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i hate to be critical of an image sent from millions of miles away but I have an honest question: Why do images from landers like this always look like there w

i hate to be critical of an image sent from millions of miles away but I have an honest question: Why do images from landers like this always look like there were taken from a iPhone 1's camera?

pavel_lishin 14y ago
If I had to guess - and I do, because I don't work for NASA - it's because there's a limited payload space on board, and visible images are some of the least interesting things, science-wise, that you can ask from Mars. Combine this with the electronics-unfriendly environment, and you probably aren't going to be strapping huge DLSR's on a 2.5 billion dollar science machine. Edit: Also, these appear to be the navigation cameras, so they're probably just good enough to be able to point the rover in a direction free of road hazards and tell it to boldly go where no other machine has yet gotten around to going.
- hnriot 14y ago
  I doubt that is the reason, the weight of a 16mp sensor or marginally more than a 2mp one. The metal camera supports are much likely to dwarf the sensor weight differences. most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same and the power comes from a nuclear battery. NASA couldn't just bolt on a 5DmkIII and expect it to work because the electronics would be fried. That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago.
  - jedberg 14y ago
    > That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago. That and the fact that they used sneakernet, which is still much higher bandwidth than wireless, especially in space.
    - flippyhead 14y ago
      Also, it was easier to do on a sound stage.
      - thechut 14y ago
        While I'm guessing this is in jest. All of these hardening necessary raises a lot of question about the legitimacy of the older photos.
        sgt101 14y ago
        My child. In the past years, while your mother played in the sunlight and your father smiled at girls and drank cool drafts as the evening drew in, before you were even a glimmer or a sunbeam, we had devices called "film cameras". These "film cameras" did not have electronic components. They worked by using levers, springs and wheels. An emulsion that is reactive to light was prepared and pasted onto a plastic film. The plastic film was exposed to the light, but briefly. Later a complicated process was applied to transfer the reacted image (for that is what it was) onto other media, which could then be copied. If one looks upon The Sacred Ebay (all bless the name of Sacred Ebay) one will find similar devices today. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/300753516935?pt=UK_Photography_VintageCameras_SM&hash=item46064e7987#ht_500wt_1332 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/... In this way, the dark time became but light. Ahhhwaahhhh wooooo. Ahhhwahh wooo... (THIS IS IN JEST)
        pavel_lishin 14y ago
        I thought that one of the things that led to the discovery of radiation was an accidental exposure of photographic film by x-rays.
        sgt101 14y ago
        Yay, yay and verily. Forsooth though it is time to rely on sciencey things. http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/CR188427.pdf http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/CR188427.p... Wherein the effects of radiation on films is documented. The answer is that some damage occurs, but films are fogged only by extreme conditions such as those that STS-31 got hit by. I don't know what steps were taken by apollo to protect films, but I would not be surprised if some protection was used to prevent excessive damage. Also I would point out that Apollo missions were 8 days in length while the martian missions are 9 mths long (if they smash into Mars at 13k kmph) or hopefully 24 mths + long if they work - hence the serious need for hardening. Anyway - if you like don't believe in it all - the rest of us are happy looking at the photos, data and science and enjoying the general idea. You can believe in invisible pink unicorns or ghosts or something instead if you like! (we don't mind)
  - rdoherty 14y ago
    You also have to factor in that the camera needs to withstand take-off, deep space flight for months (hello radiation!), 11g's on re-entry, heat of re-entry and landing. Along with lasting for at least 2 years on Mars with no spare parts in sub-zero temperatures. There's a reason why they don't send the latest and greatest camera or computer technology into space.
  - mbell 14y ago
    > most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same Only true if you assume the same sensor area for the 2MP sensor and the 16MP sensor, which is a poor assumption. If they did use sensors with the same area you would pay dearly with high noise and low sensitivity just to cram more pixels in there. I think most photographers figured out awhile ago that the "Megapixel War" is only meaningful as a way to pitch perceived quality to uninformed consumers.
shin_lao 14y ago
Patience, better images will come. They need to deploy the camera fully and it will take time to retrieve the data.
- halitalptekin 14y ago
  Some Curiosity's Photos From Mars: http://www.halitalptekin.com/yapay-zekali-curiosity.html http://www.halitalptekin.com/yapay-zekali-curiosity.html
hnriot 14y ago
It has only a 2 megapixel sensor, which is a shame. I am sure that it has something to do with radiation hardening and the other environmental factors. It would be good though if NASA did catch up with sensor technology. I suspect the 2MP sensor was approved years ago when it was state of the art.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  Sure they have a 2 megapixel camera, but there are probably good reasons, of which you mentioned one I can think of. The other being that they can only send back limited data which has to contest with scientific experiments and navigation data, and they can take multiple 2MP shots to make a panorama like they do, effectively making a higher res image (assuming they can zoom).
- pyoung 14y ago
