Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/08/22/watch-out-mars-1080-hd-video-of-curiosity-descent/

by MetallicCloud • 14 years ago

137 24 14 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

datalus• 14 years ago

Wow, right before it touches down the camera just gets still and I get sucked right into the video as it touches down. Otherworldly.

thomasf12• 14 years ago

The final drop is quite messy, there´s a lot of dust.

I wonder how happy NASA is with the sky-crane solution - would they do it again as the new standard for mars rovers or is it in the "nice try" category?

hartror• 14 years ago

The dust & gravel situation was only one reason the sky-crane was used. The other options of traditional lander or air bags have worse issues beyond dust and gravel and in the case of a lander the dust and gravel issues are worse.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Really? I had heard the issue was Curiosity was to be heavier than past probes, and they weren't confident the old airbag method could handle the weight gently enough.

mbell2• 14 years ago

From the press conferences I've watched there seems to be more debris on the rover than expected so its possible it wasn't as successful as they wanted. It could also just be that they landed in an area particularly prone to debris, I'll let the experts sort that out.

thomasf12• 14 years ago

It´s a interesting problem though... I still find it mind boggling that they pulled of that landing sequence... It´s so much more complex than the airbag idea of the last landing.

dhughes2• 14 years ago

It's hard to get a sense of scale, one minute it's wow so high up look way down at the craters then suddenly oh! That's not a crater that's the ground.

Beautiful I didn't know they had such high quality video I figured like it seems on all the others missions data is kept to a minimum and we'd only see black and white 640x480.

mbell2• 14 years ago

I think some of this is that the video is sped up. Best I can recall from being nerd-locked into the data coming back from MSL the decent camera only captures 5 frames a second at this resolution. This video is obviously replaying at a much higher frame rate so they are either playing it back at faster than real time or they interpolated a lot of frames, I'm guessing the former.

[EDIT] And now that I stop playing the video on repeat I realize this was covered in the article and the video description...

MetallicCloud• 14 years ago

Yep, it's captured at 5fps, and played at 15fps. So it's running at 3x.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Here you go this might help

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMsdobLq1-4&feature=plcp

A split screen view of the computer simulation with the original MARDI images synced up.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

This should give every coder a moment of pause.

Consider. Here we have a $2.5 billion interplanetary mission that is easily the most ambitious space exploration mission since the Apollo project. And it's using a completely new and untested landing system. Only bits and pieces of the landing system have been physically tested, and not even remotely all together. Because it turns out it is rather non-trivial to simulate an atmospheric reentry from an interplanetary trajectory, in the Martian atmosphere, under Martian gravity. In the end it came down to relying on our prior understanding of the Martian environment and simulations and measurements of the landing system and trusting the software to do its job. Because the round-trip delay for a human to be able to effect some part of the landing is nearly half an hour, and the entirety of the landing would take about a quarter that much time. Indeed, by the time we on Earth would receive a signal indicating that the atmospheric entry had begun in reality the entire landing would have already occurred several minutes in the past.

If you ever thought that a lot was riding on your code, this will certainly put that in perspective.

m_for_monkey• 14 years ago

This is nothing compared to medical software, for example. All you can lose here is some money, but no human life in danger. Some more perspective.

icambron2• 14 years ago

I disagree. 2.5 billion dollars is worth a lot of lives. Consider how many people you could save from, say, malnutrition with that money. I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot. And we as a society have decided that space exploration is actually more important than saving those people. Now, you can agree or disagree with society on that point, but either way, a lot is riding on this, even measured in units of human life. If the thing crashes into the ground, we wasted money we could have done something else with. A lot of something.

Watch Out Mars: 1080 HD Video of Curiosity Descent

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