Curiosity Mount Sharp Photo | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity Mount Sharp Photo

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55 pointslittlesparkvt31 comments

Maybe after the main objectives are completed, NASA could recover some of the money by drawing people/companies' names/logos on the ground, then taking pictures and sharing them online :-)

"Click here to promote your status update on the surface of Mars ($100000)"

Color corrected? I think they mean "colorized". Hazcams don't have multiple color filters, just a red bandpass centered around 650 nm. Any color here is basically manufactured.

They colorized the wheels and sky, too, rather than separating them for more realism. I like mine better[0] ;), but a lot of people dislike that I used Earth's sky color instead of the more boring Martian reddish brown.

[0] http://nitrogen.posterous.com/curiositys-view-of-mars-in-pse...

I wonder how much data costs per kilobyte from Mars?

MARGINAL COSTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

They'll probably keep the link relatively saturated, so it's easy to calculate the cost per unit data.

Since there's probably nobody else using the line - nothing.

Or more accurately: The fixed cost for getting the dataline installed is extremely high, but once it's there and has no other use than sending data back to earth it's almost free to use. The only cost is the electricity used, and since it's on a nuclear battery that will run for many years you can discount that.

In other words: Send as much data back as you possibly can. Prioritise it and send the most important first of course, but don't ever let the line sit idle.

Sending $$ might not be much. Receiving is another story.

On the Earth side there may be contention since AFAIK the Deep Space Network is shared by multiple missions.

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Network

How did I miss that this thing was running on nuclear power. I guess I just assumed battery + solar.

Pretty sweet! It can run for a minimum of 14 years. I don't recall the last rovers using nuclear?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Rover

the last rovers were solar powered, which is partly why they were dormant in the winter and at night.

I wonder how much more weight/space not having large solar panels gives them for scientific equipment. I assume it's a not-insignificant difference.

Well, sort of. It is not so much about reducing weight or size; the rover weighs 900kg (basically, one US ton). It is about energy budget; with the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, "nuclear battery," there is ample power not only to move such a behemoth around, but also to power some really interesting scientific instruments. For example, the rover has a laser which can vapourize a small sample which can then be analyzed spectrally to get chemical composition. Imagine trying to power a laser like that on solar panels.

In space, in the inner solar system, solar panels are more power dense than RTGs.

The situation might change enough being on planet where the sun is slightly filtered by the thin atmosphere, and the sun doesn't shine ~12 hours a day.

RTGs have many other advantages: they provide heat as well as power (which is really important on Mars) and they don't wear out when covered with dust. If Curiosity stops running within a decade, it won't be because of power.

If you wanted to estimate value, you could do that based on the fixed cost you mentioned, as well as the ground-side operation and maintenance costs (including salaries).

And assuming you were talking about the market price of using the channel for just anything, add some valuation of the opportunity costs of not using the line for the things NASA will use it for.

edit: why bother saying this? Private industry is entering space, professionals who know something (unlike me) will be very interested in figuring out the value of things NASA has been doing.

Actually, as the "line" consists of the orbiting satellites acting as relay stations, it is very much shared with the orbiters' own science missions.

Most of the time the link is going to sit idle; an orbiter is only overhead a few times a day, a few minutes at a time. So there will be scheduled bursts of communications. AFAIK the Curiosity-orbiter bandwidth is about 2Mb/s, and the highest-speed orbiter-Earth link is up to 6Mb/s (that of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter--MRO has returned more data than all other Mars missions combined.)

Curiosity also has two antennae that allow direct communication with the Earth (when it's over the horizon) but they are too slow (hundreds of bits per second) for heavy-duty image downlinking.

2 and 6 Mbit/second is pretty good bandwidth.

It would have been a reasonably good Internet connection if not terrible ping of 1680000 ms (almost half hour).

Less than a text message.

If 3GB is exceeded, an additional 1 GB is automatically provided at a rate of $10 for each additional 1 GB.

Domestic Long Distance and 50 SMS are free.

I've been more interested in what the bandwidth and packet loss rate are like.

I don't have a source I can find easily, but I believe the older rovers had a 10Mbs uplink.

I'm not on Mars, but here in Bangladesh I pay for "unlimited" broadband, but when I exceed 100k/s for a few hours in a given day, I am throttled down to about 3K/s for the next 24 hours :(

Does anyone know the bandwidth of the connection to Curiosity? Closest thing I was able to was the Spirit rover with 258 kbit/s.

I've read that when the MSL Rover Relays through the MRO (which seems to be the LIDAR communications) the link is about 2Mb/s, but a constant direct link to Earth over UHF is only 500 bits/s

I noticed the robot got its finger over the camera in the upper right corner. :-) Nice shot though.

Instagram should have done the colour corrected version with a filter. PR opportunity: MISSED.

The Viking photos taken on Mars in the late 70's are pretty cool too.

Anyone know what picture compression format they are using?

Maybe one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCSDS_122.0-B-1

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