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Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit
dylanduck writes "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has slipped safely into orbit - unlike two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars. Remember Mars Climate Orbiter and the mix up between metric and English units? MRO is going to send back 34 trillion bytes of data, more than all the previous missions put together." From the article: "The spacecraft will use a suite of six instruments, including the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. This will image objects as small as 1-metre wide and should be able to snap pictures of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The instruments will track the planet's weather, geology and mineralogy, and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water."
Why is the new camera with a resolution of 1 metre better than the current camera on Mars Global Surveyor, which is able to deliver some images with a resolution of 50 cm? See here for example pictures with this resolution.
I had to actually check out what the MRO bandwidth actually *was*
According to the MRO telecommunications page, the max bandwidth from MRO is 6 mbps. That's faster than my Cable internet connection!
Also, according to this page, our slashdot article summary is wrong. MRO is sending back 34 terabits, not 34 terabytes. Still that's a lot of (geology) porn. Looking forward to it. I wonder if the DSN guys will throttle their bandwidth?