Slashdot Mirror
NASA Releases HiRISE Images of Curiosity's Descent
gcnaddict writes "NASA released content from the MRO HiRISE imager taken during the descent of the Curiosity Rover. Among the most notable artifacts are the images themselves as well as a diagram showing the exact location of the rover relative to NASA's target."
Update: 08/07 00:15 GMT by U L : And now for a picture from the rover itself.
Nice shot. And kudos to the folks who painted the white square on the surface of Mars. If only the people who striped our freeways could have done such a good job.
Have gnu, will travel.
Watched the stream last night of Mission Control, and coupled with this and the other images it has just been too cool.
Just think about this a moment. NASA took a photo from a satellite, of a probe landing on another planet. And they got telemetry relayed about the landing from ANOTHER satellite.
And it's not just a bright pixel, you can clearly see what it is.
Stunning.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Tiff images
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/
XML source file for day 0
http://landingimagecatalog-1450153822.us-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com/landing/images_sol0.xml
why http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ didn't release a sequence of pictures? It'd be so awesome! Perhaps the other ones are blurry ...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I think something missed in all of this is how powerful imagery is.
Imagine a world without photographs ?
This mission, and ones before it.. highlight how important this invention, photography, is.
We have photographs of this on its chute landing.. this is the second time we've done it.. and we got photographs back as soon as it landed.. This is great... and the excitement of the crew, and the public, upon seeing these images is a testament to how far photography has come in the past 150ish years.
Kudos to all of those who made this happen.. for the science it will do.. and further affirming the power of images in our world..
I neglected to mention the obvious point in my submission that this was HiRISE's second such shot.
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/phoenix-descent.php
The first shot of the sort was this one from the Phoenix lander.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I was somewhat amazed the whole landing worked, so many complex parts that had to work together...
And then like you say - a casual snap shot from above of the thing on descent! Too amazing.
I'll put on several hats just to take them all off for all the NASA engineers on this one. It was a really spectacular success and it was fantastic how well they did at getting visual confirmation right off the bat before it went into radio silence.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't let Richard Hoagland get a hold of this!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
This photo is so astounding that it brings back memories of the 1960s moon landing days. I was totally enthralled by the awesome techno-wizardry it took set, not one, but two men on the moon, and bring them back to earth. The techno wizardry needed to pull this shot off seems the equal of the feats of those heady days. Well done NASA, well done.
What amazes me is how cheap the entire MSL mission is...
The entire budget was only 4 days in Iraq/Afghanistan, or approx USD$2.5billion.
NASA's entire budget is less than what the US Army spends on air-conditioning in Iraq/Afghanistan ( USD$20 billion ).
I. Kid. You. Not.
Thoughtful analysis untainted by political correctness is getting scarce these days. Which by definition means it's getting more valuable.
Competition s a basic tendency of humans. 2 billion dollars spent on getting an advanced robot to do something extremely difficult is so much better than competing to build more nuclear weapons, stealth drones, and cruise missiles, that disparaging it is counter your and my personal survival. The people who are hyper-paranoid will not stop feeling like all life is a savage competition because you criticise any non-violent competition between peoples groups or nations as not living up to your definition of 'loving'. Instead they will put all their competitive drive into making the whole planet into a smouldering pile of rubble in a misguided and delusional effort to wipe out everyone who even might be a potential enemy. If you want them to stop that, you learn to respect when competition gets focused into technological achievement, excellence in sports, creating art or pure science or even just persuing a harmless hobby, and not just taking care of people. ,every second of every waking day, your responses are not sanely proportionate.
Sure, you can tell them that a civilised country proves it's the freeest and best by building a better and better safety net for its citizens, feeding its poor, finding meaningful work for everyone, educating all citizens, and other such dreams if you want, and some of the hyper-competitive paranoids will listen a little and get on the bandwagon and grow out of being so afraid, but if you keep slamming everything else but basic care of the poor, all you will do is drive those people back into their caves, where they currentlly keep about 3,000 Megatons of very bad solutions to the problem of the poor and all those other things that just might be good in your eyes.