  Yup, this mission has been in the works for ~10 years so I would imagine that they chose the specific sensor at least 6-7 years ago. Also NASA is notoriously risk averse (for good reason). Apparently it is very common for them to rely on old but proven technology. Some of this has to do with risk aversion, but I imagine some of it also has to do with budget. It pains me to think what NASA could be doing with 10x more money.
  - ballooney 14y ago
    >It pains me to think what NASA could be doing with 10x more money. Me too, but pretty much it all ends going to Lockheed anyway whether it comes via the DoD or Nasa. I don't mean that conspiratorially either, even JPL people joke that JPL stands for "Just Procure Lockheed". The subcontractors rarely get mentioned in Nasa PR, but Nasa is really a whole bunch of different project offices spread over a few campuses with an enormous ecosystem of subcontractors. I expect a vertical, strongly-led skunkworks style structure with guaranteed funding for several continuous years (vs "start working on this now but we can't promise we won't change our minds in 12 months" which causes a lot of subcontractors to not properly commit to new hires or other big capital commitments, and having to spread all the work evenly among different states) would probably yield 10x as much for exactly the same money. Regardless of all that organizational arm-chairing (though I work in this space, hoho), Curiosity is bloody fantastic and I am very excited to follow its progress over the next year at least. Camera chat: fewer bigger pixels = less ccd noise - remember Mars further away from the Sun than Earth, and so it's generally darker. Take an Iphone 1 photo of things at twilight to appreciate some of the difference!
trafficlight 14y ago
These images aren't even from the main cameras. These are still navcam images. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Rover_instruments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Rover_instrumen...
- sosuke 14y ago
  I'm psyched they have a camera that can take true color images! Now we can see what Mars looks like without false color filtering. I wonder how close they get with those techniques to the real thing.
  - jebblue 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program I'm pretty sure the images of the surface there are not altered.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Normal "color" cameras are also false-color filtered. They just have the filters applied per-pixel instead of over the whole sensor at once. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
sramsay 14y ago
They're using Instagram filters. ;)
vhf 14y ago
Have you seen it at full res or not ? http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674898main_pia16013-full_full.jpg http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674898main_pia16013-full_... (To me, it does not look like iPhone anymore.)
- TuanaJenn 14y ago
  yeah, it looks worse
vladd 14y ago
>> The bandwidth from Curiosity directly to Earth is about 8 kb/s. Curiosity has a high bandwidth link to the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, a Mars satellite, which has a 256 kb/s link to Earth. The early pictures are from a low resolution camera with a clear dust cover still attached. This camera is used to determine if Curiosity is about to land in a crater. A higher resolution camera will be activated later. << (taken from http://www.quora.com/NASA/Why-dont-we-have-more-color-images-from-Mars/answers/1427717 http://www.quora.com/NASA/Why-dont-we-have-more-color-images... )
- mtgx 14y ago
  I'm hoping Larry Page's Planetary Resources will use Google Fiber for transmitting from the asteroids.
  - Achshar 14y ago
    You probably meant it as a joke, but fiber networks, as the name suggests, use firer optic wires to transmit data at high speeds.
- moe 14y ago
  The bandwidth from Curiosity directly to Earth is about 8 kb/s For what it's worth, just about 15 years ago that was the bandwidth that you could expect from consumer internet and BBS connections on earth. And now we're doing it to Mars. Boggles the mind.
- H_L 14y ago
  While yes, the original pictures from the low res camera look bad, the new raw pictures from the higher-resolution cameras aren't really that much better. Better than the images from the iPhone 1, probably. But better than Viking 1 images from 1976? Honestly, it doesn't look like it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mars_Viking_11d128.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mars_Viki... Just look at the detail per pixel. It's amazing. You can see tiny details in the sand. It's looks like if you took an image on a 20 megapixel DSLR with a high-quality lens, then scaled the image down to web size. The resolution isn't higher than a camera-phone, but the detail is remarkably better. And that's from nearly 40 years ago.
JunkDNA 14y ago
This is a great, detailed description about what it's like to do image processing from a space probe on Mars http://cdn.oreilly.com/radar/2012/08/Beautiful_Data_Chapter3.pdf http://cdn.oreilly.com/radar/2012/08/Beautiful_Data_Chapter3... It's from O'Reilly's "Beautiful Data", made available free in honor of the current mars mission. The short answer (covered in that document) is actually that the sensors have to be hardened for space use and are not consumer grade. They are incredibly expensive to produce.
ricardobeat 14y ago
These are still from the navigation cameras. The main camera, not yet deployed, can take 1600x1200 full-color pictures and HD video at 10fps. There's actually two of it, so it can also make 3D images/video. Other features are wide/telephoto lens, panorama stitching and 8GB flash storage. Before complaining about resolution, this is like having a GoPro 3D on Mars, it has plenty of detail. One of the articles mentions that the cameras are provided by the same manufacturer as the Viking missions, so they must certainly have improved. Expect some awesome images in the coming months! More info: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/cameras/mastcam/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/cameras/mas..., http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/ http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110531.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110531.html

