Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune

nasa.gov

77 pointsdimfeld29 comments

I can't believe this thing lives out there. I had to spray a single mote of house dust out of my Neato vacuum's laser range finder the other day. It was causing my vacuum an existential crisis. Yet this rover is out there in robot hell for years, and is just going and going. All I'm saying is the engineer who designed the dust gaskets on those motors should win a medal. A big shiny gold medal.

Yes... and then you've got Opportunity still doing valuable science 48 times longer than the three months it was designed for. Gold medals aren't enough - there should be a Nobel prize for engineering for the design team.

The operations team is just as smart. They're using tricks like driving it up north-facing slopes in winter to keep the solar panels illuminated by the lower sun, allowing them to continue high-power work (grinding etc.) year-round.

All in all, a great testament to human ingenuity.

Three months wasn't it's designed lifetime it was just the original mission span and funding. Calling that the time it was 'designed for' is disingenuous.

Curiosity has a harder deadline on it's life than Opportunity though, the RTG will eventually not produce enough power to keep the rover warm and moving and will degrade the same no matter how the rover is used.

This made me wonder why Opportunity doesn't have the same problem (answer: it uses solar panels), after a couple of clicks on wikipedia I found this awesome visualization of Huygen landing on Titan! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huygens_descent.ogg

That's an unsung triumph of data presentation. I've watched it a couple of times, and it's amazing how much information it presents clearly and at the same time. My favorite thing is how it uses multiple sound channels to allow a knowledgeable listener to monitor multiple telemetry streams at once by sound alone. I also love that space computers are finally beeping like sci-fi always said they should. :D

Oh, yeah, I probably should have mentioned that it was because of the solar panels.

I've never seen that visualization. That's so much data but still really easy to figure it out and track, thanks!

Agreed...this is at the very cusp of what we are currently capable of, and well beyond expectations for the mission, in terms of equipment and systems durability...

Previous accomplishments of "flying" spacecraft close to a planet to take fly-by pictures pales in comparison...though it richly deserves recognition...

State of the art...landing and maintaining control of a "man-made" vehicle on a planet in our solar system, well beyond it's anticipated mechanical limits...

Bravo!...

This isn't on Earth. At all. It's on an entirely different planet. It's in a place you could conceivably go, but it's too hard, and you'd be all alone, on an entire planet. And we sent a robot there. To take photos and wander around. On a different planet that's nothing like ours. And there's a sunrise and a sunset and everything.

Now here's something your selfie stick can't do:

> The view does not include the rover's arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images, or portions of images, that were used in this mosaic.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a selfie mobile app that did this. Hmmm...

Every time I see a post involving the Mars rovers I think about the technological marvel these devices represent. They were designed to work for like months and they are still out there. Look at how beat up this rover is and it still works. My hats are off to the engineering team who designed this device.

It belongs in a museum.

Let's go build one for it.

Very cool stuff, I kind of want to order prints of this.

Possibly the most expensive selfie stick made to date ;)

Book recommendation — Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens.

The author describes building scientific instruments for Curiosity. There is certainly a lot of bureaucracy involved.

Does anyone know what the temperature was like when and where this was taken? It actually looks like it would be a fun hike.

Average surface temperature on Mars is -55c. There's also the small issue of their not being any oxygen.

How long before the moon landing "shadows don't match" people start passing this around.

See! Look! Someone had to be standing there in order to take this picture. Either we have people on Mars, or Nasa is again filming the whole thing in a studio! That does look very much like some parts of california.

The first thing will be people pointing out how this was obviously not taken by the robot, as nothing connects the camera to the robot. Because reading the text below the image is too difficult for some. (I almost wonder if it wouldn't have been smarter for NASA to leave the arm in instead of mosaic it out)

There isn't anything NASA could ever say or do that would change those people's minds. Better not to let them influence anything.

Gotta love it. China releases picture of moon. NASA releases umpteenth picture of Mars (wildly more difficult) and just to round things off, it's a selfie. Do that, yutu!

Sometimes I have to remind myself "yo, that's a different rock floating around in the cold darkness of space" - the Mars pics especially, since they could be just as easily in a desert somewhere on Earth. (Conspiracy!!)

It's simply awe inspiring, and just helps remind me how little has been explored or will be explored in my lifetime.

I don't think this was in response to the pictures China released. It's not a competition, and NASA's been putting out these sorts of pictures since Curiosity has been there.

> It's not a competition

It is a little bit. And that's OK! This is the kind of thing we need to be competing over, instead of killing and stealing.

Is there a reason why they can't just serve up an HTML page with an IMG tag rather than a completely blank page that only works with JS active?

It gets even worse. It pollutes your browser history as you scroll down the page.

Only on the internet would images of one of mankind's greatest engineering marvels; the culmination of millennia of our insatiable urge to grow, build, and explore, be pooh-poohed because of a person's insistence on using less technology.

I know. Shame on me for expecting graceful degradation work as intended. We should all be so lucky to enjoy the modernity of broken JS browser apps.

> It pollutes your browser history as you scroll down the page.

First it was the water in Flint, MI... and now you have polluted browser history. Government thugs, man.

It's a lot more annoying than you think. I had to press my phone's back button like a million times just to get back here to complain about how bad that site is on Android browser.

The raw images are available without Javascript. There are thousands, complete with img tags:

http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=1197&camera=MAST_

'<a href="./?rawid=1197ML0054561950503142E01_DXXX&s=1197"><img src="http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01197/mcam/1197... alt="Image taken by Mastcam: Left" width="160" hspace="0" vspace="0" style="border: 3px solid #FFFFFF;"></a><br>'

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