I figured a paraphrasing along the lines of "Do you want to sell shiny phones..." or "Do you want to work on ways to share cat pictures..." would be more appropriate.
I liked that bit. Drove home the humanity of the people who had just accomplished something that only a few thousand years ago was thought to be in the domain of gods.
That we as a species have come so far but still retain our sense of self is fantastic.
Even still you're overestimating the science education -- or even the willingness to believe the science education they did receive is credible -- of modern society.
After loving the emotional response from the team, I actually opened one of these images in my browser and it hit me: there are bits in the memory of my computer right now that are a function of bits on Mars.
Personally, I think the tax payers of the United States deserve a round of applause from the rest of us for funding such a mission. It's not that other countries can't do this - we just don't want to pay for it...
Some of the tracking stations for the project are in Australia, including the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. Perhaps it's a small contribution but Australia is definitely involved.
Yeah, I am more talking about putting up some real money towards these missions. We are a rich first world country, would love to see the American space budget cuts made up for more internationally, especially on the science based robotic missions and space telescopes.
I would imagine that a lot of the communications stuff has a lot to do with geography and would probably happen without Australian government funding.
Australia has always been a backend operator. Similar for NASA other missions. It has provided the third contact point for when earth spins around which puts the other two contacts point out of reach.
Visited the Parkes telescope about 12mths after the movie launched, and can totally understand playing cricket on that surface. Ideal shape for playing cricket with only a batsman and a bowler.
Don't clap too long, NASA has long been on the funding chopping block, and there are far too many who would like to see it eliminated completely. They don't care that they are putting vehicles on Mars. They're too myopic to even think about what the future might look like.
2.5 billion dollars to put Curiosity on Mars. That's is a little more than double of what NBC paid to air the Olympics[1]. Imagine what they could do if we doubled their budget from half a percent of the federal budget[2] to 1%.
That the price was 10 billion does not mean the cost was that. They might even make a profit since they sell the sponsorships, broadcasting rights and tickets not to mention the stimulus of the local economy.
Sinking 2 billion into something that yields no direct monetary profit, that's a bold move for any country. They did not even sell broadcasting rights!
Somehow I suspect the long-term economic benefits of investing in the technology capable of sending the Curiosity rover to Mars are greater than those from building some sports buildings that are pretty much exactly the same as some built 4 years ago in another city and will be repeated again in another 4 years in some other city.
> Sinking 2 billion into something that yields no direct monetary profit, that's a bold move for any country.
Correct that there is no direct return on investment. However, some experts have claimed for every dollar spent on the Apollo program, we got $10 back in public benefit. It's really difficult to measure this stuff accurately, but the point to take away is that there is quite a lot to gained in technology, PR, and cash by doing inspiring & challenging science.
That’s why solving hard technical problems can be a good business move—it’s not necessarily the solutions themselves, but the by-products of creating those solutions that have lasting value.
Space exploration is not a war between "funding" and "they." Consider what you can do in your home or with your friends to advance space exploration instead of cheering on abstract forces with vague connections to real knowledge, drive and accomplishment.
You're sadly mistaken if you think space exploration isn't dependent on funding, and that that funding is in constant danger of being slashed.
As far as "what you can do in your home ... to advance space exploration" pretty sure contacting my congresspeople and telling them that funding for NASA is important to me is the best thing I can do.
I believe it is dependent on funding and you are doing space exploration harm by abstracting it down to percentages of budgets vaguely spent, as if it's a progress bar in a Zynga game that only needs to be filled.
There are many things you can do to help with space exploration. Get others excited about physics/astronomy/engineering, conduct your own rocket research and involve your family/neighbors, run/participate in distributed projects to quantify and discover items in space. Right now you are not able to see the connection between how you spend your time and what happens at NASA; this is a path to understanding how the collective individual actions of real people make these things happen, happen more often and in a better way.
Certainly also write to your representatives, but please make it personal and not abstract and give it as much weight of experience and knowledge as possible.
> I believe it is dependent on funding and you are doing space exploration harm by abstracting it down to percentages of budgets vaguely spent, as if it's a progress bar in a Zynga game that only needs to be filled.
Are you trying to sound like a smug prick?
> There are many things you can do to help with space exploration. Get others excited about physics/astronomy/engineering, conduct your own rocket research ..
Uh, ok. I am not interested in rocket research as an avenue for my own self-education, and I don't have time in my life to "run/participate in distributed projects to quantify and discover items in space." I mean, really dude? Your point seems to be, "If you are not personally building a spaceship, trying to get into outer space, you're hurting NASA!" Get a grip. In the real world, people make time for the things they care about in the spaces between all the things they must do. For those things that don't fit or are difficult to access, we do what we can. "Do everything or do nothing," which you seem to be implying, is not a viable form of advocacy.