i hate to be critical of an image sent from millions of miles away but I have an honest question: Why do images from landers like this always look like there were taken from a iPhone 1's camera?

pavel_lishin 14y ago

If I had to guess - and I do, because I don't work for NASA - it's because there's a limited payload space on board, and visible images are some of the least interesting things, science-wise, that you can ask from Mars. Combine this with the electronics-unfriendly environment, and you probably aren't going to be strapping huge DLSR's on a 2.5 billion dollar science machine. Edit: Also, these appear to be the navigation cameras, so they're probably just good enough to be able to point the rover in a direction free of road hazards and tell it to boldly go where no other machine has yet gotten around to going.

hnriot 14y ago
I doubt that is the reason, the weight of a 16mp sensor or marginally more than a 2mp one. The metal camera supports are much likely to dwarf the sensor weight differences. most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same and the power comes from a nuclear battery. NASA couldn't just bolt on a 5DmkIII and expect it to work because the electronics would be fried. That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago.
- jedberg 14y ago
  > That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago. That and the fact that they used sneakernet, which is still much higher bandwidth than wireless, especially in space.
  - flippyhead 14y ago
    Also, it was easier to do on a sound stage.
    - thechut 14y ago
      While I'm guessing this is in jest. All of these hardening necessary raises a lot of question about the legitimacy of the older photos.
      - sgt101 14y ago
        My child. In the past years, while your mother played in the sunlight and your father smiled at girls and drank cool drafts as the evening drew in, before you were even a glimmer or a sunbeam, we had devices called "film cameras". These "film cameras" did not have electronic components. They worked by using levers, springs and wheels. An emulsion that is reactive to light was prepared and pasted onto a plastic film. The plastic film was exposed to the light, but briefly. Later a complicated process was applied to transfer the reacted image (for that is what it was) onto other media, which could then be copied. If one looks upon The Sacred Ebay (all bless the name of Sacred Ebay) one will find similar devices today. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/300753516935?pt=UK_Photography_VintageCameras_SM&hash=item46064e7987#ht_500wt_1332 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leica-111a-Camera-No-276160-1938-/... In this way, the dark time became but light. Ahhhwaahhhh wooooo. Ahhhwahh wooo... (THIS IS IN JEST)
        pavel_lishin 14y ago
        I thought that one of the things that led to the discovery of radiation was an accidental exposure of photographic film by x-rays.
        sgt101 14y ago
        Yay, yay and verily. Forsooth though it is time to rely on sciencey things. http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/CR188427.pdf http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/CR188427.p... Wherein the effects of radiation on films is documented. The answer is that some damage occurs, but films are fogged only by extreme conditions such as those that STS-31 got hit by. I don't know what steps were taken by apollo to protect films, but I would not be surprised if some protection was used to prevent excessive damage. Also I would point out that Apollo missions were 8 days in length while the martian missions are 9 mths long (if they smash into Mars at 13k kmph) or hopefully 24 mths + long if they work - hence the serious need for hardening. Anyway - if you like don't believe in it all - the rest of us are happy looking at the photos, data and science and enjoying the general idea. You can believe in invisible pink unicorns or ghosts or something instead if you like! (we don't mind)
