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>> 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

by 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.
- beefman 14y ago
  That image was taken in 1977. Actually, this is how people saw it until 2009 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl1_11d128.gif http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl1_11d128.gif when Mr Van der Hoorn "used the original 11d128.blu, 11d128.grn and 11d128.red images from the NASA Viking image archive, converted them to .png, manually removed the noise and finally merged them into one image" Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Van_der_Hoorn/Viking/Filters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Van_der_Hoorn/Viking/Filte... The Viking 1 camera(s) were of the Vidicon type: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vidicon.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vidicon.png
  - H_L 14y ago
    While yes, the full color image I posted was re-compiled from the original red, green, and blue channel images sent from the rover by a non-NASA source, even NASA's B&W images look better back then than they do now. I made an image to illustrate this: http://f.cl.ly/items/0k2w2d1C1O3w3e0t300f/NASAQualityDegredation.png http://f.cl.ly/items/0k2w2d1C1O3w3e0t300f/NASAQualityDegreda...
    - rohitarondekar 14y ago
      Interesting. I'm just going on a hunch here, but maybe getting better photographs of the Mars surface is not a priority anymore? From the wikipedia page of Mars Science Laboratory the goals of the mission are: To contribute to these goals, MSL has six main scientific objectives: * Determine the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials. * Attempt to detect chemical building blocks of life (biosignatures). * Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils. * Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution processes. * Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide. * Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons. By those I can understand why carrying a high res camera was not a priority because it would have added weight, taken up space and also consumed more bandwidth while transmitting? :)

by vladd 14y ago

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.

beefman 14y ago
That image was taken in 1977. Actually, this is how people saw it until 2009 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl1_11d128.gif http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl1_11d128.gif when Mr Van der Hoorn "used the original 11d128.blu, 11d128.grn and 11d128.red images from the NASA Viking image archive, converted them to .png, manually removed the noise and finally merged them into one image" Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Van_der_Hoorn/Viking/Filters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Van_der_Hoorn/Viking/Filte... The Viking 1 camera(s) were of the Vidicon type: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vidicon.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vidicon.png
- H_L 14y ago
  While yes, the full color image I posted was re-compiled from the original red, green, and blue channel images sent from the rover by a non-NASA source, even NASA's B&W images look better back then than they do now. I made an image to illustrate this: http://f.cl.ly/items/0k2w2d1C1O3w3e0t300f/NASAQualityDegredation.png http://f.cl.ly/items/0k2w2d1C1O3w3e0t300f/NASAQualityDegreda...
  - rohitarondekar 14y ago
    Interesting. I'm just going on a hunch here, but maybe getting better photographs of the Mars surface is not a priority anymore? From the wikipedia page of Mars Science Laboratory the goals of the mission are: To contribute to these goals, MSL has six main scientific objectives: * Determine the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials. * Attempt to detect chemical building blocks of life (biosignatures). * Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils. * Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution processes. * Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide. * Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons. By those I can understand why carrying a high res camera was not a priority because it would have added weight, taken up space and also consumed more bandwidth while transmitting? :)