Curiosity is about a lot more than just looking at some rocks, but even if you reduced it to that, how is it in any way morally inferior to spending about the same amount figuring out how to put Cobalt-60 jackets on thermonuclear weapons, just so you can make not only human life extinct but clear the planet of bacterial life as well? Spending 2 billion on preserving the 'vitally important' model railroading hobby is better than building more death machines. An Olympics is better than more instruments of totalitarian population control. Finding a cure for male pattern baldness is better than inventing weaponized Ebola. While we are at it, any of those things are better than rewarding bankers for screwing up everyone else's economy,. If you can waste your energy on sarcasm and insults for a program like Curiosity, just what are you willing to say to the Pentagon procurement offices, the TARP system, or Wall street in general? If you are not screaming at them, at the top of your lungs
Who is John Cabal?
I'd mod you up too if I had points. Troll is completely unwarranted.
Actually, space is all in the English system. By a strange coincidence most of the aliens have 12 fingers, 3 toes and 1760 of an appendage we have no name for, so it makes the math easier and is more logical.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
If you take 2,000,000,000 dollars, buying a 10 dollar meal, you could have bought 200,000,000 people meals.
Hunger is a social/political problem. It is not due to a lack of food resources. You could drop $2 billion that way, and the next day, all those people would still be hungry. If you're going to spend $2 billion to stop hunger I can think of, well, about an infinite number of ways to do it that would be more productive than that.
Aren't you ignoring a very important detail: NASA budget is negligible compared to spending on "preventing entire region from falling under the control" of taliban?
"Doing only one thing at a time" in this context is like saying "oh, I can't help my kid construct a Lego house, since I'm already building a real house", duh...
Mars has it all, even without any intelligent life yet.
Amazing! mark-t has a revelation which he just has to share with the boffins at NASA. If only they had consulted him first...
Heck, these days doesn't black-and-white actually cost *MORE* than color?
No.
A B&W Camera is a colour camera without the Bayer filter. The CCDs generally cost the about same, and are marginally cheaper to make. Colour cameras are also very much less sensitive because they filter the incoming light a lot. Specifically, they filter out all the near-IR which is what the cameras happen to be most sensitive to.
And wouldn't color be capable of giving more information than what they get from black-and-white anyways
Only if you're interested in 3 rather broad bands in the visible spectrum. The colour filters aren't that accurate.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Bandwidth and processing power. At the moment it has better things to do than send pictures.
But don't worry, it's got a color camera and even a stereo camera, so we'll get better pic soon.
Was there Cake?
Why "Troll"? It would be a good marketing step to send an effective HD video and photos immediately on landing.
In this universe everything is marketing and selling. Everything. Since money was invented in Mesopotamia about 5000 - 6000 years ago.
The HD color camera weighs about 3 ounces (100 grams). 99% of people will never pay attention to the "Curiosity" anymore. But it had its chance on landing. The whole world was watching. I've heard people were saying on seeing first black and white blurry photos: "This is it?", "My phone makes better pictures."
And then complaints that they do not get enough money for missions.
I fly Ardrone2 http://ardrone2.parrot.com/ quadrocopter. It can record HD video on USB stick during flight.
I know that aerial videos are often interesting and revealing about an area. Why did not they make such a video on landing? We could see the Gale crater, Mount Sharp ourselves from above, with our own eyes, in high quality, in color. USB stick weighs about 10 grams (1/3 ounces).
Such videos could cause a real interest in society to exploration.
It's hard to believe that detail is possible from the top of a multi-story building. Amazing!
Giant numbers should be presented in context.
Whenever I hear giant numbers for budgets I like to compare them to other things to know what they mean. A good comparison is one that everyone or almost everyone can relate to. I like to use the cost to raise everyone on earth out of extreme poverty, which means clean water, food, clothes and shelter.
Ending extreme poverty would cost less than $200 billion each year.
(source: Jeffrey Sachs - The end of poverty)
The UN has similiar numbers from the millenium goals.
The United States military budget is $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. $500 billion doesn't count the middle east wars, interest on war debt, veterans benefits or spending by the States.)
Plus a recent analysis of Deptartment of Labor Statistics by the PERI institute shows that for every billion dollars that we spend on the military we LOSE from 5,000 to 15,000 jobs compared to spending the money on green jobs, hwalth or education. That's because the military isn't very labor intensive. It takes more people to teach effectively than to kill effectively.
Anyway, remember it only costs $200 billion to end extreme poverty globally. Think about that next time you hear a big budget item come up.
I'm off topic I know. Context matters. And for those of you who think "So what? Congress will never go for military cuts." go watch Lawrence Lessig talk about "How money corrupts Congress, and a plan to stop it."