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NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images
- malwarebytess 6y agoStunning? 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.
- kgrimes2 6y agoDude, it's a scientific experiment, not a fucking Instagram shoot
- malwarebytess 6y agoThat'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.
- kgrimes2 6y agoWhat qualifies as "stunning" in your book if not photos of another world?
- bregma 6y agoMars 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.
- chovybizzass 6y agothey don't look all that stunning to me.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoAre you saying women are from mars? I thought they were from venus. Here are the images: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
- ElCapitanMarkla 6y agoOh wow I didn’t realise that was a thing, that’s amazing. Thanks
- medium_burrito 6y agoMicrobes in bikinis, please
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoLOL. Not sure why you're being downvoted - microbes with or without bikinis would definitely be stunning.
- ncmncm 6y agoI think this is the first probe ever to have a microscope on board. Seemed kinda dumb to be looking for evidence of life without one. But there was a time when it was a big uphill battle even to get a camera on board: "no scientific value". That mistake was not repeated. Pictures always have surprises.
- tiahura 6y agoThanks 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?”
- jerkstate 6y agoI 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?
- soheil 6y agoI would think encryption would slow down the transmission rate. So most likely are sent in the clear
- hackeraccount 6y agoI'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 6y agoIf 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/ https://xkcd.com/1337/
- azernik 6y agoData 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/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/rover/communication/
- milofeynman 6y agoHow close was the rover to its intended landing spot?
- jcims 6y agoNailed it - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/avoiding-hazards-at-jezero-crater 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 6y agoIt 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.large.jpg 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/share https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/870?rss=1/sh...
- Cogito 6y agoIt 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 6y agoIs there a single good official site to get Perseverance media from?
- uomo 6y agohttps://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ Would be the best place to get images/videos from Perseverance.
- rsj_hn 6y agoI 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.
- azernik 6y agoThe helicopter hasn't flown yet - they put it down on the ground, and they're going to run it through a lot of remote checks before flying it. IIRC it's gonna be a month or two before first flight.
- rsj_hn 6y agoThank you for this! Do you know of a source on the net for a simple timeline of when X will happen?
- almyk 6y agoThis is not a timeline, but it states the objectives of the helicopter and contains a check list of them. https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/ https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/
- azernik 6y agoThe ground controllers themselves don't know precisely. I suspect they'll have more precise timelines in the last week before flight, but that's just a wild guess on my part.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoDoes anyone know what type of data compression is being used to transmit these images? There's been huge progress since the last rover.
- NL807 6y agoI'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.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThey 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 6y agoNaively, 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 6y agoCompression can also include backup/padding/parity data to correct for errors and transmission losses.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThey use the same kind of compression as the last mission. JP2, I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 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.
- idiocrat 6y agoAll 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.
- wait_a_minute 6y agoThe 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.
- mLuby 6y 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.
- runarberg 6y agonah. We’ve been waiting for businesses to step up their game for over 30 years now. I don’t see it happening in the next thirty years coming. A more realistic scenario is for governments to build the infrastructure required to recycle and reuse our trash and, better yet, regulate how trash is produced and punish it’s existence.
- soheil 6y agoNasa's image gallery UI is such a pain to use, I wish someone would upload these into a more user friendly photo viewer tool.
- hanniabu 6y agoWhat's difficult about it?
- asdff 6y agoMultiple 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.
- hanniabu 6y agoMaybe over the weekend if I can carve out a few hours I'll put together an open source site and share here.
- kgrimes2 6y agoThe site isn't great, no. But the reason there's so many repeated images is because NASA doesn't want to be accused of hiding anything. If they're taking photos for calibration, we get those, just like if they're taking stunning panoramas.