- rdoherty 14y ago
  You also have to factor in that the camera needs to withstand take-off, deep space flight for months (hello radiation!), 11g's on re-entry, heat of re-entry and landing. Along with lasting for at least 2 years on Mars with no spare parts in sub-zero temperatures. There's a reason why they don't send the latest and greatest camera or computer technology into space.
- mbell 14y ago
  > most of a DSLR's weight is lens and battery(s), both of which are not issues in this case, since the lens would be the same Only true if you assume the same sensor area for the 2MP sensor and the 16MP sensor, which is a poor assumption. If they did use sensors with the same area you would pay dearly with high noise and low sensitivity just to cram more pixels in there. I think most photographers figured out awhile ago that the "Megapixel War" is only meaningful as a way to pitch perceived quality to uninformed consumers.

shin_lao 14y ago

Patience, better images will come. They need to deploy the camera fully and it will take time to retrieve the data.

halitalptekin 14y ago
Some Curiosity's Photos From Mars: http://www.halitalptekin.com/yapay-zekali-curiosity.html http://www.halitalptekin.com/yapay-zekali-curiosity.html

hnriot 14y ago

It has only a 2 megapixel sensor, which is a shame. I am sure that it has something to do with radiation hardening and the other environmental factors. It would be good though if NASA did catch up with sensor technology. I suspect the 2MP sensor was approved years ago when it was state of the art.

skeletonjelly 14y ago
Sure they have a 2 megapixel camera, but there are probably good reasons, of which you mentioned one I can think of. The other being that they can only send back limited data which has to contest with scientific experiments and navigation data, and they can take multiple 2MP shots to make a panorama like they do, effectively making a higher res image (assuming they can zoom).
pyoung 14y ago
Yup, this mission has been in the works for ~10 years so I would imagine that they chose the specific sensor at least 6-7 years ago. Also NASA is notoriously risk averse (for good reason). Apparently it is very common for them to rely on old but proven technology. Some of this has to do with risk aversion, but I imagine some of it also has to do with budget. It pains me to think what NASA could be doing with 10x more money.
- ballooney 14y ago
  >It pains me to think what NASA could be doing with 10x more money. Me too, but pretty much it all ends going to Lockheed anyway whether it comes via the DoD or Nasa. I don't mean that conspiratorially either, even JPL people joke that JPL stands for "Just Procure Lockheed". The subcontractors rarely get mentioned in Nasa PR, but Nasa is really a whole bunch of different project offices spread over a few campuses with an enormous ecosystem of subcontractors. I expect a vertical, strongly-led skunkworks style structure with guaranteed funding for several continuous years (vs "start working on this now but we can't promise we won't change our minds in 12 months" which causes a lot of subcontractors to not properly commit to new hires or other big capital commitments, and having to spread all the work evenly among different states) would probably yield 10x as much for exactly the same money. Regardless of all that organizational arm-chairing (though I work in this space, hoho), Curiosity is bloody fantastic and I am very excited to follow its progress over the next year at least. Camera chat: fewer bigger pixels = less ccd noise - remember Mars further away from the Sun than Earth, and so it's generally darker. Take an Iphone 1 photo of things at twilight to appreciate some of the difference!

