NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

bbc.com

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Up to date image collection on the nasa site for anyone that cares: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

We're seeing Martian robot selfies. Neat.

Anyone has insights on how data in such volumes can be transferred from Mars to Earth in the absence of a direct link? Do the intermediate nodes have gigabytes of available storage to emit data to the next available node once it becomes visible ?

Perseverance sends the data to various orbiters (satellites already in orbit around Mars) during overflights (time windows when the orbiter is in range of the rover) and those orbiters then send (relay) the data to Earth via the Deep Space Network (satellite dishes on Earth).

From my layman's understanding, it's relayed via the orbiters.

There are a few orbiters around Mars. NASA appears to have an arrangement with the ESA to upload data from the rovers to the ESA's orbiters, depending on whose orbiters are within line of sight at any given time. Then the orbiter sends the information back to Earth, which are received by NASA's Deep Space Network

During the time when line of sight between Earth and Mars is blocked by Sol, there isn't any communication.

May interest you: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communicatio...

It never ceases to impress me that we have the ability to do this sort of stuff. A couple thousand years ago, the height of technology was shooting something from a few hundred metres away with a bow and arrow, now we are landing machines on another planet and transmitting data back and forth through the solar system. Incredible.

Incredible for me, too. The power of building the civilization, one generation after another, and of working together, sharing the knowledge.

But according to Ancient Aliens, the large stone Pyramids were built by aliens, but the TV cameras recording the show's hosts, with CCDs, and likely 10nm chips inside, were built by humans.

In all seriousness, it's impressive what knowledge sharing and cooperation achieves.

[Ancient Aliens] Ah but the cameras and chips are only possible -because- the aliens built the pyramids and inspired humans technologically and a mere 4450 years later, voila! CCDs and computer chips!

Well, given the fact that we still know relatively little about most of the observable universe (dark matter & energy), I don't think you can completely rule out the several unlikely hypotheses. For example, that earlier civilizations instead of electricity used a completely different form of energy - and that basically directed their development into a completely different direction, not leaving many material artefacts. I don't believe this actually happened, but a part of me knows that I can't be 100% sure it didn't.

It is highly unlikely that the cameras being used to produce Ancient Aliens are CCDs unless they are also using ancient camera tech. Most likely, the camera's image sensors are CMOS. 3 chip CCDs reached their pinnacle as 90s/early 00s tech. CCDs can only sense one color, so they put three of them behind an RGB splitter.

A couple of thousand years ago is the peak of the Romans, so you're way off on your 'height' of technology at that time.

Using bows and arrows as an example when you've got wonders of pretty advanced engineering like the Parthenon, plus they also had ballistae, chariots and catapults, so not the peak at all.

Not only that, but even the bows were more advanced, composite bows much more powerful than simple ones made of wood.

The most complex machine of the Roman era was perhaps a water organ. (I would guess that for long historical periods the most complex machines were keyboard-controlled musical instruments.)

Oh see you did it now - opened up a vacuum about ancient tech.

I'll start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

Great link, thanks for sharing! This has the makings of an excellent thread – please do continue sharing cool stuff!! :o)

(The question as to how - and why or why not - we could go from the Aeolipile to full blown steam engines, I've always found fascinating ...

... what other things / proceses / materials / frame of mind made the steam engine possible vs. this.

What made for an industrial revolution in the 1800's vs. the 1st century AD).-

One thing that severly hampered the romans was their number system.

Makes sense that it would ...

A couple of thousand years ago, humans built massive engineering projects, including the Pyramids, massive irrigation and earthwork systems, and tunnels, and bridges, domesticated wild animals, produced metals - including steel - out nothing but wood, water, and low grade ore, etc, etc.

They did not have internal combustion engines, or electricity, or the ability to machine parts to high tolerances, but ancient engineers cared deeply about efficiently transforming mechanical energy from one form to another.

Reddit had AMA with engineers from this mission, IIRC last week. They provided good info on different aspects including how they were able to get video over low bandwith connection, including various mission site link for more info. You might want to check out AMA for your question.

Edit: added following links

This Q&A about storage https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

These Q&A about data rate https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

This Q&A about RTG (operational life) https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

Do you have a link to this AMA?

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

Others have posted links to the Reddit thread overall, but I think this is the specific question being referred to:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lpzbzo/were_scientist...

EDIT: Apparently the rover has an antenna that can directly communicate with Earth at 10 bits per second! That's obviously not useful for pictures or anything, but it's an amazing capability for emergency comms.

Very low bandwidth, very low power, very long distance comms are really cool. The limiting factor tends to be the clock frequency precision - if you have precise enough clocks at both ends, there isn't anywhere in the universe you couldn't communicate with, as long as you're happy to go slow enough.

Given self-clocking signalling[1] exists, why is clock frequency precision the limiting factor?

I would imagine signal-to-noise would be the limiting factor, ie how strong is your transmitter and how sensitive is your receiver.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-clocking_signal

It is possible to send a signal weaker than the noise floor. The maximum information you can send is defined by shannon's channel capacity formula, which clearly says a signal can be weaker than the noise.

If you use a self-clocking signal, then effectively the information you are sending consists of both the clock timings and the information you're really trying to send. If your channel capacity is very low, you will find there is no channel capacity for even the clocking information, let alone the information you really want to send.

Noise, by definition, doesn't have a qualifying characteristic. It just means "all signals we're not interested in". That means your ability to filter out noise is strongly dependent on having pre-existing knowledge about the shape of the signal you're interested in.

Self-clocking signals are useful when the ambient noise level is low with respect to the signal, but if your signal is just "these two droplets in an ocean" you will not be able to filter out enough of the signal to detect the edges of the original signal.

Having a very reliable clock frequency means you can apply a very exact filter to lock on to the signal you want, thereby making the transmission less sensitive to interference from other radio signals. Just having a sensitive receiver isn't enough, because a sensitive receiver will also pick up more of the other radio signals.

Wrong clock, gotcha. For some reason I didn't think of the carrier signal generator when I read the word "clock".

It all makes sense now, thanks!

> there isn't anywhere in the universe you couldn't communicate with

Right, assuming you are emitting infinite amount of photons, there are no obstructions, black holes and you ignore universe expansion and GR which can make your precise enough clocks go out of sync.

"Precise enough clocks" includes handling GR and other non-destructive effects along the whole light path I assume. :)

That's one big ask :)

> emitting infinite amount of photons

I think that the double slit experiment shows that this isn't an issue... Since we are summing with all other noise in the universe, it doesn't matter exactly which photons came from my transmitter, if any at all, but the total count will still (probabilistically) reflect the the we're after...

On long distances you are talking about receiving single photons. And while we may view it as probabilistic, it will either interact with our equipment or it won't. If it doesn't, communication failed.

But yes, I wondered about that when writing my comment. Certainly photons are more than just "bullets" that are getting more and more sparse. So I got curious and it seems[1] that in context on our detector you can indeed put hard bounds on where the photon may be received. As far as I understand it, based mostly on the abstract, I do not really grasp it.

But ignoring the paper, I think I get your point. If photon has any chance of reaching the target (even lower than virtual particle spawning) and even if you don't know the future of the Universe (other photons hitting detector), you can use some complex encoding so that observing certain (allegedly otherwise unlikely) patterns allows you to say you received some message with some probability (which is what communication always is). If you have synced clocks. Simultaneity is relative though so there's also that.

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.3712.pdf

PS. I seem snarky today, sorry about that, I'm happy to learn if I'm misunderstanding something.

They added dedicated storage in the rover itself to store phots and videos. So for example they can compress the video files before transmitting. I've hear they use ffmpeg for this purpose. There are 4 orbiting satellites that can relay any data sent to it.

Vint Cerf has been working with NASA for over a decade on a design for interplanetary internet. I work at Google and he shared a story about how the earlier rovers had radios that were overheating at higher bandwidth transmissions. A smart engineer noted that they had an X band radio on the rover and still had one in an orbiter around Mars. The rover could transmit at 128mbps over xband to the orbitter, which in turn had large antennas to transmit back to earth at 128mbps. I assume Perseverance supports more bandwidth but it may be limited by whatever equipment we have in orbit around Mars.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for-building-...

See https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for- building-an-internet-in-space-20201021/ for some details on projects related to this. IIRC it's store and forward.

This is a video presenting ten milestone images that revealed what we've learned about Mars after decades of exploration prior to the landing of Perseverance [1]. It's nice to see the evolution of image resolutions of the Red Planet.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1eFMzO3iPc

Similar, a gf capturing the evolution of our knowledge of Puto in somewhat less than a century: https://i0.wp.com/www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fu...

Great. Sometimes it feels like there's little progress made in space exploration. But such a compilation is a good reminder that - yes, maybe it's a bit too slow for the impatient, but progress is being made, and it shows.

That period during the New Horizons mission where every new image represented a major advance in our quantum of knowledge of Pluto was absolutely remarkable.

The situation with Mars is different: the planet's close enough for reasonably good telescopic investigation from Earth, we've had landers on the planet for 50 years (the Soviet Mars 2 lander beat Viking by 5 years), high-resolution orbiters for ... nearly as long? And since 1996, rovers, which have transected paths of varying lengths exploring specific regions of the plant. We've got a very strong overview (something still not complete for Pluto --- New Horizons got detailed close views of only about 60% of the surface), and several very-high-detail pictures.