- phist_mcgee 6y agoAnd to a science agency, I don't think their top priority is selecting the best 4k wallpaper for easy download. I honestly don't mind government sites, they are usually thoroughly boring and very conservative with their design, which means that even old people like my dad can click around and use it. I think that's a good thing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teleforce 6y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1eFMzO3iPc
- dredmorbius 6y agoSimilar, 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/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/pluto-observations-through-the-years.gif https://i0.wp.com/www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fu...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoGreat. 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.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThat period during the New Horizons mission where every new image represented a major advance in our quantum of knowledge of Pluto was absolutely remarkable. The situation with Mars is different: the planet's close enough for reasonably good telescopic investigation from Earth, we've had landers on the planet for 50 years (the Soviet Mars 2 lander beat Viking by 5 years), high-resolution orbiters for ... nearly as long? And since 1996, rovers, which have transected paths of varying lengths exploring specific regions of the plant. We've got a very strong overview (something still not complete for Pluto --- New Horizons got detailed close views of only about 60% of the surface), and several very-high-detail pictures. Astronomical time and distance are both huge relative to human scale. That we (or our robot agents) can cross the solar system in a decade or two is remarkable. A few months to Mars is nothing. The Earth was once as large or far larger (to us).
- snicker7 6y agoAny good desktop wallpapers out of this?
- 29athrowaway 6y agoCuriosity took pretty nice pictures that you can very easily turn into wallpapers. https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/curiositys-1-8-billion-pixel-panorama/?site=msl 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 6y agoStupid 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-power/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...
- marshmallow_12 6y agoa 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?
- neolog 6y agoI'd be interested in a real answer to this if any nuclear engineers are around
- ChuckMcM 6y agoNot a nuclear engineer, but we covered this in my third semester of physics at University. The short answer is there isn't any engineering reason why you can't do this. The "real" reason is that there is liability here that nobody knows how to deal with. If the unit became damaged and its shielding failed it could sit there and kill people who came near it for years (for example). I got to talk to one of the engineers who worked on KRUSTY[1] a 10kW nuclear reactor. This combined with some batteries for peak load could run pretty much any house for a couple of decades. (they talk about several houses in the article but realistically the peak load of a single house when the oven, refrigerator/freezer compressor, and central AC are running is a bit north of 10kW. I would seriously consider a way off grid ranch house if I could have one of these to power it :-) [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a20127140/nasa-tests-mini-nuclear-reactors-for-moon-and-mars/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a20127140/n...
- miguelmota 6y agoIf 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqqaW8DCc-I
- nsturtz 6y agoThat is so cool :)
- gtm1260 6y agoStupid 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 6y agospeculation, but it's probably compressed before transmission to earth... for obvious reasons.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alpaca128 6y agoIt 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.
- Balgair 6y agoGenerally, 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.
- reilly3000 6y ago
- mojomark 6y agoWhat 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_0009_0667755959_167ECM_N0030000NCAM05000_05_0LLJ#.YD8PxnMjlNM.gmail https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/NLE_000... 2.) https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/SI0_0011_0667925212_087ECM_N0030000SRLC10010_0000LUJ#.YD8SbN0esto.gmail https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/SI0_001...
- maaaaattttt 6y agoMy 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 6y agoSame question. Where are the stereo images?
- suyash 6y agoCan someone explain, is this how Mars would look to us with naked eye or this is an artistic/digital interpretation?
- CharlesW 6y agoMy 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-calibration-target/ https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25619/mastcam-z-looks-at-its...
- BooneJS 6y agoI love seeing cables neatly routed and even evidence of cable lacing in 2021. Dying art.
- throwaway888abc 6y agoThe photos are stunning! Scratching head why one would like to live on Mars ?
- itbeho 6y 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.
- novaRom 6y agoAre 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.
- kgrimes2 6y agoAll 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/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/cameras/ These are ENGINEERING cameras for taking incredibly precise measurements. Not for populating an Instagram page.
- centimeter 6y 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.
- kgrimes2 6y agoPun intended?
- cco 6y agoIf 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.
- kgrimes2 6y agoGo show a kid the EDL video, and then try to say that again with a straight face
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoSuch cameras won't survive the trip through interplanetary space and operate on a planet without a magnetic field.
- whatever1 6y agoAnyone 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 ?
- electriclove 6y agoPerseverance 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 6y agoFrom 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/communications/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communicatio...
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoIt 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.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoIncredible for me, too. The power of building the civilization, one generation after another, and of working together, sharing the knowledge.
- DorianSinDeep 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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.
- berkes 6y agoLooking 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 6y agoI 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?
- berkes 6y agoMy 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.
- bregma 6y agoThe chances of someone unscrewing on Mars are a million to one they said.
