.

Also, whay are the images fairly low resolution compared to a phones camera. Does it have to do with image data transmission error?

Finally (then I'll shut up), when do we get to see the stereo images? I want to see these on my Vive.

1.) https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/NLE_000...

2.) https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/SI0_001...

maaaaattttt• 5 years ago

My wild guess would be dust on the lens. Quickly looking at related images shows black spots present at the same locations relatively to the image's frame.

intrasight• 5 years ago

Same question. Where are the stereo images?

suyash• 5 years ago

Can someone explain, is this how Mars would look to us with naked eye or this is an artistic/digital interpretation?

CharlesW• 5 years ago

My understanding is that these are how they'd look with the naked eye. There's a color calibration target on the rover.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25619/mastcam-z-looks-at-its...

BooneJS• 5 years ago

I love seeing cables neatly routed and even evidence of cable lacing in 2021. Dying art.

throwaway888abc• 5 years ago

The photos are stunning!

Scratching head why one would like to live on Mars ?

itbeho• 5 years ago

"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 these images and being inspired to help get us there in person, hopefully in the near future.

novaRom2• 5 years ago

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.

kgrimes29• 5 years ago

All ya'll complaining that you can take better pictures with your iPhones than Percy can on Mars, please read this: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/cameras/

These are ENGINEERING cameras for taking incredibly precise measurements. Not for populating an Instagram page.

centimeter• 5 years ago

SuperCam fires a laser at mineral targets that are beyond the reach of the rover’s robotic arm, and then analyzes the vaporized rock to reveal its elemental composition. Like the ChemCam on rover Curiosity, SuperCam fires laser pulses at pinpoint areas smaller than 1 millimeter from more than 20 feet (about 7 meters) away.

Holy shit, that rocks.

kgrimes29• 5 years ago

Pun intended?

cco• 5 years ago

If they didn't include at least one Instagram ready camera, the team majorly misstepped on the "secure funding by inspiring a generation" part of NASA's mission.

kgrimes29• 5 years ago

Go show a kid the EDL video, and then try to say that again with a straight face

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

Such cameras won't survive the trip through interplanetary space and operate on a planet without a magnetic field.

whatever1• 5 years ago

Anyone has insights on how data in such volumes can be transferred from Mars to Earth in the absence of a direct link? Do the intermediate nodes have gigabytes of available storage to emit data to the next available node once it becomes visible ?

electriclove2• 5 years ago

Perseverance sends the data to various orbiters (satellites already in orbit around Mars) during overflights (time windows when the orbiter is in range of the rover) and those orbiters then send (relay) the data to Earth via the Deep Space Network (satellite dishes on Earth).

raynr• 5 years ago

From my layman's understanding, it's relayed via the orbiters.

There are a few orbiters around Mars. NASA appears to have an arrangement with the ESA to upload data from the rovers to the ESA's orbiters, depending on whose orbiters are within line of sight at any given time. Then the orbiter sends the information back to Earth, which are received by NASA's Deep Space Network

During the time when line of sight between Earth and Mars is blocked by Sol, there isn't any communication.

May interest you: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communicatio...

SturgeonsLaw• 5 years ago

It never ceases to impress me that we have the ability to do this sort of stuff. A couple thousand years ago, the height of technology was shooting something from a few hundred metres away with a bow and arrow, now we are landing machines on another planet and transmitting data back and forth through the solar system. Incredible.

akg_67• 5 years ago

Reddit had AMA with engineers from this mission, IIRC last week. They provided good info on different aspects including how they were able to get video over low bandwith connection, including various mission site link for more info. You might want to check out AMA for your question.

Edit: added following links

This Q&A about storage https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

These Q&A about data rate https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

This Q&A about RTG (operational life) https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

asaddhamani• 5 years ago

Do you have a link to this AMA?

eCa• 5 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

jdmichal• 5 years ago

Others have posted links to the Reddit thread overall, but I think this is the specific question being referred to:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

EDIT: Apparently the rover has an antenna that can directly communicate with Earth at 10 bits per second! That's obviously not useful for pictures or anything, but it's an amazing capability for emergency comms.

pkaye3• 5 years ago

They added dedicated storage in the rover itself to store phots and videos. So for example they can compress the video files before transmitting. I've hear they use ffmpeg for this purpose. There are 4 orbiting satellites that can relay any data sent to it.

mmcconnell1618• 5 years ago

Vint Cerf has been working with NASA for over a decade on a design for interplanetary internet. I work at Google and he shared a story about how the earlier rovers had radios that were overheating at higher bandwidth transmissions. A smart engineer noted that they had an X band radio on the rover and still had one in an orbiter around Mars. The rover could transmit at 128mbps over xband to the orbitter, which in turn had large antennas to transmit back to earth at 128mbps. I assume Perseverance supports more bandwidth but it may be limited by whatever equipment we have in orbit around Mars.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for-building-...

dekhn• 5 years ago

See https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for- building-an-internet-in-space-20201021/ for some details on projects related to this. IIRC it's store and forward.