Astronomical time and distance are both huge relative to human scale. That we (or our robot agents) can cross the solar system in a decade or two is remarkable. A few months to Mars is nothing. The Earth was once as large or far larger (to us).

Stupid question maybe but like is there a reason the picture quality seems worse than a decent dslr photo? I'm so curious what that photo would look like, taken with an everyday camera, without the bizarre 'scientific' look of these shots.

speculation, but it's probably compressed before transmission to earth... for obvious reasons.

It would surprise me if they used lossy compression. However I once read about a space probe using a custom image compression and transmission format which does not require 100% data integrity for proper decoding. So if the transmission is cut off after 60% NASA will still be able to view whatever they received. I assume such methods are still applied.

Generally, these cameras are many years out of date. They don't load up the rovers with the latest gear from today, but with the latest gear from when the design review process was closed. I don't know when that was for Perseverance, but it would not surprise me if that was a decade ago. The cameras are also not specifically designed for image capture, but for scientific study. In that they take images at a wider range of wavelengths than what humans can see. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. Additionally, the cameras' chips are not what we have commercially. They are designed to withstand the vacuum, the solar radiation on the long transit, and for use on the Martian surface for many years. You can't swap them out, ever. As such, they are much more 'rugged', which may effect image quality as well.

Yep, that’s the same reason why it runs on a PowerPC750 chip. They cost $200k+ for under 200Mhz on a 150-250 nm process, but can withstand up to 1,000,000 rads of radiation and function within extreme temperature ranges for decades. They have been proven to work in the harshest environments on prior missions, and the risk of an unproven processor is giant; a CPU failure could jeopardize the mission just as much as a crash landing. Design constrains are so very different when you shoot something 140M miles away!

Especially since hardware is generally designed for speed and performance instead of reliability. Didn't NASA use a lot of 486es for a long time for this same reason?

But yeah. It's not a problem if a CPU gets buggy or dies in a datacenter with 10K similar ones, because of redundancy and a completely different approach to software workloads nowadays. I mean a lot of production systems barely even care what CPU they run on.

And ~200 Mhz is still powerful enough for a LOT of applications.

> Didn't NASA use a lot of 486es for a long time for this same reason?

They were also using Amigas until ~2006 for various duties, including launch control.

Could you explain why such a processor is 1000x more expensive than a non-rugged one ? I mean, considering the future of earth, I'd certainly welcome a processor that could withstand a lifespan of decades (including the harsh "I'm going to unsolder it to put it in another device" environment).

From this list, I assume the isotopic purity is the biggest contribution to the price, though I expect relative lack of mass production doesn’t help: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

Part of it is low demand, so you don't benefit from economies of scale. Also the customers buying this type of equipment are able to bear such costs. They aren't gonna haggle over $100k on a critical component to a $3B mission.

a $100k here, a $100k there, suddenly, we're talking real money.

Oh we're talking real money. JPL will destroy 78 production grade parachutes to find all the ways they can break. There is tremendous energy poured into eliminating risk, because launch is so expensive. As it becomes cheaper, perhaps these measures won't be as necessary.

With Spacex being able to launch a car out beyond the orbit of Mars, is their current capability being considered for future JPL missions? Or is everything waiting on Starship?

Thankfully, SpaceX isn't waiting for anyone. They are in the front with a machete wacking down the limbs leaving a trail for others to follow. Of course SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of those missions that lead the way before, but let's be honest, after Gemini, Mercury, Apollo, Shuttle, everything else has been a bit stagnant. Not taking anything away from all of the probes and rover missions. Those are the only things that make NASA relevant. Finally, we have a space agency actively working on humans in space again.

And it's not like people at JPL are clenching their fists and screaming, "Damn you, Shotwell! Begone, Mueller! SEC eat you, Musk!". NASA is fully on-board with what SpaceX is doing - cutting straight into and reversing the dreaded Space Mission Costs Spiral. They may be cautious now, but eventually, they'll just start putting scientific probes on SpaceX rockets too (and those of competitors). SLS notwithstanding, NASA is happy to outsource launches and focus on bleeding edge missions.

And if SpaceX blazes the trail? Expect more scientific missions to follow, as cheaper and more frequent launches - the Spiral put into reverse - cuts mission costs across the board. NASA will be able to do more cool stuff with their budget. And so will everyone else.

IIRC it’s a custom process using wide-bandgap silicon (part of the whole rad-hardening thing) that no-one else needs or wants, so you have to pay the full costs of a fab run for a relatively small number of chips. Hence the cost per chip is huge.

The low demand definitely leads to higher prices but the other aspect is all of the additional testing involved for every chip. There's standard testing at every level of the manufacturing process and there will be further environmental testing at the package level. They will even run radiation tests on the wafer to characterize any quirks.

Hopefully as more space & deep space stuff gets going there will be more demand and the unit cost will go down thanks to economies of scale. Or alternatively ways of computing are tried and found viable (massive shielding, standardized massive redundancy, etc.).

Specs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

For radiation-hardened semiconductors sometimes you use specialized processes like silicon-on-insulator. Even if you're using a more conventional process, you're probably using specialized upset-resistant gate designs and layout. And even your gate-level or HDL-level design might have changes to make it possible to detect and recover from some kinds of bitflips. It really affects the whole technology stack.

Maybe a stupid question, but couldn’t they put there something “cutting-edge” next to the existing system? Then if that fails then whatever, the rest of the system is still functional as expected, but at least they know that in the future what they would need to change to be able to use the new technologies in that environment. Although I can imagine that even the smallest weight increase could cause issues, so probably that’s the reason.

Ingenuity (the Mars helicopter) has a much more modern processor that isn't particularly radiation hardened, and instead just restarts within milliseconds on any fault (fast enough to recover if it happens in flight). If Ingenuity does well I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar design in a future rover.

They did this exact thing with the helicopter — it's using a Snapdragon SoC that runs Linux.

But now you’ve added weight and need to remove something else.

As a tangent, I remember a talk from Grady Booch where he put software cost in terms of mass that needed to be added to your rocket. So every new feature cost weight by requiring more chips and more fuel.

Scott Manley mentioned in one of his recent videos about Perserverance that they have an FPGA on board the rad hardened PPC main cpu can offload tasks to, such computer vision based navigation during landing.

Not sure what the long term plan is for that hardware - I guess they can just do stuff more slowly on the main CPU if it gets fried by radiation. Or maybe being an FPGA the can just isolate the radiation affected regions over time and use the rest ?

You got me curious and I found a product listing with a rather amazing explanation of what they're doing for radiation-proofing.

Radiation Performance

> RTG4 FPGAs are immune to radiation-induced changes in configuration, due to the robustness of the flash cells used to connect and configure logic resources and routing tracks. No background scrubbing or reconfiguration of the FPGA is needed in order to mitigate changes in configuration due to radiation effects. Data errors, due to radiation, are mitigated by hardwired SEU resistant flip-flops in the logic cells and in the mathblocks. Single Error Correct Double Error Detect (SECDED) protection is optional for the embedded SRAM (LSRAM and uSRAM) and the DDR memory controllers. This means that if a one-bit error is detected, it will be corrected. Errors of more than one bit are detected only and not corrected. SECDED error signals are brought to the FPGA fabric to allow the user to monitor the status of these protected internal memories.

https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/rad-tolerant-fpg...

Wow, a rad hard FPGA! Now that's something I didn't expect - thanks for digging this up! :)

I know the camera image compression happens on a x86 processor. Not sure if it is rad hardened. It would be okay if the processor is not doing critical work and can be power cycled due to a rare SEU failure. Also the same with the helicopter uses a mobile phone processor.

Also some of the components are not rated for long term use. The microphones they installed will probably fail due to extreme temperature cycling. The helicopter is expected to last only 4 uses and anything beyond that is a bonus.

Scott Manley recently did a pretty good ELI5 on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wah1DbFVFiY

It takes 15min but this plus the comment section on CMOS (can’t link directly) is excellent. The other comment about being made a decade ago is also relevant and accurate. They will certainly be better next time with evolutions in camera tech thanks to smartphones.

TLDR worth a listen

My question is why was the “sound of Mars” release only 18 seconds long?

Why not record hours of what it sounds like to be on another planet? Even the sound recordings from decades ago on (I think Titan) was only a short creepy clip.

I understand it’s mostly going to be wind and interspliced with the robots sounds but I still don’t get how we don’t have hours of Mars already.

My guess would be bandwidth. Every bit of bandwidth is precious, so they probably dont have the spare budget to send long audio files without obvious scientific value...

Maybe after they complete their primary and secondary mission objectives, they'll find spare time and compute to stream a couple hours of Martian ambience. Does NASA have a suggestion box for after hours / extended program experiments?

I doubt a NASA suggestion box open to the internet will be very fruitful.

I for one look forward to Rover McRoverface in the 2022 launch window.

Marvin McMarsface is to take a close-up look at the Face On Mars in 2023 and then implant an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator to eliminate Mars because it obstructs our view of Venus.

> I doubt a NASA suggestion box open to the internet will be very fruitful.

The two resectful and fun comments between 'this' comment and your comment.

I can imagine a Tumblr/Reddit re-post would be more fun, but-yes-not for the NASA suggestion box. They would have 1 diamond idea every 100k unusable ones.

I can imagine every gaming company would LOVE to have the original Mars sound in their games (e.g. "No Man's Sky").

