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SpaceX Looking For Help With "Landing" Video
Maddog Batty (112434) writes "SpaceX recently made the news by managing to soft land at sea the first stage of rocket used to launch its third supply mission to the International Space Station. Telemetry reported that it was able to hover for eight seconds above the sea before running out of fuel and falling horizontal. Unfortunately, due to stormy weather at the time, their support ship wasn't able to get to the "landing" spot at the time and the first stage wasn't recovered and is likely now on the sea bed. Video of the landing was produced and transmitted to an aeroplane but unfortunately it is rather corrupted. SpaceX have attempted to improve it but it isn't much better. They are now looking for help to improve it further."
I smell a Photoshop Friday theme...
Watching that video on YouTube, it'd be tough to clean up or reconstruct - there's a lot of information missing.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
I appreciate them looking for public help. It's a gesture of trust and openness usually not seen from either goverment or private corporations.
Though I suspect most the the video is beyond salvage.
how does something fall horizontally? some strange gravity out there.
Here's some footage. "Enhance" it. I smell a new meme.
To paraphrase Jack Handey: If the video transmission of your rocket's landing was corrupted due to a storm, let it go, because man, it's gone.
If we had access to the telemetry as say an FBX or Alembic file, it'd be pretty trivial to produce a visual representation of what happened, using what little video can be deciphered....without that, I don't see how anything can be salvaged
Well, it was Raw until YouTube re-compressed the hell out of it. Seriously, I don't think you have any shot if you start off with this YouTube footage. If they really want help we need the actual raw bitstream. I/Q output from the receiver would be even better. Even better than that would be diversity receivers. Aren't those guys the rocket scientists?
Definately agree that the raw non-Youtubified video should be available, the addtional transcoding and compression just adds to the problem.
SpaceX have attempted to improve it but it isn't much better
No different than a porn download when I can't for it to finish downloading before hitting play. You just have to squint a little and you can make out the long cylindrical shape.
The video supposedly of one of the great innovations of the 21st century, missing! Haven't launch vehicles been carrying a rocketcam for 10 years? Let me be the first to call bullshit. Just more shouting from the rooftops by carnival barker Elon Musk.
an ill wind that blows no good
Whatever happened to redundant/multiple video recordings, like you know, how we back up data? Failing that, a stronger signal wouldn't hurt surely?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Maybe they should have transmitted to an airplane instead?
Lemme take another look.
... until they post an analog recording of the telemetry. The bitstream *as decoded* is corrupted because of demodulation errors, and you can't reconstruct data that isn't there. If they have an analog recording, then analog filters can be applied to that in an attempt to create a cleaner input signal to the demodulator stage. An analogy: They have taken a picture of a page of text, rather out of focus and dark, and used OCR software on it. All they are giving us is the output of the OCR software. We need to see the original picture so we can apply better filtering/contrast adjustments to it before attempting pattern recognition.
Sorry, but SpaceX's record is that of failure after failure after failure. To this day, they haven't completed a single mission without having a good share of problems and failures. And every single time, they always have a cheap excuse as to why they had the failure.
Space exploration is not a market where failure is an option. This constant lies about their failure record is showing that the company is nowhere near being ready at being reliable ... or honest.
Give it to the CSI team in Las Vegas, a few clicks, and and a couple of enhancements, apply this really cool filter that apparently people who work in crime labs design as a side project and you'll be able to read the name plate on the side of the launcher right away it will be that good.... if they are too busy solving crime I'd try the NCIS lab next....
Seriously, land in a desert or something similar. Much easier to recover protected data storage units. If you can't hit the landing spot of a massive dessert, theres no way anyones going to let them land on a landing pad.
Always amazes me when people think they know better than the well paid professionals who actually got the rocket in the air in the first place.
Almost certainly, the camera is a small lightweight CMOS device. Which is analog at the chip level. However, this is converted to digital as soon as it's off the sensor diodes. It's then encoded to MPEG because the telemetry bandwidth is simply too low for anything else. You can get a decent image from a tiny amount of data in the digital domain using H264 or 5. When you are bandwidth limited as they were (the numbers are much much more important than the video), your options are few, and don't really include purely analog video.
Even Musk before the flight said they had a 40% chance of success of the landing on the first stage. And yet by all accounts is was close to 100%. (and the Dragon delivery was 100% success). The only problem as I see it was the the video sucked and they were unable to get to the stage before it sank due to bad weather. All the other telemetry indicated the objectives were all reached - the engined ignited, the legs deployed, and the stage ended up with zero velocity at 0 height.
Since you appear to think this stuff is easy *, it appears you really don't know enough about the subject so I'll stop there.
* it isn't.
try "computer, enhance ..."
They should just send frame by frame to the CSI guys and they will than click ----enhance----, DUH.
So they try to transmit raw MPEG without any FEC coding?
I guess they could have been more successfull by beaming analog CVBS instead.
Telecommunications has improved since the 80s, you know.
Unfortunately, BitZstream had made one (actually, many, but one will do) fatal error in his argument. He says this stuff is easy.
It isn't. Rocket engineering is very very difficult. Harder than rocket science, and that's harder than brain surgery.