> you are not able to see the connection between how you spend your time and what happens at NASA
I didn't know you and I were so personally acquainted. Oh, wait, you're just projecting.
Wow, that's quite a rude response for Hacker News. I'm sorry to see it here.
Edit: to respond to the middle part, I think that if you are more concerned about the space program than the other things that compete with it for money, then you would want to spend your time similarly, especially because many people are not as interested in space as you (and I) think they should be.
I do not think being busy is a good excuse; when I said you couldn't see the possibilities of positive action I meant to warm you to the possibility of increasing future support for funding by incubating enthusiasm for space exploration in others. You could certainly do this. I was also serious to suggest that you might actually contribute in some way to our exploration of space, which would mean more exploration for the same money. Whether funding increases, stays even or decreases that is a good thing.
I do stand by the Zynga analogy in that your perception of funding appeared to be too deterministic, not that you are somehow a Farmville addict or even play one Zynga game. I maintain it's bad for NASA if its advocates view the relationship between funding and space exploration too abstractly.
I saw a Twitter comment during the celebration suggesting that NASA run a $30B Kickstarter to fund the first manned mission to Mars. [Setting aside legal issues] would the human race come together and pay for it? I like to think "yes", it would be a successful funding effort.
To the martians, of course. Don't you think they will have tax payer concerns like the rest of us? why do you think they have not visited us in such a long time. :)
I had the impression that the whole "control" room was nothing but show. Estimating the travelling times of a radio wave, nobody on earth could have had any control about the spacecraft, and none of the engineers in the control room could have done anything other than watch.
So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these people could have decided upon?
What did you expect them to do? Go home and go to sleep and come back in the morning to check the logs? Come on. They'd hardly close their eyes for a second with all the excitement.
They're all there monitoring the various systems because they're all responsible for various components of an incredibly complex piece of equipment.
Assuming the landing goes well, they all still need to be there to continually monitor the operation of the systems they're responsible for and provide feedback if things don't like how they expected - it's not just about landing there.
This is normal even when releasing a tiny piece of software; it's hardly surprising NASA do the same for a multi-billion dollar project.
They made it very clear in the press conferences earlier in the day that they have no more control during EDL than the viewer watching it at home.
I don't think the control room was "nothing but show." They certainly could have all gone home, but given the time and energy invested in this mission over the last decade, It was importent to monitor the event as it happened even if it cannot be controlled.
For the landing process, they were watching it unfold automatically and irreversibly on the 14-minute relativistic delay, just like us.
But I don't think that means their assembly there was "just for show". That's the best place to see every detail of how well things matched plans: to see discrepancies, in context and with collaborating peers, as soon as possible.
And now that it's down, there could be info that requires adaptive action. Even though interpreting such new data, devising a plan, and sending instructions would take hours or days, it's still a "control" function, just a slow and deliberate one.
It was acknowledged that they didn't have any direct control over the landing. However, there's lots of work to be done immediately after and most obviously, it's incredibly exciting to see the data as soon as it is available and to know that years and years of hard work executed successfully.
Additionally, watching a room full of engineers "do their thing" does a lot to get the average layman excited about the research and science and may get schoolkids excited about the possibilities of space travel, STEM, etc.
EDL is scripted, but there has been activity before tonight, and as another poster said, there is activity after landing. As the cruise phase comes to an end, there have been more and more tweaks to get the landing ellipse as tight as possible. In addition, there are system checkouts, and coordination of the orbiters that relay telemetry, in advance of the landing. It was not at all certain that the images could be produced right away.
Ugh. If you've ever worked on a project with more than 1 person, you'd understand why... it's about the team and the work they'd done over the last few years. Even if they had no direct "joystick" control over the procedure, there was plenty of work happening immediately after the landing. I'm sure most of those people didn't have to actually be there for that work, but anybody working on the project wants to be there...
That's really cool. Would love it if they had some video, or alternatively made a visualization of the entire landing sequence using received data. Like for instance a video of the telemetry you took screenshots of.
These types of trickle down are not identified till much later. If you knew what it would be in advance you wouldn't need it to trickle down - you could just use or develop it directly.
I think the Curiosity team would object to your answer. They've been working on the project for almost a decade, have spent thousands (millions?) of man-hours on it, and have written 500,000 lines of code to control it. The dollar amount that has gone into building it is greater than the value of many fortune 500 companies!
There are probably some awesome innovations that came out of such a large project, it's a great question to ask.
For one, the robot gearing was designed with zero backlash (well +/- 0.000001") using a novel set of EDMachining techniques developed to achieve this accuracy virtually no part distortion - which was reported in literature and trade journals. Eventually, this could lead to super precision/efficient mechanical systems in scientific instruments, micro-robotics, etc.