In a world where the sounds of sports on TV is not even the true sound of what's happening in the stadium because it's boring, I highly doubt they would pay a single penny for what would probably be a highly disappointing wind-like monotonous sound.

Yes, but you could record few minutes of sound in the same amount of data taken by one high res photo. I think the good question is why 18 seconds specifically.

It's just 18 seconds so far. I doubt they sent the microphone just so they could use it once, but then I doubt sending hours of audio was at the top of the priority list for the first few days of the mission.

Perseverance is the first rover with microphones on Mars. This is why we don't have audios from prior missions.

Working microphones. They've sent microphones previously, which have either failed or been on missions that crashed.

IIRC the Mars Insight mission was able to reconstruct the sounds of wind in Mars from signals picked up by their super sensitive seismometter.

One of the most beautiful and haunting things I've ever heard was a tape cassette that had EM signals recorded by Voyager transposed into human-audible sound domain somehow. It was like whale song of space.

I found it here (there's a series on other planets/moons as well in the recommendations):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAZWb9_si4

And Cassini flying into Saturn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWHLCHv4PiI

I wonder what it sounds like to leave the atomosphere now too, I guess this is as close as we can get in the near future. Even with probes going 15km/s.

Ah yeah, that's the kind of thing! Cheers! The tape was recorded much earlier though (I was listening to it in the late 90's IIRC) and a lot longer.

Is it simply dusty/hazy?

Some of the fuzzy photos remind me of the Sahara Desert when there was a little wind.

Dusty. Gives the sky a dull reddish color. Also makes Martian sunsets blue.

In some interviews with the mast cam engineers, they say they can capture higher resolution images later on. Maybe they were reducing the image size to get then transmitted quicker.

If anyone is curious about the technology powering the Perseverance rover, there's this great video on YouTube explaining the incredible engineering behind it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqqaW8DCc-I

All ya'll complaining that you can take better pictures with your iPhones than Percy can on Mars, please read this: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/cameras/

These are ENGINEERING cameras for taking incredibly precise measurements. Not for populating an Instagram page.

> SuperCam fires a laser at mineral targets that are beyond the reach of the rover’s robotic arm, and then analyzes the vaporized rock to reveal its elemental composition. Like the ChemCam on rover Curiosity, SuperCam fires laser pulses at pinpoint areas smaller than 1 millimeter from more than 20 feet (about 7 meters) away.

Holy shit, that rocks.

Pun intended?

If they didn't include at least one Instagram ready camera, the team majorly misstepped on the "secure funding by inspiring a generation" part of NASA's mission.

Go show a kid the EDL video, and then try to say that again with a straight face

Such cameras won't survive the trip through interplanetary space and operate on a planet without a magnetic field.

Is there a single good official site to get Perseverance media from?

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ Would be the best place to get images/videos from Perseverance.

I want to see that little helicopter fly! I scoured the site and as yet can't find any images of it, when I thought they were going to take mutual selfies -- heli of the rover and vice versa.

The helicopter hasn't flown yet - they put it down on the ground, and they're going to run it through a lot of remote checks before flying it. IIRC it's gonna be a month or two before first flight.

Thank you for this! Do you know of a source on the net for a simple timeline of when X will happen?

This is not a timeline, but it states the objectives of the helicopter and contains a check list of them.

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

The ground controllers themselves don't know precisely. I suspect they'll have more precise timelines in the last week before flight, but that's just a wild guess on my part.

I would think with the wind and sand storms that it'd be dangerous leaving it exposed for a month before you even get to use it. Does the rover park on top of it during storms for minimal protection?

Right after landing, Perseverance put Ingenuity down on the ground and drove off to give some separation.

The winds and sand aren't mechanically very strong - the Martian atmosphere isn't dense enough to transmit much force even at high wind speeds. The only real dangers are obscuring the sun (important because Ingenuity runs on solar power) and getting dust in all kinds of places. But the landing site is pretty low latitude, and it's early in northern hemisphere spring right now, so power shouldn't be a problem.

Mars isn't quite as dead as the Moon, but still - you would be surprised how well things are preserved on dead rocks. As long as you can withstand the radiation and the cold, of course.

I don't think Perseverance moved since landing, and Ingenuity should be still inside the rover.

Ah - yup, was confusing the plan with something that had happened already. Apparently the rover will drive to a better takeoff site, then go through that process.

But the helicopter will, indeed, be expected to survive on its own, not even landing back near the river.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-100-day...

A 60 mph wind on Mars has an aerodynamic drag force equivalent to a 5 mph breeze on Earth.

I don't believe they have put it on the ground yet.

Also, InSight: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

This is the link I came to the thread looking for.

Many thanks.

Stupid question, but where is Perseverance's energy source?

Answer: Plutonium

It powers a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.

The plutonium decays at a few % per year, so that means it should be able to bring Elon a sandwich when he lands.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...

a glowing green sandwich covered in red sand. But seriously, this stuff is powering those voyager probes 40 years later. Which makes me ask: why do we have to send there technologies 10 billion miles away to make them work? Why can't my fridge be powered this way?

What's powering Voyager is a plutonium pile. Pretty sure you don't want that in your fridge. 10 billion miles from me? Sure, knock yourself out. 10 feet from me? No way.

AKA "Not In My Back Yard."

So the question stands and extends to include this: "why not?"

Nuclear reactors are better and have economies of scale, it doesn't make much sense to everyone have their own.

Risk?

That is my basic opposition. Happy to be flexible on energy in almost every way. Cost, type, uptime...

But error with nuclear tech tends to endure for a very long time. Fukushima will be raising ocean radiation for a long time, just one example.

These are many lifetime events. Some minor, or recoverable, some profound.

Given we can reasonably run the fridge on solar, and other tech, that risk does not seem to make sense to a lot of people.

Doesn't to me.

Now, that said I am not ideologically opposed. Other tech could very seriously improve risk profile. Maybe it becomes worth it.

Then again, the fridge in my RV can run on a small flame, or a very low current source. And no moving parts!

So, we could make fridges differently too. Make tradeoffs.

> Fukushima will be raising ocean radiation for a long time, just one example.

Will it? The ocean is very, very big. Contaminated water from Fukushima is a literal drop in a bucket.

Already is. Drops over say, 10 to 100k year timelines add right up.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

I say that in jest, because dilution involving radioactivity works on much longer timelines than many things do.

People are probably going to answer “safety”.

But it’s also hideously expensive. Plutonium is, apparently, one of the safer ways to build these things, because it is easy to shield, and the power density is good. But plutonium, as it’s not naturally occurring, is stratospherically expensive.

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

The first nuclear bombs cost billions of dollars each.

I wish I could say that’s a good thing. But no, after the first of them, nuclear weapons seem to have justified their own existence, no matter the cost.

I would rather see remaining weapons material repurposed as deep-space power sources. If that were to solve problems.

Anyhow, Perseverance makes me happy.

> I would rather see remaining weapons material repurposed as deep-space power sources. If that were to solve problems.

Unfortunately this is not possible, nuclear weapons make use of pu-239, which has properties that does not make it a useable RTG fuel.

> The first nuclear bombs cost billions of dollars each.

No, at least union's ones were priced at around $100000-$120000 a pop in materials.

Giant amount of money back in seventies union for an individual, enough to live on for a lifetime.

Additionally, the decay product of Pu-238 is U-234. Though a relatively 'safe' alpha emitter, it's half-life is ~200,000 years.

Note: With alpha emitters, it's 'safe' if it's outside your body, your skin can absorb it. But once you eat or inhale it, you get the full blast right into the quickest dividing cells in your body.

There's a lot of waste heat put out by RTG. The one powering Perseverance has an output of about 110W but thermocouples have about 5% efficiency so there's ~1900W of heat you have to deal with. For a fridge the running power can be almost double that it's just completely silly on Earth except for odd places like the lighthouses along Russia's northern coast where there was no way to get a grid connection, not enough sun for solar, and suppling diesel constantly was impractical.

To add to the other posts: nuclear weapons proliferation

There's a TON of power generation alternatives that look much better both from the "trying to not give you a lot of cancer" standpoint and the "efficiency is something we care about" standpoint. Most RTGs make about 3 to 6% efficiency, while a random Amazon 100w solar panel will give you 15/22% without most of the risks.

The main reason this are used vs (or sometimes along!) other technologies is that they function rather happily in super crappy conditions we don't -unless some world-ending event happens soonish- usually have on Earth.

It's not actually a reactor. The plutonium is just emitting radiation, as plutonium will do, and you harness some of the natural heat energy with thermocouples. There's no explosion risk, although you would certainly need trustworthy shielding.

The radiation emitted by plutonium 238, which is what's found inside RTGs, is easily shielded by essentially any solid material.

The real reason you don't want an RTG powering your fridge is that it costs on the order of one million dollars per watt.

Economies of scale would surely change that though?

Plutonium is fairly rare, so I'm not sure it could be scaled up easily, even if there was a demand for it. Not to mention we probably don't want the raw material for nuclear bombs to be inside easily accessible home appliances...

To some extent, but plutonium is relatively rare. Because it's radioactive an it decays, there isn't that much in nature. You can make some as a byproduct of uranium fission reactors, but again, I believe collecting and refining it takes a lot of energy... You could always cover your roof in solar panels. They could potentially last 40 years, and the cost is anywhere between 10K to 20K installed. It's relatively affordable amortized over a 30-year mortgage, and considering it produces usable power.

