Spring RTS Engine

flying since 9 months, landing in about one hour:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/mars/ ... news3.html

Super excited!

Edit: Merrrika! Fuck Yeah!

Wow... that was intense... now I need to go try to get a full night's sleep in 6 hours...

Go Humanity! https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity

Yeah it was AMAZING. I am excited as hell for the coming footage.

OMG! Its full of dust!

PicassoCT wrote:OMG! Its full of dust!

any video capture of the real landing? (there was that reconnaissance probe in the orbit?) would really like to see how it actually looked

gajop wrote:any video capture of the real landing? (there was that reconnaissance probe in the orbit?) would really like to see how it actually looked

I'm pretty sure there is not any real-time video AT ALL... apparently getting data from Mars to earth is really durn tricky and expensive because of bandwidth issues... turns out pointing an antenna at a tiny spot 54.6 million to 401 million km away is hard enough... and then the signal strength to get data that distance uses a lot of power.

The MSL will get much better pictures than what we got so far... the images above are from the "hazard cams" that are situated around the thing to let the driver (and navigation software) figure out where it is and what's nearby... it was also still covered with a dust cover when those images were sent before the "dust cover" was removed from the cameras.

We will likely be getting much more and higher quality black and white imagery from the other Hazard cams over the next few days and then in a little longer than that the colour camera will come online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/ ... intcmp=239

Worth waiting for will be the video feed from underneath the spacecraft as it flew to its target and began lowering the Curiosity rover on those nylon ropes. That will be truly extraordinary to see.

Two other spacecraft can also listen to Curiosity: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the European Space Agency's Mars Express. Any data they picked up from MSL as it landed has been stored onboard and will be transmitted to Earth later. There could be spectacular images on the way not only from Curiosity itself but also from MRO: there's a 60% chance that it managed to take images of Curiosity with its extremely powerful camera as the rover was descending to the surface.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had been commanded to attempt to image Curiosity as it was descending to the surface. Apparently the spacecraft has now sent data back to Earth and the images have been processed. We probably won't see the result until later today; NASA will hold its next press conference at 5pm UK time.

I stand corrected... still the bandwidth thing is true... it will be a while before we get that video.

Duno bandwidth shouldn't be any problem with such mars satellites (they should have much stronger antennas than a ground vehicle), esp. with all these new advances in video encoding. Only problem might be processing power (I assume Curiosity has one of those 800MHz radiosity-protected CPUs), but even that could be fixed with hw encoders.
Sure the video couldn't be 16kx16k or whatever res their photos got, still 640x480 should be possible.

See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4269545/ns/ ... dth-boost/ . Duno from what year that news is but it seems to be a bit older, so even higher bandwidth might be possible now. Still ~32kB/s are the range we are speaking of (using both mars satellites might double the bandwidth as long as it has contact to both).

Money might be a reason (ground antenna time costs). Still they paid for it never the less for the landing ... - I don't think they had a on-demand connection during that timespan.

Hurray! Yay!

Merrrika is awesome!

It's more expensive to send the data via SMS

The "Landing Video" is up...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I

That was underwhelming.

Das Bruce wrote:That was underwhelming.

My thoughts exactly... 4 FPS at like 64x64 isn't much...

USA puts a rover on Mars, Europe discovers the Higgs Bosom.
Fight!

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:USA puts a rover on Mars, Europe discovers the Higgs Bosom.
Fight!

Winner: Science!

I didn't realise Peter Higgs had a Bosom.

And having met someone who worked at CERN, I'm certain he has never discovered one.