trafficlight 14y ago

These images aren't even from the main cameras. These are still navcam images. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Rover_instruments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Rover_instrumen...

sosuke 14y ago
I'm psyched they have a camera that can take true color images! Now we can see what Mars looks like without false color filtering. I wonder how close they get with those techniques to the real thing.
- jebblue 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program I'm pretty sure the images of the surface there are not altered.
- sp332 14y ago
  Normal "color" cameras are also false-color filtered. They just have the filters applied per-pixel instead of over the whole sensor at once. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

sramsay 14y ago

They're using Instagram filters. ;)

vhf 14y ago

Have you seen it at full res or not ? http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674898main_pia16013-full_full.jpg http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674898main_pia16013-full_... (To me, it does not look like iPhone anymore.)

TuanaJenn 14y ago
yeah, it looks worse

vladd 14y ago

>> The bandwidth from Curiosity directly to Earth is about 8 kb/s. Curiosity has a high bandwidth link to the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, a Mars satellite, which has a 256 kb/s link to Earth. The early pictures are from a low resolution camera with a clear dust cover still attached. This camera is used to determine if Curiosity is about to land in a crater. A higher resolution camera will be activated later. << (taken from http://www.quora.com/NASA/Why-dont-we-have-more-color-images-from-Mars/answers/1427717 http://www.quora.com/NASA/Why-dont-we-have-more-color-images... )

mtgx 14y ago
I'm hoping Larry Page's Planetary Resources will use Google Fiber for transmitting from the asteroids.
- Achshar 14y ago
  You probably meant it as a joke, but fiber networks, as the name suggests, use firer optic wires to transmit data at high speeds.
moe 14y ago
The bandwidth from Curiosity directly to Earth is about 8 kb/s For what it's worth, just about 15 years ago that was the bandwidth that you could expect from consumer internet and BBS connections on earth. And now we're doing it to Mars. Boggles the mind.
H_L 14y ago
While yes, the original pictures from the low res camera look bad, the new raw pictures from the higher-resolution cameras aren't really that much better. Better than the images from the iPhone 1, probably. But better than Viking 1 images from 1976? Honestly, it doesn't look like it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mars_Viking_11d128.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mars_Viki... Just look at the detail per pixel. It's amazing. You can see tiny details in the sand. It's looks like if you took an image on a 20 megapixel DSLR with a high-quality lens, then scaled the image down to web size. The resolution isn't higher than a camera-phone, but the detail is remarkably better. And that's from nearly 40 years ago.

JunkDNA 14y ago

This is a great, detailed description about what it's like to do image processing from a space probe on Mars http://cdn.oreilly.com/radar/2012/08/Beautiful_Data_Chapter3.pdf http://cdn.oreilly.com/radar/2012/08/Beautiful_Data_Chapter3... It's from O'Reilly's "Beautiful Data", made available free in honor of the current mars mission. The short answer (covered in that document) is actually that the sensors have to be hardened for space use and are not consumer grade. They are incredibly expensive to produce.

ricardobeat 14y ago

These are still from the navigation cameras. The main camera, not yet deployed, can take 1600x1200 full-color pictures and HD video at 10fps. There's actually two of it, so it can also make 3D images/video. Other features are wide/telephoto lens, panorama stitching and 8GB flash storage. Before complaining about resolution, this is like having a GoPro 3D on Mars, it has plenty of detail. One of the articles mentions that the cameras are provided by the same manufacturer as the Viking missions, so they must certainly have improved. Expect some awesome images in the coming months! More info: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/cameras/mastcam/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/cameras/mas..., http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/ http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110531.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110531.html