Plutonium was generated in reactors in the US but those were all shut down by the late 80s. It's not an easy thing to just mine or make more of there were whole reactors basically dedicated to just what we have left today. In fact we're kind of running out of the stuff for scientific missions, NASA only has enough for one RTG left according to reports.

https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html

https://mjosefweber.medium.com/nasa-needs-plutonium-ea3bbaad...

The situation for Pu-238 production has improved since that was written https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-produced-plutonium-238-help-p...

Not really, it's all artificially produced and would require generation of lots of power (it comes from reactors) to produce it at scale. The only times we used to do it at any reasonable scale was for nuclear weapons. It's also restricted by treaty because of this.

I was thinking it would be fun to buy some uranium 238 (you can have up to ~7kg of it without a license). Then I tried ddg'ing what it would cost to dispose of. I couldn't find an answer, so I decided buying uranium wasn't a good idea.

It's hard enough getting rid of an old lead-cell battery.

I do wonder what it takes to end up on a watch list and assumed attempting to get plutonium or even discussing an attempt would be a guarantee.

I went searching and this website on watch lists appears to be real, whilst also seeming like a joke.

“Since there are many reasons why a traveler may seek redress, DHS TRIP works with the TSC, as appropriate, when an inquiry appears to be related to the watchlist.

The TSC does not accept redress inquiries directly from the public. Instead, members of the public should contact the relevant screening agency with their questions or concerns about screening.”

https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/national-...

I can't imagine people would like seeing enriched uranium. Sure it'd make a good story, but people don't even want to see my ore sample. Deleted uranium should also be fun; I'd love to have some dice made of it: https://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/dudi...

> easily shielded by essentially any solid material

If that shield fails for any reason, including tampering, you're looking at the radiological contamination and likely deaths of everyone nearby at the very least.

Alpha sources outside the human body are of little health concern. You'd have to break it open and eat the plutonium inside for it to be a serious risk.

> You'd have to break it open and eat the plutonium inside for it to be a serious risk.

Yes. Sounds like something a child would do.

Yes, just like how children regularly eat kitchen knives.

aside from the fact that 'breaking open a refrigerator' doesn't remotely sound like something a child would ever do to me, let's assume the worst and the child somehow opens up a refrigerator.

a conventional fridge has electric motors/pumps , live a/c wiring, and gas under pressure. It's not radiation-spilling-everywhere unsafe, but it's not really safe for the kid, either.

That refrigerator is discarded. It ends up in a scrapyard. Someone comes, sees the shielded capsule containing radioactive material and harvests the lead. The remains are eventually sold to someone else and it ends up in that person's home where children are likely to become fascinated by it or even eat it.

Everyone who went near this thing is likely to become ill at the very least.

or breathe particles. grind it up into a fine powder and you have a nasty dirty bomb

How familiar are you with the human species? There have been several notable accidents where humans have cracked open medical machines and decay powered lighthouses to exactly this effect. Imagine if you started whacking plutonium in consumer products!

> There have been several notable accidents where humans have cracked open medical machines and decay powered lighthouses

Indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

A caesium-137 radioactivity source was left behind and eventually stolen. The thieves successfully dismantled it despite sustaining severe injuries in the process, exposing the radioactive material contained in the shielded capsule. They were fascinated by the strange light emitted by it.

Eventually it was sold to a scrapyard. The owner also became fascinated with the blue glow. He brought the thing home to show everyone. He distributed parts of the material to friends and family. Eventually sold it to another scrapyard but not before his brother took some of the beautiful radioactive dust and smeared it on the concrete floor. Where his daughter sat and ate a contaminated sandwich. She also applied he powder on her own body.

The only reason this unfortunate chain of events stopped is the scrapyard owner's wife noticed everyone was getting sick and notified the authorities. She died later along with the girl. Attempts to bury the child also led to a riot. Scrapyard workers also died attempting to extract the lead from the radiation shielding component.

> the scrapyard owner's wife noticed everyone was getting sick and notified the authorities[...]

The Wikipedia article and the Portuguese source it links to seems ambiguous on the matter of whether it was because she notified the authorities, or because a visiting scientist thought to use radiation detectors on other people reporting to the hospital a day after her notification.

> How familiar are you with the human species? There have been several notable accidents where humans have cracked open medical machines and decay powered lighthouses to exactly this effect. Imagine if you started whacking plutonium in consumer products!

People already dope silicone bands and fabric (including underwear!) with Thorium and sell them as "negative ion" "wellness" products. Some are still available to buy on Amazon.

Because there's nothing like "wellness" than exposing your gonads to ionising radiation!

That plutonium would end up in scrap heaps. Cointainers would break open and people would pretty much spread it everywhere from there.

Plutonium dust is very dangerous and you don't want to be around the decay products either. Plutonium also likes to catch fire.

let's not forget that nation-state(s) (maybe singular, but not certain) have weaponized Polonium[1], and also the ubiquity of americium-241[2] which could be used similarly...Outside the human body but readily available for inimical ends...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector

Plutonium is also highly (chemically) toxic.

And recycling en masse would be nightmare. We got anough hassle with R* gases.

They're also quite massive, and radiate a lot of waste heat.

Are you really asking why we can't power your fridge with plutonium?

Do you have an answer that isn't speculation or something you concluded from a breezy stroll over to Wikipedia?

Stop mocking questions. It solves nothing.

Each Mars Rover uses 5 kilograms of plutonium 238. (Plutonium 239 is the one that is used in nuclear bombs.)

Per https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-mars-rover-will-be-powered... we currently have a lab dedicated to producing it, and it makes 3.5 pounds per year.

Per https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/141931325/the-plutonium-probl... the cost of getting the lab restarted was a bit shy of $100 million. And once running fully it costs millions of dollars to run.

At those cost points it would be cheaper to deliver you a brand new fridge each month for the next 20 years than to deliver you a single fridge using plutonium to run without external electricity for the same 20 years. Not to mention that the plutonium itself is toxic.

Thanks for the info, interesting.

Though FWIW I was more commenting on the mocking of a legitimate question. Not everyone has the same background as everyone else. There are no stupid questions.

Fair enough. I probably should have dialed down the snark.

I suppose if we're looking for a Randall Munroe / "What If?" style explanation of why powering consumer equipment with plutonium is a bad idea, then it was the right question to ask.

Not sure about you, but I was promised fusion-powered DeLoreans by now.

You don’t have the Mr. Fusion upgrade? Run that sucker on trash. Had it since 2015.

I was promised that by at least 1985, plutonium would be available in every corner drugstore.

I come to HN because yes, people are really asking and really answering. It’s currently the best forum on the internet for this reason.

You know I was about to say something about how your fridge draws so much more power than these probes, but actually I just googled it and they're pretty close. Today I learned.

(I don't know how much power the probes actually use, but anyway the wattage of the RTG itself is pretty close to the steady state power consumption of a fridge.)

I'd be interested in a real answer to this if any nuclear engineers are around

Not a nuclear engineer, but we covered this in my third semester of physics at University. The short answer is there isn't any engineering reason why you can't do this. The "real" reason is that there is liability here that nobody knows how to deal with. If the unit became damaged and its shielding failed it could sit there and kill people who came near it for years (for example).

I got to talk to one of the engineers who worked on KRUSTY[1] a 10kW nuclear reactor. This combined with some batteries for peak load could run pretty much any house for a couple of decades. (they talk about several houses in the article but realistically the peak load of a single house when the oven, refrigerator/freezer compressor, and central AC are running is a bit north of 10kW. I would seriously consider a way off grid ranch house if I could have one of these to power it :-)

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a20127140/n...

Plus the 90kW of waste heat would keep you very warm.

So true, of course if I lived in a place where it snowed I would put water pipes under the sidewalks and driveway and recirculate water through them and a heat exchanger near the reactor. Voila, no more shoveling snow!

RTGs get hot, that's the point of them, actually. Too hot for use in a small area like your fridge. On a space probe or rover on a cold planet, the waste heat is useful in keeping things somewhat warm. On earth, not so much.

RTGs are also large, too large to power a fridge given the power draw for a fridge. There were microRTGs used in some pacemakers, but the long term safety concerns were never overcome.

The decay rate is high enough that you'd need to augment or refuel your house every handful of years. Halflife of 87 years, 25% energy loss in 40ish, 10% loss in just over a decade, etc.

Also, they've got little plutonium pellets in them, which is both expensive and dangerous.

Many advocate for the use of Thorium instead.

The 8 figure price tag for a RTG makes consumer use uneconomical.

More than likely, 99% of that cost is the container and the apparatus to make use of its energy. [0][1]

[0] https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-most-expensive-element-606...).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci....

Plutonium-238 can only be made via Uranium-238. Per the Seaborg process, you must bombard U-238 with deuterons to get Neptunium-238, which then further decays into Pu-238. The Pu-238 then decays into U-234 with a half life of ~88 years. U-234 has a half life of ~200,000 years, btw.

It is very unlikely that the production of Pu-238 would cost less to produce than the container and the apparatus that harvests the energy.

Let alone the issues with the waste products of U-234 hanging about in the kitchen or basement. If you think climate change is bad as is, add in what people will do when faced with surplus uranium waste removal costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238

The reason for that high of a price tag is that the engineering costs are spread over a very few units. If they made 100,000 of them, the costs would be much closer to the materials cost.