- johnchristopher 6y agoI'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 6y agoBecause 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.
- berkes 6y agoThis presumes the only alternative to "screws and nuts and bolts" is "3dprinting". Which I know to be false.
- idlewords 6y agoI 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.
- endoelenar58 6y agoCurious, whether rover survives to the return sample mission.
- ForHackernews 6y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble
- Denvercoder9 6y agoThat'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/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI've come to expect news/media copyright mistakes to fail on the side of copyright interests - and not the public's.
- lovezone 6y agoNice
- mytailorisrich 6y 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?
- cosmonaughty 6y agoThe picture labeled "wind carved rock" is interesting. If the atmospheric pressure is 610 pascals or 0.088 psi (less than 1%) earth pressure, how could any wind be powerful enough to carve a rock? Does the wind blow 600-1200 mph on Mars? Don't answer as the question is rhetorical. Air pressure that thin would require winds several hundred MPH just to kick up fine dust particles, well before we get to erosion of rock. With such low air pressure a human would barely feel a 300 MPH wind gust. In that low air pressure a parachute would be useless unless it is 2000 feet in diameter. A rocket would need 100x the thrust to get the same acceleration or deceleration, as per Newton's law, 100x less resistance means an object in motion plummeting toward the surface would tend to remain plummeting. Remember why they tell you meteors meet resistance and burn up entering Earth's atmosphere? The reverse would be true of a object plummeting through atmosphere of only 610 pascals. 100x more thrust would be necessary to slow the descent to compensate for the lack of atmosphere and the density differential. Did NASA think of any of the actual physics before they served you this fake Mars landing cartoon? You're hackers. You know how to do math. This is 8th grade physics to see the scam being served up here as scientific exploration. I suppose if grifters had a 70 million dollar per week budget they might be tempted to produce what was paid for, even if they had to fake it. Everything shown to you in these Mars landing videos is consistent with parachuting into Earth's atmosphere, not an atmosphere 100x thinner. That parachute would drop almost as fast as a rocket. Remember the falling feather and cannonball in a vacuum analogy? You're being played. NASA is just a division of Hollywood. Yes, the world is that messed up. And yes the military industrial complex is that shady. Enjoy your cartoons!
- snickms 6y agoThis 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-plume-from-perseverances-descent-stage/ 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.
- ozim 6y agoI 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.
- snickms 6y agoWhat 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.
- ozim 6y agoWell but it is potential value, what if we never get such sensitive instruments? I expect Mars to be big enough that when we will have such instruments there still be a lot of stuff not touched to use those on.
- raphaelj 6y agoThe high resolution, 360 panoramic view, of the landing site is also stunning: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8873/nasas-perseverance-rover-gives-high-definition-panoramic-view-of-landing-site/ https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8873/nasas-perseverance-rover-giv...
- known 6y agoMars surface looks pretty much like Earth surface :)
- arethuza 6y agoWait 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....
- novaRom 6y agoLike 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.
- billfruit 6y agoAny sound clips released as of now? I heard they had a microphone on board unlike so many of the probes till now.
- daverobbins1 6y agohttps://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/participate/sounds/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/participate/sounds/
- billfruit 6y agoActually they sound some what underwhelming.
- NoOneNew 6y agoUp to date image collection on the nasa site for anyone that cares: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
- ASalazarMX 6y agoWe're seeing Martian robot selfies. Neat.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoWholly 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/_117351722_f72d9f69-374b-4019-b3f6-4460779c5eeb.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/58BB/production/...
- hyyypr 6y agoiirc the "landing crane" was doing autonomous live analysis of the terrain and making the necessary last minute adjustments to avoid problematic areas.
- kesava 6y agoIt was actually the rover itself doing those calculations with it's set of radars and controlling the sky crane thru the umbilical cords.
- Nelkins 6y agoI hope we start terraforming Mars in my lifetime.
- birdyrooster 6y agoI hope we figure out how to terraform Earth first
- asasidh 6y 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
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- kellyrose019788 6y agoHi
- kgrimes2 6y agohttps://www.c-span.org/video/?509554-1/president-biden-congratulates-nasa-mars-perseverance-landing-team https://www.c-span.org/video/?509554-1/president-biden-congr...