DorianSinDeep• 5 years ago

I think people who don't care for long term investments like this are afraid of the idea that the world will go on without them just as well as it is now. They believe in their fear that some catastrophy bigger than their own death must be coming or what was the point of their life at all? The world was fine before you and it will be fine after you. Endeavours like these are the only worthwhile contributions we have to make towards the future.

michelb• 5 years ago

I think most people who are not a fan of space programmes would like to have spent that money/effort on humanitarian and socio-economic problems first. I say why not both? Just reduce military spending.

berkes3• 5 years ago

Looking at closeups of the Rover, I cannot help but think: are those screws, nuts and bolts? And if so, why? Why carry the weight or decreased stiffness of or by the notches, slits, threads etc. that makes screws be screwable. To a place where no-one ever will unscrew them?

vasco• 5 years ago

I predict that the chances of someone ever unscrewing them are higher than not. Just not super soon.

Plus during development its useful, and why would you change the platform you test when deploying to live?

berkes3• 5 years ago

My thoughts as well: the benefits during development outweigh any downsides during transport and deployment.

My other thought is that I simply saw it wrong and there are no screws in the rover, just things that look like screws, nuts or bolts.

bregma4• 5 years ago

The chances of someone unscrewing on Mars are a million to one they said.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

I'd be amazed if we could build a single-use unibody rover but even so I suppose those bolts and nuts give some needed flexibility when landing and moving.

Any structural engineer around?

carabiner• 5 years ago

Because you'd need higher weight in wall thicknesses if using weaker 3D printed aluminum instead of aluminum sheet, bar stock etc. Which actually has a coherent grain.

berkes3• 5 years ago

This presumes the only alternative to "screws and nuts and bolts" is "3dprinting". Which I know to be false.

idlewords3• 5 years ago

I get how exciting this is for planetary scientists, but the last few robotic missions have really driven home that Mars is kind of an armpit. Here's to sending rovers somewhere with cooler visuals. I will stay up all night to see what the Io Lander can send home before it falls into a volcano.

wayanon• 5 years ago

Not kidding someone could add filters to the images to see different aspects of the view.

idlewords3• 5 years ago

Cat filter would make headlines

endoelenar58• 5 years ago

Curious, whether rover survives to the return sample mission.

ForHackernews• 5 years ago

The bottom of this page says: "All images copyright Nasa/JPL-Caltech"

But I thought all works created by the US federal government are public domain and not protected by copyright?

Famously the "Blue Marble" photo is not under copyright and reproduced all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble

Denvercoder92• 5 years ago

That's probably just a mistake from the BBC. The original source [1] just says "image credit" NASA/JPL-Caltech, not copyright.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

WarOnPrivacy4• 5 years ago

I've come to expect news/media copyright mistakes to fail on the side of copyright interests - and not the public's.

lovezone• 5 years ago

Nice

mytailorisrich• 5 years ago

All images copyright Nasa/JPL-Caltech

Question: Aren't those pictures actually in the public domain as they were produced by US government's agencies?

raphaelj• 5 years ago

The high resolution, 360 panoramic view, of the landing site is also stunning:

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8873/nasas-perseverance-rover-giv...

snickms2• 5 years ago

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 the two pieces of trash required to enable the landing.

For all the data we have gained, we have lost a pristine planet - which makes me wonder if we are doing this at the right time.

ozim2• 5 years ago

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 human point of view "I want". Let alone planets are not pristine they are bombarded with space trash like asteroids all the time :)

Why do we use such anthropocentric view? It makes any difference if there is parachute on Mars? Pollution? Well we defined pollution because it is something we want to get rid of because it makes us sick. There is much more bad things for humans in space than you can count.

snickms2• 5 years ago

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.

bogwog• 5 years ago

That "jets of pollution" is the equivalent of a fart in the wind

kbelder• 5 years ago

We're disturbing all those pristine impact craters.

known• 5 years ago

Mars surface looks pretty much like Earth surface :)

arethuza• 5 years ago

Wait until we get images of cliffs of Echus Chasma, the crater of Pavonis Mons or the view over Valles Marineris....

Edit: I know Perseverance isn't going to those places, but something/someone will eventually....

novaRom2• 5 years ago

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.

billfruit2• 5 years ago

Any sound clips released as of now? I heard they had a microphone on board unlike so many of the probes till now.

daverobbins1• 5 years ago

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/participate/sounds/

billfruit2• 5 years ago

Actually they sound some what underwhelming.

NoOneNew• 5 years ago

Up to date image collection on the nasa site for anyone that cares: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

We're seeing Martian robot selfies. Neat.

WarOnPrivacy4• 5 years ago

Wholly cow. In that 2nd photo, the rover looks like it just missed landing on a ridgeline.

ref:https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/58BB/production/...

hyyypr• 5 years ago

iirc the "landing crane" was doing autonomous live analysis of the terrain and making the necessary last minute adjustments to avoid problematic areas.

kesava• 5 years ago

It was actually the rover itself doing those calculations with it's set of radars and controlling the sky crane thru the umbilical cords.

Nelkins• 5 years ago

I hope we start terraforming Mars in my lifetime.

birdyrooster• 5 years ago

I hope we figure out how to terraform Earth first

asasidh• 5 years ago

"The Perseverance rover has initial funding to operate for one Mars year, roughly two Earth years."

So wire the rover money after 2 years ? no wonder Elon is into Bitcoin

kellyrose019788• 5 years ago

kgrimes29• 5 years ago

https://www.c-span.org/video/?509554-1/president-biden-congr...

NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

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