Comments on: Mars Curiosity Rover: Boing Boing's $2.5 billion dollar question about image file types, answered by JPL

By: bereal

bereal — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:59:00 +0000

Should you ever want to play around with 40GB of raw imagery from Spirit and Opportunity , you can find it here: http://archive.org/details/MarsRoverOpportunity and http://archive.org/details/MarsRoverSpirit

By: Don Denesiuk

Don Denesiuk — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:27:00 +0000

Going by hairstyles it looks like a lot of the MSL operations team are fans of the Golden era of California the 50s -60s.
I tweeted a couple of questions to Mr. Seltzner What’s his favorite Band? What’s his favorite Car? I expect something like Beach Boy’s and ’57 Chevy hot rod. Too stereotypical? If he doesn’t (understandably) reply maybe you can ask him sometime?

By: Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:57:00 +0000

that is a very interesting idea.

By: Gregg Ian Bayocboc

Gregg Ian Bayocboc — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 03:21:00 +0000

they didn’t tell the exact compression/format of the image because of the fact the anybody from the globe can intercept the signal coming and going to mars.. to connect it to the format of the pictures, the signal intercepted will be analyzed like the format of the picture and its possible that if you can decode the signals, you can recreated your own signals that will let you manipulate the rover and read the signals that it is sending back to earth..

For an example, a official online game is out in the internet and someone wants to make an emulator of the game server, they only need to sniff the packets of the connection from the game client to gameserver and vice versa and then decode it using a format that can be read. So they can now create server emulation. In some ways its relatively the same concept of hacking.

By: Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:45:00 +0000

that is awesome!

By: Ivan Koldaev

Ivan Koldaev — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Your question was the best, thank you that you got details.

By: penguinchris

penguinchris — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:26:00 +0000

I was happy to see you get chosen to ask a question; wasn’t sure what you’d say but was pleasantly dork-surprised by your question and was disappointed they didn’t have a good answer (though understandable, that’s not really their department I guess).

You, and that question, perfectly represented BoingBoing (of course) but also happy mutants in general and all the other geek havens on the internet :)

p.s.: it is imperative that you see this

By: David Deutsch

David Deutsch — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:08:00 +0000

You might like this video of the Cassini-Huygens landing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhecsoEQsOc

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:30:00 +0000

I wonder if they’re prepared to pay the postage for that Cease & Desist letter.

By: Thad Boyd

Thad Boyd — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:08:00 +0000

Neat.

I spent an all-too-brief summer before my last year of college working on the USGS Astrogeology Team’s ISIS project, which involved image processing for the Lunar Lander, Mars Orbiter, and suchlike. (It was right when Cassini entere Saturn orbit — an exciting time to be working there!)

Unfortunately I don’t remember much about compression specifics; I was mostly doing grunt work on makefiles to make sure that old-ass Fortran and C code would compile across various platforms. Still, great just to be on the team; best job I ever had.

By: MikeJones1208

MikeJones1208 — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Yes more tech info, please. How about screenshots of each of those techie’s screens. What were/are they seeing? With annotations – eg this is the “speed of descent, a very important value since we need to have to slow down or we crash” or whatever.

By: Scratcheee

Scratcheee — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:21:00 +0000

So let me see if I can struggle to follow you, bumblebeeeeeee. You’re saying that, because of something having to do with the speed of light, the data from Curiosity was not immediately presented to us, but was in fact delayed in some way?

By: bumblebeeeeeee

bumblebeeeeeee — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:15:00 +0000

it’s many orders of magnitude greater than real-time.

By: Ernest Valdemar

Ernest Valdemar — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:53:00 +0000

I think the jingoism was specifically intended to mollify the members of the U.S. congress who control the budget. We (aka globalists, science geeks) were not the intended audience for those remarks.

It’s part of the cost of doing business in an ossified democracy.

By: Scratcheee

Scratcheee — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Indeed. Hence the folksy term “real-timeyness.”

By: awjt

awjt — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:35:00 +0000

I know, right? a 64-year old woman with a handle “GROKSTAR”??!?!?! HOLY AWESOMENESS

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:09:00 +0000

Hang on a sec – it seems you didn’t need Boing Boing to make you cool; your handle is already grokstar.

I’m not sure how much cooler than that you can get…

By: awjt

awjt — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:15:00 +0000

Exactery. It’s possible that just by a fluke, with Curiosity landing down range a little bit, that it had a good view of Odyssey for a few seconds longer than expected. We’ve learned from past missions to always be landing with mouth and ears fully open, in case something goes wrong we have scooped up as much data as we possibly can.

By: Over the River

Over the River — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:11:00 +0000

This make me so goddamn proud!

By: Over the River

Over the River — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:10:00 +0000

That is a good point @boingboing-7cf498e42c1a1d06960376beb34127bc:disqus and I wondered about it. They show an ellipse-designated ”estimated landing region” and the rover is within that ellipse. I wondered if they “landed exactly where they wanted to” by simply landing in the ellipse.

By: msadesign

msadesign — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:01:00 +0000

You rock, Xeni.

By: grokstar

grokstar — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:39:00 +0000

Thanks Boing Boing for the heads up about the landing. And thanks Xeni for being there. It was such a nice surprise to see you and made me feel connected through my Boing Boing “family”.
I can’t remember how I first found Boing Boing, but I’ve been hooked for the past several years. You’ve upped the ‘cool’ quotient a lot for this 64 year old woman.

By: bumblebeeeeeee

bumblebeeeeeee — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:38:00 +0000

well, real time minus the delay caused by the speed of light threshold.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:21:00 +0000

Oh man—you do NOT want to transmit a full-res, layered Photoshop-formatted file from mars. Not only does that take forever, but odds are good the email server for whoever you’re sending it to will have a 20mb size limit. I’m glad they built that rover smart enough to use the “save for web” option.

By: coweatyou

coweatyou — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:04:00 +0000

The rover doesn’t have a high bandwidth long range transmitter, instead it sent the data to the Odyssey (a spacecraft that is orbiting Mars). Odyssey then sends the images to earth using it’s high bandwidth connection to relay the signal to earth. When they where landing the Odyssey was just visible over the horizon and so they didn’t know if they where going to be able to get an immediate signal and how strong it would be. Those two factors established how fast the images got back to earth.

By: robuluz

robuluz — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:51:00 +0000

As an Australian, I can say that the only time I’m NOT sick of hearing about the might and power of the US is when you land stuff on distant astral bodies.

You pull off shit like that landing, then you be as cocky as you like about it, with my full blessing. You earned it.

On a side note, as an Australian, I’m really glad Michael Phelps has retired.

By: Mark Dow

Mark Dow — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:48:00 +0000

The clause “…about two meters away from its planned destination…” should be “…about two kilometers away from its target …”:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA15981

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:30:00 +0000

Get the soundtrack from Due South and you’ll be able to hear the original Canadian band performing it :-) Meanwhile, the Mars orbiter was on the top of the world, looking down on creation, and ….

By: thomas vesely

thomas vesely — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:27:00 +0000

true, but it is a dominance built from a previous economic cycle. will this current economic meltdown allow china to take over ?
i think so.
and they have the shoulders of giants to stand on, so to speak.

By: ocker3

ocker3 — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:19:00 +0000

Makes me Extra happy I jumped in on the Kickstarter for that NASA MMO, I Really wish it was out already!