Mars Perseverance Rover has Landed - Images

raydm6

raydm6

Yay! Cameras! 🙈🙉🙊┌( ಠ_ಠ)┘ [◉"]
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https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Coming Soon: Images from the Perseverance Rover!

Bookmark this page and come back on landing day (Feb. 18, 2021) to see images taken by the rover at Jezero Crater.

21381_PIA22109-min.jpg
 
Just a remarkable feat of engineering. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Congrats to the Perseverance Team.

Jim B.
 
I remember the Gemini Program and particularly, the Apollo Missions, as a young boy. The sisters at my Parochial School allowed us to watch in the classroom.

This brings back that excitement in a different way.

Great memories...
 
Watched on Blue Ray ‘Apollo’. Stunning orignal 70mm colour film footage included. Read a book on Apollo 8 recently. The mathematics of all this is remarkable. The confidence in that for so many crucial decisions is impressive. Most of us know of Apollo 13. I saw or read something on that recently. If the explosion had happened sooner they would have run out of oxygen before getting home; later and they would not have had time to prepare for the solution of transferring to the LEM and going around the moon with newly calculated burns of the engines and needed the communications with the ground continuously, not possible behind the moon.
 
I worked for NASA at JPL for four years and still know a few folks there. The landing was gut wrenching and spectacular, an amazing technological (and spiritual!) achievement! All the men and women who worked on it for all these years are heroes. :D

Richard G said:
Watched on Blue Ray ‘Apollo’. Stunning orignal 70mm colour film footage included. Read a book on Apollo 8 recently. The mathematics of all this is remarkable. The confidence in that for so many crucial decisions is impressive. Most of us know of Apollo 13. I saw or read something on that recently. If the explosion had happened sooner they would have run out of oxygen before getting home; later and they would not have had time to prepare for the solution of transferring to the LEM and going around the moon with newly calculated burns of the engines and needed the communications with the ground continuously, not possible behind the moon.
Click to expand...

If you'd like to read another fantastic book on the space program from the years of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, go for "Failure is not an Option" by Gene Kranz, legendary Apollo flight director. There's so much in the book that it informs the documentary "Apollo 11" and makes it even more fantastic a film to see.

Another fine book is "Journey Beyond Selene: Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System" by Jeffrey Kluger. This one is all about the un-manned exploration of space...

Some of my favorite reading...
G
 
Doggone speed of light! Always making these ‘blind’ landings nail biters.
Why don’t they (whoever ‘they’ are) hurry up and invent subspace FTL radio.
After all, it works on Star Trek.
 
Wonderful advance in technology in 20 years. In the English "Spectator" magazine there is a wonderful very dry summary of the week's events at home and abroad, usually ending with something whimsical and even drier and a bit more millennial. Here is the one from the 27th of March 2004:

"The roving machine on Mars, Opportunity, found sediment with ripple patterns that indicated it had been formed in salt water."
 
I can't wait for the video from multiple cameras, with microphones, of the descent. Should be quite spectacular! Supposed to also show the parachute deployment.
 
Not impressed with these cameras. No facial recognition. No high speed continuous focus tracking. No film simulation modes. Do they accept third-party lenses? Are they even full frame?


Ok, joking aside, this stuff is just astounding. I remember the Viking landers, the Surveyor landers (on the Moon), and before that the Ranger spacecraft that transmitted live TV as they crashed into the Moon - giving us our first glimpse of the Moon in detail back in the 1960’s.

Mars landings are tough!!! It’s amazing that the previous landers lasted about 100x their intended lifespan and explored so much of the surface.

Looking forward to seeing more of this!
 
Mars Perseverance Rover has Landed - Images

23 cameras but the transmission rate back to earth is only 2 megabits per second.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communications/

This link has tech specs for comms but does not explain where the images are stored (e.g. locally on the rover or sent to orbiter and buffered until xmitted to Earth)

Are all images are transmitted or is there a local algorithm to determine which images are worth sending?
Maybe NASA receives all low-res images and then requests the picks be re-sent as high-res images.
 
maigo said:
23 cameras but the transmission rate back to earth is only 2 megabits per second.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communications/

This link has tech specs for comms but does not explain where the images are stored (eg locally on the rover or sent to orbiter and buffered until xmitted to Earth)

Are all images are transmitted or is there a local algorithm to determine which images are worth sending?
Maybe NASA receives all low-res images and then requests the picks be re-sent as high-res images.
Click to expand...

Because you never know what you might find later, after someone else finds something interesting, all image data is transmitted and collected at NASA. Discoveries have happened years after a mission ended, based on re-interpretation of data that some feature was at first overlooked.

NASA archives all the data, it's all just about priceless and represents the product of billions of dollars of research and effort. I remember (in 1983 or so) working on a project to revive some ancient computers/storage systems at JPL with the notion of reading and archiving all the data on mag tape written by/for those systems from missions in the 1960s and 1970s that was deteriorating... The repository of archive data is extremely important!

I don't know what they're doing for the more recent missions on Mars, but for Magellan mission ("Venus RADAR Mapper") the mission profile had the orbiter in a assymetrical profile elliptical orbit. It took data on the fast down-pass north to south, reoriented to put the high-gain antenna back to Earth, uploaded the data take on the slower up-pass south to north, took command telemetry, reoriented to put the high-gain antenna back into data capture mode, took data, etc on every orbit, for however many thousands of orbits were required. The three primary receiving stations on Earth had to capture the data stream as it came in (and as each of them had its window of visibility to the orbiter) and the data had to be re-sorted and combined back into a continuous stream for each orbital pass after that. There was a tremendous amount of work involved to arrange the orbit of the spacecraft along with the timing of the visibility to each of the three receiving stations so that the timing worked out for the capture and upload within the on-board storage capacity, with some small reserve overhead in time and storage.

(I had a small role in helping develop the user command/control interface to the Earth/ground-based spacecraft control application, which is why I know how it was designed to work in such detail.)

That was in the middle 1980s. I'm sure that similar algorithms and data comm techniques are in use between the rovers, the orbiters, and the receiving stations here... The equipment is just much, much more sophisticated now, and can do an even better job. :)

G
 
Our daughter lives in LaCanada/Flintridge CA where JPL property is located tho the public thinks it’s Pasadena. Splitting hairs, JPL mailing address is Pasadena. Our daughters oldest (our grand daughter)attends school with a friend whose father works at JPL. She said her father was on the Curiosity rover team, going to work when it was sunrise on Mars. It was hard to do as 24 hours here on earth doesn’t equate to time on Mars.

One of these times we visit, I’m going to try to get a tour of JPL.

A little info from JPL
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about/maps/
 
I couldn't find anything on the image processing for the Perseverance Rover, but this technical paper goes into amazing detail on how it was accomplished with the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) - with some very nice imagery examples included:

Processing of Mars Exploration Rover imagery
for science and operations planning
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2005JE002462


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I've really got to get me one of those! I'd be fine with an economy model that doesn't have the drilling rig, but only the cameras.
 
Live event today on NASA JPL YouTube site:

Quote:
May 20, 7pm PT (10pm ET/0200 GMT):
Imaging experts on the Perseverance Mars rover team will discuss how we get extraordinary images from around our solar system and beyond back to the phone in your pocket.

youtu.be/4OY0YCdFDpU
 
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