This is amazing. I hope that school children are given time to watch this. I hope that parents and teachers have the skills and knowledge to foster the Curiosity-driven curiosity of those children.
I've been watching for 3 hours, I accidentally closed my browser during the sky crane step, by the time I opened the ustream feed, they were already cheering... I missed out.
That's a photo of the ground with the rover's shadow projected onto it by some backlighting, suggesting that the specific camera that took that photo is facing away from the sun and down towards the ground. Because there's no sky present in that shot, the exposure is set so that the ground is bright and the shadow is darker.
Meanwhile, if you look at the other photos with the horizon present (e.g. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=RLA_39750... ), the ground is dark because in order to capture the details in the bright sky, the exposure has to be adjusted so that less total light is captured (usually by using a faster shutter speed). Otherwise, you'd blow out the sky and get no details there.
It looks like the dynamic range of these cameras is limited, so keep that in mind when looking at any photos that come out of them. Something that's bright in one shot might be extremely dark in another, depending on its relative brightness compared to other parts of the scene. Take a look at the last few rear camera shots with the sun in them:
The sun causes all the sky detail from the previous rear camera shots to appear black, since its overwhelming brightness requires the exposure to be extremely brief.
Anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea of what to expect from these cameras and how to interpret the photos.
175 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThat we as a species have come so far but still retain our sense of self is fantastic.
http://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity
You could totally they were having a great time there.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/july-21-1969,10515/
I actually shed a tear. That was beautiful.
Edit: Raw images being put on Twitter by NASA:
http://p.twimg.com/Azl6LRUCMAAU1GK.jpg:large
http://p.twimg.com/Azl9hyXCEAE5_Hw.jpg:large
http://p.twimg.com/Azl7LXOCUAAJT5z.jpg:large
(by the photo looks like something like it, stil...)
Everything has to work, so I rarely begrudge them somewhat dated tech.
http://wfr.tcl.tk/fichiers/pub/Tcl_on_Pathfinder.pdf
I would imagine that a lot of the communications stuff has a lot to do with geography and would probably happen without Australian government funding.
Sorry had to drop a cricket reference here...
2.5 billion dollars to put Curiosity on Mars. That's is a little more than double of what NBC paid to air the Olympics[1]. Imagine what they could do if we doubled their budget from half a percent of the federal budget[2] to 1%.
1. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics-fans-ways-circumvent-n...
2. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622643main_FY%2013%20Budget%20Presen...
NB I do think the Olympics has been a good thing - but I do wonder about the value for money....
Sinking 2 billion into something that yields no direct monetary profit, that's a bold move for any country. They did not even sell broadcasting rights!
You need to look at what is spun off from the projects. If you look at that I'm sure the 2 billion will seem like a pitance.
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/database
Correct that there is no direct return on investment. However, some experts have claimed for every dollar spent on the Apollo program, we got $10 back in public benefit. It's really difficult to measure this stuff accurately, but the point to take away is that there is quite a lot to gained in technology, PR, and cash by doing inspiring & challenging science.
As far as "what you can do in your home ... to advance space exploration" pretty sure contacting my congresspeople and telling them that funding for NASA is important to me is the best thing I can do.
There are many things you can do to help with space exploration. Get others excited about physics/astronomy/engineering, conduct your own rocket research and involve your family/neighbors, run/participate in distributed projects to quantify and discover items in space. Right now you are not able to see the connection between how you spend your time and what happens at NASA; this is a path to understanding how the collective individual actions of real people make these things happen, happen more often and in a better way.
Certainly also write to your representatives, but please make it personal and not abstract and give it as much weight of experience and knowledge as possible.
Are you trying to sound like a smug prick?
> There are many things you can do to help with space exploration. Get others excited about physics/astronomy/engineering, conduct your own rocket research ..
Uh, ok. I am not interested in rocket research as an avenue for my own self-education, and I don't have time in my life to "run/participate in distributed projects to quantify and discover items in space." I mean, really dude? Your point seems to be, "If you are not personally building a spaceship, trying to get into outer space, you're hurting NASA!" Get a grip. In the real world, people make time for the things they care about in the spaces between all the things they must do. For those things that don't fit or are difficult to access, we do what we can. "Do everything or do nothing," which you seem to be implying, is not a viable form of advocacy.
> you are not able to see the connection between how you spend your time and what happens at NASA
I didn't know you and I were so personally acquainted. Oh, wait, you're just projecting.
Edit: to respond to the middle part, I think that if you are more concerned about the space program than the other things that compete with it for money, then you would want to spend your time similarly, especially because many people are not as interested in space as you (and I) think they should be.
