Video cameras to Mars

[lewcos]

I am curious why the rovers didn't bring video cameras and sound? <br /><br />What would spark more interest than watching the Mars sunrise and sunset along with watching the rover mission in full?

 

[siarad]

The power consumption would be prohibitive & guessing, the reception equipment would be tied up & unavailable for other uses.

 

[spacechump]

You also have to worry about bandwidth concerns and that "live" feeds would be too tenuous to maintain even with compression. Better communications equipment would have had to be on the rovers. If you wanted to store video and send sections back later you have to remember that you can't just throw in a hard drive or extra high-speed ram without enivronmental condition concerns. The rovers have just a 20 MHz risc processor with 128 MB of system ram and 256 MB of flash ram that have all been hardened and tested for space travel.

 

[gregoire]

With such a tenious atmosphere you probably wouldn't hear very much & a videocam image wouldn't be much different than panning one of the composite panaramas released by JPL.

 

[mikejz]

Mostly the issues are bandwidth: DV video would mean a 4.5 minute clip would be over a gig. That is a sizable fraction of the total data the rovers have sent back. On top of that the slow sleep of the rovers does not leave much to see, so action means not need for video. Sound of course has been tried, and i see no reason why not. I personally would like to see them put a crappy little mpeg video camera and video tape the landing--but for now i don't think they will.

 

[igorsboss]

I don't know why we would be sending video cameras to Mars anyway... The Martians are notoriously poor consumers.

 

[davp99]

I Agree with you on the Sound aspect, i'd really like to hear the Wind whistling across the Martian plains...<img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font size="4">Dave..</font> </div>

 

[mrmorris]

<font color="yellow">"i'd really like to hear the Wind whistling across the Martian plains"</font><br /><br />There was a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander. It has supposedly been added to the French Netlander mission (first I've ever heard of sucha animal.<br /><br />Info on the mic can be found here.

 

[davp99]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>There was a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />True mrmorris, but the main word here is "Was ,".Too bad huh.. ( MPL was Lost During the landing stage...)<br /><br />Hopefully in the Future this will be included on the Next series of Missions to Mars... <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font size="4">Dave..</font> </div>

 

[mikejz]

I'm not sure, but someone said there was one on the Huygens probe....

 

[lewcos]

Thanks for the replies - hopefully sometime I can see a martian sunset.

 

[the_ten]

<font color="yellow">"The rovers have just a 20 MHz risc processor with 128 MB of system ram and 256 MB of flash ram that have all been hardened and tested for space travel."</font><br />Is that all? So it's basically a Gameboy Advance with souped up RAM. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />

 

[mikejz]

Thats nothing there are still Satelites that use RCA Cosmac 1802 processors. A whole 4 MHz and have flown on Voyager, Viking, and Galileo. The big problem is that getting processors radiation hardened takes a lot of time a money--so space processors a decade behind the PCs we use.

 

[spacechump]

That's nothing! Pioneer 10 and 11 didn't have onboard computers. The had a few NAND gates thrown together to form a shift register to move data back and forth to the intruments and that's all.

 

[spacechump]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Is that all? So it's basically a Gameboy Advance with souped up RAM.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Yep. Spirit and Oppy play a little Tetris during their down time cause you know, it's a little lonely on mars. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />

 

[lewcos]

If you ask me, whatever the cost is, it should be done - I think live video would motivate people much more than still pics ever could.<br /><br />You have to give the people what they want or they will lose interest.

 

[spacechump]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>If you ask me, whatever the cost is, it should be done - I think live video would motivate people much more than still pics ever could.<br /><br />You have to give the people what they want or they will lose interest.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Live video of what? There really wouldn't be much to see that you couldn't see in returned images. It's not like the rovers are tearing across Mars with a 57 Chevy bigblock in them. The images being returned are stunning and beautiful and you can tell on this board that there is a lot of interest in the rover missions. If someone does not see the value and awe in them well that is their fault. You can't please everyone. Plus it would just piss folks off more if you spend that much more coin on setting up the infrastructure to broadcast live video from Mars.

 

[lewcos]

<br />Just to hear the wind, see a sunset, view Earth from Mars, look inside a cave, see a live dust storm, pan around a crater. Not sure why you would need a bigblock Chevy to see stuff - I would think that a slower vehicle would make for a nicer view <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />

 

[najab]

I agree that they should try a microphone again - it has both scientific and "ooh ahh" purposes. As for full-motion video, there really isn't much point. There isn't too much moving on Mars and it's not going that fast. A sequence of still images can be animated if needs be.<p>Also, remember that bandwidth is a limiting factor: the pipe can only hold so much data. The big images from the MERs have been about 6-8MB. That's equivalent to about 15 seconds of 480x320 video. Which would be more impressive to you: the image that's so detailed you can pick out the individual grains of sand, or the movie clip that's so small and smudged that you can just about make out that there's something red in the image?</p>

 

[lewcos]

I would rather have a high quality IMAX movie of Mars.<br /><br />I think we have the technology - just not the political will to spend the money on it. I think if they spent the money, it can be accomplished and if it was, a broader range of people would gain an interest in manned space exploration. The more people that are interested, the more money that gets allocated to it.

 

[spacechump]

Of course we could set up the communications infrastructure for full video from Mars but it would be highly expensive and pointless at this point.<br /><br />Now try this. Go out to a dry lake bed and just sit there. Sit there for about an hour. That's what it'd pretty much be like if you watched a "high quality IMAX" movie of any of the landing sites visited so far. It's not boring per se, but most of the public wouldn't really care to sit and watch a rather <i>slow</i> scene for any extended period of time. I'm guessing ordinary folks would be much more pissed off to learn they just spent 2 billion dollars to see something equivalent to watching paint dry.

 

[lewcos]

I got a laugh out of your reply. On the surface it does sound boring because we have seen so much of our own planet and that would be boring. <br /><br />Seeing LIVE MARS paint dry might not be so boring - not for the first time anyway. I think we could learn quite a bit from observing in real time also.<br /><br />Maybe it's just me but I would be glued to the feed.

 

[lewcos]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040809.html<br /><br />This is the last part of the above article - I guess they are looking at the video much more closely <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />"Up to now, Mars is a freeze-frame planet, profiled in camera clicks. In the near future, the prospects are good for streaming video to present the red planet in motion, as never seen before. <br /><br />"I would love of have had a video of that Magic Carpet being pulled up. That might have made the point incredibly strong," McKay concluded.<br /><br />

 

[silylene old]

All that talk of microbial mats on the surface brings back memories of all those threads we imagined we could <i>almost</i> see in so many of the microimage photos.<br /><br />Keep the videocamera, I'd take an improved microimager, with significantly better resolution for looking for life. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature" align="center"><em><font color="#0000ff">- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</font></em> </div><div class="Discussion_UserSignature" align="center"><font color="#0000ff"><em>I really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function.</em></font> </div> </div>

 

[thalion]

I'd prefer a tool for radioisotope dating to finally firm up Martian areological dates (drool). Unfortunately, no such tool is planned on any probes that I know of.