So only six figures for fridge? Sounds like a good deal.

> the costs would be much closer to the materials cost

Which is? Not cheap. And it's not like you can buy in any corner store.

And no, while an "economy of scale" would make it cheaper, it doesn't mean it would be cheap.

I never said they would be affordable even in qty 100k.

I would think the major use for them beyond space probes would be providing last resort backup power/heat for life support on outside earth orbit space habitats/crewed vehicles as the cost will still be at least $500/watt.

Smoke detectors rely on a circuit powered by atomic fission ionizing the air. It isn't their power source (they still need batteries), but it is a safe way to get continuous electricity.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/s...

There's probably a way to get a little more power out of it without being too dangerous. But then we'd have ordinary citizens buying things over-the-counter that could be abused in bulk. And I don't see any hassle being worth an extra free outlet or not replacing batteries.

We used to power pacemakers this way. There might still be a person with plutonium inside.

Surely it would be a horrible idea to distribute radioactive materials to the general population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Aside from the high cost of a consumer grade plutonium RTG, and the size constraint issues with putting one in the base of a fridge, or the health risks with having a reactor in your house under your food, one reason might be to prevent people exploding them.

Back in the 60's, people thought everything would be nuclear-powered; atomic cars, planes, trains, houses, etc. But like with building-sized computers, we've chosen a different path through the tech tree.

There were terrestrial exceptions though, like "the Beta-M is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that was used in Soviet-era lighthouses and beacons." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M

But people happened across them and got radiation poisoning, so imagine that happening a lot more often if they were powering all manner of home appliance. Also a lot more dirty bombs.

The Russians tried powering a bunch of remote stuff with plutonium batteries during the Soviet era. It did not end well, and cleaning those up has been an ordeal. Pu-238 was also used in pacemakers. The basic problem is just that plutonium is toxic as hell.

No no.. My grandfather from Irkutsk oblast had plutonium heart, and he live to long ripe age of 45! Almost unheard of in Soviet union.

I mean, US has been employing RTGs to power all kinds of stuff too, it's not just Russians which did. But yes, actually collecting and decommissioning them after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been an ordeal.

Not plutonium, strontium

More accurately, plutonium is as toxic as lead. It's also a bit more radioactive than lead.

Because if you can power a fridge this way, you can power an automobile this way. They won't let this happen.

The current power structures in the world (petrodollar, etc) and world economy as a whole (massive employment within oil industry and throughout supply chains catering to oil industry) are too intertwined with the oil industry to allow any other technologies to swiftly disrupt that.

Why can't my fridge be powered this way

The MMRTG is a cylinder 25" in diameter and 26" high, it's going to seriously impact space in your 'fridge. Plus it weighs nearly 100 lbs.

It outputs around 100W of power, which might be enough for a small refrigerator, but it also emits around 2000W of thermal energy, so your kitchen's going to get a little warm (probably a good thing in the winter, not so much in summer).

Though probably the biggest drawback is the cost -- the MMRTG costs around $100M to manufacture. The US Department of Energy makes the plutonium for it.

And, if you somehow manage to procure one to power your fridge and complete all the necessary paperwork for it to be legal, you'll be on the radar of pretty much every single three and four-letter agency in your country.

Not just the obvious ones (checking if you aren't selling plutonium or making a dirty bomb), but also health agencies (what if it leaks and someone eats it?), environmental agencies (what if it leaks and gets into groundwater?), child protective services (are you really storing nuclear material in reach of children?!), drug enforcement (are these parties near your "glo fridge" legal and above board?)...

On the bright side, as the joke goes, being on the radar of government agencies is a good way to deter criminals from robbing your house.

According to the below, The Perseverance could potentially give you a dose of 210 milligram in an accident. That’s not as much as I’d have thought, though would make getting the milk from the nuclear fridge a little hazardous.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...

There are more efficient Stirling Engine based RTGs in prototype phase that would be a much better fit for your fridge as they could run the compressor directly. And also add a nice nuclear-steampunk flair to the whole thing. :)

The bottom of this page says: "All images copyright Nasa/JPL-Caltech"

But I thought all works created by the US federal government are public domain and not protected by copyright?

Famously the "Blue Marble" photo is not under copyright and reproduced all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble

That's probably just a mistake from the BBC. The original source [1] just says "image credit" NASA/JPL-Caltech, not copyright.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

I've come to expect news/media copyright mistakes to fail on the side of copyright interests - and not the public's.

What are the "dark spot anomalies" that appear to be floating in the air in some images (1, 2)? Dust on the camera lens? I've never looked at any rover images so I assume someone knows.

Also, whay are the images fairly low resolution compared to a phones camera. Does it have to do with image data transmission error?

Finally (then I'll shut up), when do we get to see the stereo images? I want to see these on my Vive.

1.) https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/NLE_000...

2.) https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/SI0_001...

My wild guess would be dust on the lens. Quickly looking at related images shows black spots present at the same locations relatively to the image's frame.

Same question. Where are the stereo images?

The high resolution, 360 panoramic view, of the landing site is also stunning:

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8873/nasas-perseverance-rover-giv...

Does anyone know what type of data compression is being used to transmit these images? There's been huge progress since the last rover.

I'm speculating here, but I think these images are transmitted in some kind of raw format, or close to it, making them more resilient to data corruption. Compressed images will incur greater data loss when compressed, compared to raw images where you might lose a few image blocks at a time.

They compress them but transmit with forward error correction. They do have the ability to retransmit if the images are too damaged.

Totally uncompressed images are not a very efficient way to transmit images if you want to ensure they're scientifically accurate.

Naively, I'd doubt that. There are all kinds of error correcting codes to deal with that and you'd end up with a substantial increase in effective bandwidth (with the compression). There may be error correction built in to the protocol itself already.

Compression can also include backup/padding/parity data to correct for errors and transmission losses.

They use the same kind of compression as the last mission. JP2, I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000

I'm not sure that data compression has progressed that much since Curiosity in 2012 or Insight in 2018. There have been some formats that have improved compression at the expense of large amounts of memory or processing power, but neither of those are abundant on a rad-hardened processor. Neither is electricity. Neither are the toolchains to process such images very widespread or as well understood.

Any idea how much storage it has? I would think it'd have to be TBs to store all these images, logs, and other data for years while making sure they have enough memory so that they're not limited and if the rover stays there for longer than intended.

Why would it need to continue to store things after successful receipt on Earth?

Very off-site backup.

Once it's been sent to Earth, they drop it. Curiosity's main computer had a flash drive of 2GB, and each of the big cameras had an 8GB flash drive on board. I doubt Perseverance is much changed from that; the main computer is IIRC a spare part from the Curiosity production.

Rad-hardened computer hardware is expensive and bulky. You don't add storage or processing power that you don't absolutely need.

See https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/blog/how-to-store-data-on-mars and https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/brains/

One of the obvious constraints is that for science reasons they transmit each image in a lossless format, so we're up against the limits of what a lossless image compressor can do.

If there were a future mission's requirement to send back lossy images first, and CPU power was significant, something like AVIF or JPEG-XL would likely be a candidate.

https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-c...

ICER appears to be what they're using now for lossless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICER

Thanks for that. Yes, they do both lossless and lossy compression. I think sometimes they may send the lossy image (especially if for a navigation or engineering camera) and request a lossless image if there's something particularly interesting.

According to the graph on p.42, the 20 MHz CPU compresses at a rate of about 20us/pixel. So the 1024x1024 images take about 20 seconds each to compress.

There are 2,000 "normal" sized images on the website [0]. If each of these was 1024x1024, they took 11 hours to compress. So Perseverance spends about 7% of its CPU time on image compression.

[0] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

Found some more info. They're using ICER for lossless, like you say. They're also using LOCO for lossless compression. For lossy compression, the JPEG encoding was inherited from the Mars Insight lander (in 2018).

Page 36 from the PDF: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

I can't find references to JPEG 2000 on this report: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

Are they being re-encoded into regular JPG files when being shown online?

Look for “JP2”. It is used for other spacecraft that are part of the Mars fleet.

You're right. They're encoding just regular JPEG for lossy compression. They're also using either ICER and LOCO for lossless compression. JP2 has been used for other Mars spacecraft (the HiRise orbiter, I believe), but the JPEG encoding was inherited from the Mars Insight lander (in 2018).

> There's been huge progress since the last rover.

One thing that changed in the last 8 years is that there are now two new orbiters around Mars (MAVEN and ExoMars TGO), which can retrieve data from the rovers faster, cache it and send it to Earth faster.

> All images copyright Nasa/JPL-Caltech

Question: Aren't those pictures actually in the public domain as they were produced by US government's agencies?

Wholly cow. In that 2nd photo, the rover looks like it just missed landing on a ridgeline.

ref:https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/58BB/production/...

iirc the "landing crane" was doing autonomous live analysis of the terrain and making the necessary last minute adjustments to avoid problematic areas.

It was actually the rover itself doing those calculations with it's set of radars and controlling the sky crane thru the umbilical cords.

Can someone explain, is this how Mars would look to us with naked eye or this is an artistic/digital interpretation?

My understanding is that these are how they'd look with the naked eye. There's a color calibration target on the rover.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25619/mastcam-z-looks-at-its...