I do not think being busy is a good excuse; when I said you couldn't see the possibilities of positive action I meant to warm you to the possibility of increasing future support for funding by incubating enthusiasm for space exploration in others. You could certainly do this. I was also serious to suggest that you might actually contribute in some way to our exploration of space, which would mean more exploration for the same money. Whether funding increases, stays even or decreases that is a good thing.
I do stand by the Zynga analogy in that your perception of funding appeared to be too deterministic, not that you are somehow a Farmville addict or even play one Zynga game. I maintain it's bad for NASA if its advocates view the relationship between funding and space exploration too abstractly.
http://pic.twitter.com/qSDmNS9H
The page has not been updated yet as of now.
So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these people could have decided upon?
They're all there monitoring the various systems because they're all responsible for various components of an incredibly complex piece of equipment.
Assuming the landing goes well, they all still need to be there to continually monitor the operation of the systems they're responsible for and provide feedback if things don't like how they expected - it's not just about landing there.
This is normal even when releasing a tiny piece of software; it's hardly surprising NASA do the same for a multi-billion dollar project.
I don't think the control room was "nothing but show." They certainly could have all gone home, but given the time and energy invested in this mission over the last decade, It was importent to monitor the event as it happened even if it cannot be controlled.
But I don't think that means their assembly there was "just for show". That's the best place to see every detail of how well things matched plans: to see discrepancies, in context and with collaborating peers, as soon as possible.
And now that it's down, there could be info that requires adaptive action. Even though interpreting such new data, devising a plan, and sending instructions would take hours or days, it's still a "control" function, just a slow and deliberate one.
Additionally, watching a room full of engineers "do their thing" does a lot to get the average layman excited about the research and science and may get schoolkids excited about the possibilities of space travel, STEM, etc.
http://i45.tinypic.com/353eemc.jpg
http://i46.tinypic.com/ej95s5.png
http://i49.tinypic.com/2qicoqq.png
http://i50.tinypic.com/2hd8j13.png
edit: its just fun to watch those. also, according to NASA there is 500,000 lines of code behind those 38 steps.. would love to see some parts of it!
(counterexamples welcome!)
There was an IAMA on reddit many moons ago by a guy who designed those screens. Obviously they use real life examples and embellish.
http://jayse.tv/v2/about/
http://jayse.tv/v2/the-work/
Here's a request where a guy pipes up:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kwi3c/iama_request_som...
A guy who did the graphics for Moon
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/f50mf/sci_fi_if_...
But neither are the one I'm thinking of sorry. :(
HN has dozens of people capable of creating a nice lunar lander / mars lander sim.
* http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1094
* http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Mars-Rover-Landing...
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/
Images are grouped by Martian solar days (sol 0 == day 0, length 24h 39.6m).
Best guess is, they talked about finding a flat surface to land on, so my guess is that's a grid showing the options.
https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/status/232354875189628929
These types of trickle down are not identified till much later. If you knew what it would be in advance you wouldn't need it to trickle down - you could just use or develop it directly.
There are probably some awesome innovations that came out of such a large project, it's a great question to ask.
THIS IS AWESOME, I WANT TO BE AN ENGINEER!
Also - come on a SkyCrane!?!?
the realization that none of the people involved in making this happen will ever be on a Forbes 500 list.
and still they did it. because they love it, it is progress, science, exploration. and not a way to ruin pics with a filter.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/workspace/apss/ORT-1...
Looks like a building with a garage door on it and some random pipes sticking out.
I see the same thing.
Here's an image of Curiosity, so maybe you can work out the shadow form this?
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120803.html)
Meanwhile, if you look at the other photos with the horizon present (e.g. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=RLA_39750... ), the ground is dark because in order to capture the details in the bright sky, the exposure has to be adjusted so that less total light is captured (usually by using a faster shutter speed). Otherwise, you'd blow out the sky and get no details there.
It looks like the dynamic range of these cameras is limited, so keep that in mind when looking at any photos that come out of them. Something that's bright in one shot might be extremely dark in another, depending on its relative brightness compared to other parts of the scene. Take a look at the last few rear camera shots with the sun in them:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=0
The sun causes all the sky detail from the previous rear camera shots to appear black, since its overwhelming brightness requires the exposure to be extremely brief.
Anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea of what to expect from these cameras and how to interpret the photos.
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/mars/curiosity_news3.html
"RT @DanielBrian: I love that @MarCuriosity launched Nov '11 but @NewHorizons2015 launched '06 & won't arrive @Pluto til 2015! Space is huge!"
https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015/status/23236225947574272...
New Horzons is the spacecraft currently on its way to Pluto--it's expected to be in range in about three years or so.