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Comment by drewblaisdell | Hacker News Reader

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drewblaisdell·

When can we expect any imagery from Perseverance? The Curiosity photos were incredible.

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First few low-res pictures posted here:

https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere

I'd bet they post the first high-res pictures once they arrive. The link from Mars to earth is sending a lot of information about what just happened, so understandably bandwidth is pretty saturated

Pictures already coming in to JPL apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPrbJ63qUc4

Probably around 20-30 minutes after it's landed. Perseverance needs to lock onto sattelites that are part of the Deep Space Network for the bandwidth required to send media. It also takes 22 minutes to send a command and get a response back.

We actually got a picture like 3 minutes after landing. (Okay, a picture from shortly after landing.)

Probably routed through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Maven and possibly Europe's Mars Express satellites, rather than a direct connection to the Deep Space Network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAVEN

If I understood the livestream correctly, it's because they were able to (maintain|quickly establish) lock to the MRO after touch-down and zip a couple of images up through the "bent-pipe" UHF-to-high-power relay into the Deep Space Network.

It would seem they had MRO in position to snap a few photos of the landing / descent as well as do the relay.

It was already communicating with DSN the whole way down, via one of the orbiters, and "send a pic" was apparently a pre-programmed command not requiring Earth initiation.

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