Mars surface looks pretty much like Earth surface :)

Wait until we get images of cliffs of Echus Chasma, the crater of Pavonis Mons or the view over Valles Marineris....

Edit: I know Perseverance isn't going to those places, but something/someone will eventually....

Like Venus as well. IMO Venus is more interesting destination because it's more active and diverse, with Earth like gravity, but high temp and pressure is the reason we don't land there, Mars is just simpler to explore with current tech.

I love seeing cables neatly routed and even evidence of cable lacing in 2021. Dying art.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?509554-1/president-biden-congr...

This mission is an incredible achievement. The images are as advertised (stunning) and I'm sure all the sciences - and even art - will benefit from the data.

What I find a little sad is that we seem incapable of doing this without leaving a particularly human signature wherever we go.

We arrived on Mars with jets of pollution https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25672/black-and-white-smoke-... followed by the dumping of the two pieces of trash required to enable the landing.

For all the data we have gained, we have lost a pristine planet - which makes me wonder if we are doing this at the right time.

I have an opposite view of this.

Cosmos and Mars, Sun whatever else was there long before us an will be still there long after us. From cosmic point of view humanity does not matter much.

From that 1000ft view humans and whatever we built is natural and not different than colony of ants. We are just sand grains that will be crushed when next big asteroid comes by.

Having pristine planet like Mars has no value besides human point of view "I want". Let alone planets are not pristine they are bombarded with space trash like asteroids all the time :)

Why do we use such anthropocentric view? It makes any difference if there is parachute on Mars? Pollution? Well we defined pollution because it is something we want to get rid of because it makes us sick. There is much more bad things for humans in space than you can count.

What if in the future we could examine the contents of a particular rock from space? Have instruments sensitive enough to detect the remnants of Vogon breath from their visit millions of years ago?

A pristine planet has value beyond 'I want this' IMO - it is an opportunity to perform experiments in an almost perfectly isolated test tube.

As a human, I also find it beautiful. As you say though, this is an anthropocentric view.

Well but it is potential value, what if we never get such sensitive instruments?

I expect Mars to be big enough that when we will have such instruments there still be a lot of stuff not touched to use those on.

That "jets of pollution" is the equivalent of a fart in the wind

We're disturbing all those pristine impact craters.

How close was the rover to its intended landing spot?

Nailed it - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/avoiding-hazards-at-jezero-c...

(A little more complicated than that of course. If I understand correctly, anything in blue was a candidate landing spot that it was free to select from. I'm pretty sure the header image is an artistic crop :) )

It was almost that good. It had a five-mile-wide ellipse to search, and found a spot close to the middle. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/371/6532/870/F1.l... If you have a Science magazine subscription, the image is from this article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/870?rss=1/sh...

It landed quite close to the centre of its landing ellipse, which was significantly smaller than the landing zones of previous missions.

Perhaps most impressive is the success of the terrain relative navigation. During descent a specific landing site was chosen, after going through atmospheric entry. That site had to be reachable based on where they ended up after entry, needed to be safe to land in, and should land as close as reasonable to scientifically interesting sites. The system chose a pixel from the initial images taken during descent, and the final landing was within 5m of that spot.

"And we made it to Mars! I stepped out of the lander and took a look around. It turns out the place is just a bunch of rusty looking rocks. No hot green chicks, no angry little green men. I guess I was kind of hoping there would have been someone here to shoot it out with, or at least make out with."

- From the unpublished short fiction of itbeho

Seriously though, this is fantastic. Imagine being a kid today, seeing these images and being inspired to help get us there in person, hopefully in the near future.

Are you serious? First Vikings landed there 50 years ago. Kids of 70th and 80th did seeing first images, there were many colorful books about solar system. It's pitty how badly slow is space exploration of last decades. No wonder everyone and its dog are now so excited about this mission.

Nasa's image gallery UI is such a pain to use, I wish someone would upload these into a more user friendly photo viewer tool.

What's difficult about it?

Multiple clicks to get to the full resolution image. 50 thumbnails able to be viewed at a time, many uninteresting to lay people (solid gray screen, dozens of repeated images of of a portion of the rover itself, etc), for the monumental task of sifting through the 6407 images the rover has transmitted so far in mere days. Wholly unusable in a few months I imagine.

Maybe over the weekend if I can carve out a few hours I'll put together an open source site and share here.

The site isn't great, no. But the reason there's so many repeated images is because NASA doesn't want to be accused of hiding anything.

If they're taking photos for calibration, we get those, just like if they're taking stunning panoramas.

And to a science agency, I don't think their top priority is selecting the best 4k wallpaper for easy download.

I honestly don't mind government sites, they are usually thoroughly boring and very conservative with their design, which means that even old people like my dad can click around and use it. I think that's a good thing.

That being said, there are NASA sites that are more curated, like https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/beta

Any sound clips released as of now? I heard they had a microphone on board unlike so many of the probes till now.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/participate/sounds/

Actually they sound some what underwhelming.

All the extraterrestrial expansion, dream of Men to conquer Space, star track enterprise! I'm pessimistic that we will ever leave our solar system, and if so in 1000 years, I do not care.

Hopefully people learn how tiny our bubble is and protect our environment more. The Martian environment looks so boring -- as a replacement for polluted Earth. (We will pollute Mars faster than Earth).

I'm living at the ocean, trying to keep my vicinity free of garbage. Today I pulled out pair of trousers and some plastic bands out out water. Sometimes I'm having fights with my elderly village neighbors, who are burning household trash (paper, wood) on the ocean shore. I take their garbage out their hands and carry it to my home, later drive to the garbage processing center.

I admire your efforts to clean. But unfortunately it’s pointless. There are entire million and billion population countries that treat oceans as waste baskets, simply because they don’t know better.

I’ve talked to fishermen in rural Thailand and they don’t have waste collection. So they take their trash every day and just dump it in the middle of the ocean somewhere. They didn’t understand why that was a problem when I discussed it with them.

My imagination has a pretty big range for 'rural Thailand', do they have a safe way to dispose of it inland? Subsistence folks, to the extent that it might apply here, get a pass from me.

The issue is that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is dumped from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa where the waste disposal system consists of driving a truck up to a river and dumping the trash in. Of the remaining 10%, it comes from Latin American nations that do the same thing.

Meanwhile western people see these masses of trash and plastic in the ocean and conclude the rational response is to ban straws in the western nations that do have effective waste disposal systems that don't consist of transporting said waste to the ocean and dumping it.

So the question is whether the outrage about ocean pollution is harnessed towards effectively addressing the problem or whether it is dissipated in the heat of pointless kabuki rituals that we do to absolve ourselves of guilt, even as the trash in the oceans piles up every time someone in the third world throws something away.

A lot of those effective waste disposal systems in the West, particularly for recycling, consist of paying Asian and African companies to take away the waste, so it can then be dumped in their countries/oceans or get "recycled" in places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie

No, that is not a waste disposal system, it's how tech companies and other companies that sell gadgets fool their eco customers into thinking they are "recycling" something that cannot in principle be safely recycled. It is yet another example of going through a kabuki ritual rather than effectively dealing with the problem.

Agreed, but weren't you claiming earlier that poor countries are responsible for 100% of the plastic waste problem?

I think that's a good approximation. The volume of computer parts or used phones isn't significant compared to the total volume of waste produced domestically in these nations. But it's a separate tragedy that companies like Apple can pay partners to "recycle" stuff that ends up in a landfill in Nigeria somewhere, or manually stripped of copper and other parts by people working in unsafe conditions.

It's not only recycling. Currently, in my area of Poland there are gangs which bring toxic industrial waste from Western Europe in large quantities and just dump them wherever, while collecting the fee from industrial clients for properly disposing of them. This is a very recent trend, that was, from what I've read, started by China no longer importing European waste. You can only imagine how often "disposing of" such waste in China consisted of dumping it into a forest or pouring into ground or a river.

Plastic recycling done in Asia is the result of incredibly cheap return shipping as most containers come back empty.

People who get outraged about it don't understand that due to cheaper wages and energy costs, plus the need for raw feedstock in the manufacturing countries it's actually a really decent system. It's a closed loop where plastic goods are produced in Asia and recyclable plastic returns on the same ship, it gets processed and keeps raw material prices low for continued use in manufacturing for export again. It doesn't just get shipped there and thrown in a river.

The real problem, especially in South East Asia is very much cultural, many assumed that societies would become more environmentally friendly as they got richer but that is not the case, they are polluting more than ever. It's incredibly common to see people throw rubbish on the ground despite being right next to a bin. Nearly every waterway is horrendously polluted with plastic consumer products.

It's an externality that the rest of the world must bear. The other poster here is on the money, nearly all of it comes from a few catchments.

Half the plastic in the ocean comes from 5 countries, all are in Asia.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/asia-s-plastic-proble...

That's the theory. However, in practice plastic recycling waste is contaminated & worthless, so much so that a number of Asian countries including China and Malaysia have banned imports.

> in practice plastic recycling waste is contaminated & worthless

China is still by far the biggest plastic recycler on Earth, and that product is very likely in plenty of things you have bought this week.

From your own source:

> While numerous international press reports have made reference to allegations that the majority of exports to Ghana are dumped, research by the US International Trade Commission found little evidence of unprocessed e-waste being shipped to Africa from the United States,[9] a finding corroborated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial University, Arizona State University, UNEP, and other research.[10] In 2013, the original source of the allegation blaming foreign dumping for the material found in Agbogbloshie recanted, or rather stated it had never made the claim that 80% of US e-waste is exported.[11]

What’s the waste stream looking like? Like can we trace how this trash originates and why it’s not ending up where it should? If poor areas with weak government services are the problem, then that’s a problem, no?

What could they do with the waste instead, if they don't have collection?

Honestly burning it just might be better. Without doing any calculations my intuitions tell me it would be minuscule on the global scale and the benefit of that garbage not going into the ocean would outweigh the added air pollution.

In parts of the US that don't have garbage collection, people are expected to either take it to a dump or bury it on their own land.

One person doing something in the face of billions of others is the entire opposite of pointless. Giving up because you're one person and you can't magically transform the entire world is cynical, a cop-out and completely misunderstands the nature of the problem.

The world won't change overnight, it won't immediately flip from the actions of one individual, or two, or even 1 thousand or 1 million. But that doesn't mean the action is pointless.

Change requires momentum, momentum requires the actions of an individual diligently living the change they want to see and sharing it with others. That sort of change builds slowly, often imperceptibly. But before you know it things begin actually changing. So no, this binary attitude of "You can't change everything by your actions so you may as well do nothing" is such an apathetic, cynical cop-out and I hate seeing it spouted everytime you see someone do something positive. As an idea it literally does nothing but harm and it has no value in being said.

It's not pointless, but I do think it's reasonable to question whether this is the best thing one can do to have an impact.

Could the time spent taking the neighbors trash away be spent doing something even more impactful?

Is the interaction with these neighbors caring and educative, or antagonistic? In the latter case they're unlikely to emulate it or pass on the idea to others.

It's not about doing the best thing, it's about doing something. You don't have to perfectly efficient, just take simple actions that reflect the change you want to see. We all have limited time and energy, if you see something positive you can do you shouldn't dismiss the idea of doing it just because you could sell all your belongings and become an eco-warrior and be maximally efficient in pursuing a positive development. Don't do nothing because you could be doing more. Just do what you can.

Do something good and do it consistently.

Why though, if you're not going to make a difference? Why bother?

The reality is that the reason we do these things is to make ourselves feel better. Ah, yes, my daily shot of endorphins from recycling. Ah yes, my bumper sticker makes sure everyone knows I'm one of the good ones -- my social standing is safe.

This philosophy is why middle class first world kids pay thousands of dollars to go on missionary trips to build a single well in a far away village. Yes, you got dirty with the natives and did something.

I think it's all hollow. If you aren't making a real impact -- actually moving the needle -- you are doing nothing. It's just a vanity.

I believe in donating money to causes that have high impact. Given my skillset, I'm confident that's by far the best thing I can do. And aside from that, I don't sweat the small stuff. I have a keurig. Yep you heard right. Also donated enough to save a few lives from malaria. Exactly one of those facts about myself made any difference at all to the world.

> The reality is that the reason we do these things is to make ourselves feel better. Ah, yes, my daily shot of endorphins from recycling. Ah yes, my bumper sticker makes sure everyone knows I'm one of the good ones -- my social standing is safe

Speak for yourself my friend. The idea that people only make changes, even little ones entirely out of self service is extraordinarily cynical and a very negative and sad view of the world.

Sometimes people just do good things, because they want to improve some minor aspect of our world, or make someone elses (or somethings) day a little bit nicer. Sometimes people do this entirely without the desire to praise themselves or be praised by someone else.

It still exists, but by it's nature you don't often see it. And if you don't believe it exists, even when you do catch a glimpse of it you wouldn't notice or care.

> I think it's all hollow. If you aren't making a real impact -- actually moving the needle -- you are doing nothing. It's just a vanity.

Say on my walk to and from work every day I pick up one single piece of litter and quietly put it in the bin. I do this every day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 500 pieces of litter. Every day those little actions aren't moving the needle at all, but at the end of the year I've actually managed to make a tiny little nudge to my environment around me. Say I tell my friend and they decide to do the same thing, now it's 1000 pieces of litter. They tell 2 of their friends, now it's 2000 pieces of litter. Then I decide to make it 2 pieces of litter, and I tell my friend and they pass it on. Now it's 4000 pieces. They start telling their friends. And so on and so on. The individual action barely nudges any needle, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't moving some needle even slightly. You just don't have strong enough vision.

> I believe in donating money to causes that have high impact. Given my skillset, I'm confident that's by far the best thing I can do. And aside from that, I don't sweat the small stuff. I have a keurig. Yep you heard right. Also donated enough to save a few lives from malaria. Exactly one of those facts about myself made any difference at all to the world.

You don't exist in a vacuum, and my whole point of all my comments is that individual action drives collective change. One person making minor adjustments on it's own is nothing, but if many of those singular people decide to make changes it can lead to amazing things. You can choose to make whatever change you please, I'm glad you believe in some action. But let me ask you, what change do you think you're making by stomping on the idea that multiple little changes can lead to positive effects? Why expend the energy if it's pointless anyway?

Things can be better, and people should try and make as many little positive changes as they can to the world. No person is smart enough, or has enough foresight or knowledge to be able to predict what that may lead to in the future, and personally I choose to be optimistic because why waste my life believing that anything better is a futile mission?

The idea that people only make changes, even little ones entirely out of self service is extraordinarily cynical and a very negative and sad view of the world.

You keep saying that. It's subjective, and it's not an argument. George Bernard Shaw said, The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Say I tell my friend and they decide to do the same thing, now it's 1000 pieces of litter. They tell 2 of their friends, now it's 2000 pieces of litter. Then I decide to make it 2 pieces of litter, and I tell my friend and they pass it on. Now it's 4000 pieces. They start telling their friend

Well that's imaginative but it seems highly unlikely. After all, if everyone is so highly primed to change in this way, and all it takes is one person to spark the fire... chances are enormously likely it would have happened already, and it would have happened without you needing to spark it.

This idea that you're at the center of a movement to change the world is just more subconscious ego feeding. If you want to be at the center of a movement that changes the world... it's going to take a lot of hard work.

what change do you think you're making by stomping on the idea that multiple little changes can lead to positive effects

Humans enjoy conversation, and some of them enjoy trying to figure out truth from fiction. No more, no less.

personally I choose to be optimistic because why waste my life

Whatever floats your boat. We "cynics" are enjoying the ride as much as anyone. We just think we're doing it in a clear-eyed way.

> George Bernard Shaw said, The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

I think you should double check to make sure your "accurate observation" and "clear eyed" thinking is not tainted by your own biases. It's very easy to consider ones own view the accurate one without ironing out the biases learnt or inherent to you.

> Well that's imaginative but it seems highly unlikely. After all, if everyone is so highly primed to change in this way, and all it takes is one person to spark the fire... chances are enormously likely it would have happened already, and it would have happened without you needing to spark it.

They have. Millions of times in fact! Human history is always changing and growing from little things and big things too. The world of today looks drastically different to that of 30 years ago, or 90 years ago or 500 years ago!

> This idea that you're at the center of a movement to change the world is just more subconscious ego feeding. If you want to be at the center of a movement that changes the world... it's going to take a lot of hard work.

It's not about being the center of a movement to change the world, and the fact you keep jumping back to that shows that you don't understand what I'm saying. You look at it in that lens because you want to, but it's just about doing minor good things for it's own purpose. A simple autotelic action. It's honestly that simple, but the end result of a lot of people making that simple choice is a changed world. It's not about feeding ego at all. It's also not about building a movement, at least not directly. It's about convincing those around you of the value of doing something small that improves things even insignificantly because combined they have massive impact.

Enjoy your "clear-eyed view" of the world, I know you've convinced yourself you're 100% correct.

If one million people make a little effort the impact will be huge. Dont't be pessimistic. Lead by example. The simplified, minimalist, sustainable living style is contagious because it is as we are meant to actually live. In balance with the energy of the planet we depend upon and are part of.

One rural fisherman's garbage production doesn't scale, though. A company owned by a handful of people can put out more pollution than that of millions of rural fishermen.

The only solution is the spread of information and education. That's the only thing that will help. We must reach all people and present them with the evidence on environmental degradation. The planet is ours to protect and cherish, and I'm confident this is an achievable goal if we act fast. By advocating for access to internet and education at global scale! Starting with our homes.

"One person's trash is another's treasure."

The other solution is make it more profitable to collect and sell your garbage than to dispose of it. Which means it has to be worth it for a business to collect your trash from you. Better recycling and distribution technologies can enable this.

I dream of the day when businesses fight for the privilege of hauling away your trash. Maybe delivery drones could bring back garbage to make their return trips less, uh, wasteful.

nah. We’ve been waiting for businesses to step up their game for over 30 years now. I don’t see it happening in the next thirty years coming. A more realistic scenario is for governments to build the infrastructure required to recycle and reuse our trash and, better yet, regulate how trash is produced and punish it’s existence.

This. Fuck that. Anyone under 65 can agree with me. It's us and our kids and their kids for the next 50-100 years that will pay. Time for us to take the reigns. These fat cows had their chance. We'll build a garden.

Profit has been a deprecated concept. Technology we have today can automate Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all at global scale.

Maslow. You mean the guy who took babies ape away from their mother ?

> We will pollute Mars faster than Earth

I don't see how this is possible. At most, Mars might have small, organized colonies someday. Earth has billions of people.

Most people are unable to realize distances in space. Humans are simply not designed to travel in space. For a space ship that can be self-sustaining in every way and capable of multi-year travel, it has to be almost like a city. Even when you get to planets, they are even less hospitable than Mars. I think future life forms which will colonize other planets will be machines, not humans.

> I think future life forms which will colonize other planets will be machines, not humans.

Tardigrades seem like likely candidates, too.

Most people also don't realize how slow the speed of light is in relation to the size of the universe and the distance between stars. It's quite easy for a person to look at two galaxies in a telescope that will never be able to even observe each other's existence, let alone visit one another.

People often argue that we'll find a way to travel faster than light -- which is curious given how rarely people argue that we'll find a way to travel backwards in time.

Any good desktop wallpapers out of this?

Curiosity took pretty nice pictures that you can very easily turn into wallpapers.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/curiositys-1-8-billion-pixel...

Take the second one from that page, for instance, zoom in, and just take a screenshot and use it as your wallpaper.

I remember a recent article on HN about being able to receive signals from Tianwen-1 with a homemade satellite dish - is it possible to receive these pictures over radio with the right equipment, or do they come down encrypted?

I would think encryption would slow down the transmission rate. So most likely are sent in the clear

I'm not saying they are encrypted but I thought that encryption is a close cousin to compression - that it generally doesn't add overhead.

If I recall correctly, the Tianwen-1 amateur signal reception was (1) shortly after launch, and (2) using a 20 meter dish. Receiving the downlink from a deep space object requires much more sophisticated technology than most amateurs have access to, both to track the object, and to listen hard enough.

That being said, I doubt that the transmissions are encrypted. Hell, I bet some amateurs with a very powerful transmitter might be able to transmit a software update and take control of the rover.

https://xkcd.com/1337/

Data comes from Perseverance through two channels:

* A low-bandwidth direct link to Earth (160bps-800bps depending on receiver dish- no, that's not a typo)

* A high-bandwidth link to orbiting satellites, which then forward traffic to Earth (~2Mbps for the rover->orbit hop, anywhere from 0.5-4Mbps for the orbit->Earth) .

I strongly suspect that the low-bandwidth telemetry signals - equivalent to the homemade reception from satellites I've heard of - are sent in the clear. Bandwidth is just too precious to waste.

I would not be surprised either way for the image data - on the one hand, computing power is relatively scarce, while on the other hand it already has to go through a compression pipeline.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/rover/communication/

Curious, whether rover survives to the return sample mission.

I hope we start terraforming Mars in my lifetime.

I hope we figure out how to terraform Earth first

Nice

I think people who don't care for long term investments like this are afraid of the idea that the world will go on without them just as well as it is now. They believe in their fear that some catastrophy bigger than their own death must be coming or what was the point of their life at all? The world was fine before you and it will be fine after you. Endeavours like these are the only worthwhile contributions we have to make towards the future.

I think most people who are not a fan of space programmes would like to have spent that money/effort on humanitarian and socio-economic problems first. I say why not both? Just reduce military spending.

The photos are stunning!

Scratching head why one would like to live on Mars ?

"The Perseverance rover has initial funding to operate for one Mars year, roughly two Earth years."

So wire the rover money after 2 years ? no wonder Elon is into Bitcoin

Looking at closeups of the Rover, I cannot help but think: are those screws, nuts and bolts? And if so, why? Why carry the weight or decreased stiffness of or by the notches, slits, threads etc. that makes screws be screwable. To a place where no-one ever will unscrew them?

I predict that the chances of someone ever unscrewing them are higher than not. Just not super soon.

Plus during development its useful, and why would you change the platform you test when deploying to live?

My thoughts as well: the benefits during development outweigh any downsides during transport and deployment.

My other thought is that I simply saw it wrong and there are no screws in the rover, just things that look like screws, nuts or bolts.

The chances of someone unscrewing on Mars are a million to one they said.

I'd be amazed if we could build a single-use unibody rover but even so I suppose those bolts and nuts give some needed flexibility when landing and moving.

Any structural engineer around?

Because you'd need higher weight in wall thicknesses if using weaker 3D printed aluminum instead of aluminum sheet, bar stock etc. Which actually has a coherent grain.

This presumes the only alternative to "screws and nuts and bolts" is "3dprinting". Which I know to be false.

I get how exciting this is for planetary scientists, but the last few robotic missions have really driven home that Mars is kind of an armpit. Here's to sending rovers somewhere with cooler visuals. I will stay up all night to see what the Io Lander can send home before it falls into a volcano.

Not kidding someone could add filters to the images to see different aspects of the view.

Cat filter would make headlines

they don't look all that stunning to me.

What do you want before you'll call it "stunning"? Beaches with women in bikinis? Those are stunning for the amount of detail they show of the surface of another planet.

Are you saying women are from mars? I thought they were from venus.

Here are the images:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

Oh wow I didn’t realise that was a thing, that’s amazing. Thanks

Microbes in bikinis, please

LOL. Not sure why you're being downvoted - microbes with or without bikinis would definitely be stunning.

I think this is the first probe ever to have a microscope on board.

Seemed kinda dumb to be looking for evidence of life without one. But there was a time when it was a big uphill battle even to get a camera on board: "no scientific value". That mistake was not repeated. Pictures always have surprises.

Thanks for having the courage to make this comment. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it’s not like these are mind bending technicolor panoramas. They look like every other picture of Mars we’ve seen since the first pictures of Mars decades ago. At some point someone needs to ask why we’re spending billions on more pictures of Mars and answering deep questions like “Is Mars soil 36.7 or 36.8% silicon?”

The "science" mostly isn't in the images.

Images, however, are the easiest thing for the lay public to grasp.

Images I would argue serve an invaluable purpose: inspiring the public and the next generation of space explorers.

This project will cost $2.8 billion…over the 10-year life of the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020

In government terms? That is nothing. We’ll burn that much on defective F-35 fighters in a year.

And we are not “just” assessing the mineral content of the soil—not even close.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/science/

(If you’re that offended by the cost, I will Venmo you the 0.1 cents per year this is taking out of your tax bill.)

You triggered the fuck out of me. The saving grace of the Joint Strike Jobs program is that maybe 1% of the people learned what to do next time.

Yes yes, I know, it’s trite to point out that boondoggle of a project.

Except…NASA apparently spent all of $80 million on a helicopter that will work on Mars. One has to wonder what the military-industrial complex could accomplish with a bit of financial discipline and oversight.

The NASA helicopter had to work at all on Mars. It's amazing that they succeeded. But it didn't have to survive in an environment with Martian SAM sites, or even rifle fire from the ground.

That is, the military requirements are much more intense than we often realize.

Surviving rifle fire has been a solved problem since like, the bronze age. Add more metal. Getting to and landing on another planet (intact and functional) on the other hand, is probably like 3 orders of magnitude higher in difficulty.

Inquiring minds would love to know about a practical solution. You can add more material, but that's extra bulk and weight. I think we can agree that a mountain is bullet proof, but that's not really practical.

Also, rifles are really good at shooting through shit. We're talking rifles from 1890s. People don't realize that a bullet from a rifle punches through steel plate (and then buy steel body armour like the plebs they are). Modern ar15/ak rifles are wusses by comparison- we traded big badass bullets for smaller ones that are lighter and easier to carry.

More awesome weapons like the rpg-7 basically create a stream of molten metal that goes right through armored vehicles. Or you use depleted uranium or tungsten, which get more dense as they heat up from friction of punching through things.

In the near future we'll have even more badass things like railguns that will go through meters of steel/ceramic/admantium.

So yeah, that mountain may not save you. Meanwhile, mars will be the same.

Not really sure how this relates, but ok.

The vast majority of combat causalities are from explosive fragmentation anyways.

great: i'm thrilled that the RPG-7, a weapon that is over half a century old, is so awesome. let's cancel all US variants of this tried and true beast and send the money directly to NASA: win-win all around, except by those developing unneeded RPG-7 improvements.

Might as well farm that one out to the Pashtuns too - they seemed to be doing OK with the 1890s rifle copying in the 1980s

The whole get 10+ prototypes from various places, stick them in a big ass vacuum chamber, and try to make them fly was interesting. Turns out a torque rotor doesn't work there.

With $80m, the military industrial complex would figure out that pink and yellow don't work well for urban camouflage.

Why? Because missions like these contribute to our understanding of extraterrestrial worlds, like Mars. The data collected will help with future space travel and potential settlement.

yer dopamine circuits are fried brah! Take a tech detox for 2 weeks

Stunning? Boring is the truth. They look as haphazard and unconsidered shots of earthly, unremarkable, landscape.

NASA needs artists and poetic photographers to capture inspiration on Mars if they want to snare the hearts of the public. What a waste of fortunes if they cannot do that.

If only the images were as great as the feat and engineering itself.

Dude, it's a scientific experiment, not a fucking Instagram shoot

That's not what this is. I didn't impugn the project did I? I criticized the public relations blitz and a falsely descriptive title on the BBC. Don't pretend public outreach isn't part of the plan here.

What qualifies as "stunning" in your book if not photos of another world?

Mars exploration is first and foremost a human experience. Dry observation and engineering wet dreams are OK for a few elite but what we're looking at here is a legacy for all humankind. It should be treated that way, and that includes emotional interpretations.

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