Mars landing: Photo shows Perseverance rover during landing
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Aug 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MRO_sees_Curiosity_landin...
Yesterday: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25610/hirise-captured-persev...
MRO was probably pretty busy at first, so they needed to keep image size small, just in case something died, or ...
Mars to Earth bandwidth is slower than your neighborhood IP.
" The data rate direct-to-Earth varies from about 500 bits per second to 32,000 bits per second (roughly half as fast as a standard home modem). The data rate to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is selected automatically and continuously during communications and can be as high as 2 million bits per second."
But how fast from MRO to earth?
If you haven’t seen 7 minutes of terror, it’s a must watch (a little on the laughable drama side but hey it’s deserved!), but no need to hunt it down because it’s included near the beginning of his talk in the link below.
https://longnow.org/seminars/02013/oct/15/beyond-mars-earth/
That seems like a strange thing to have as a top priority. I would have thought the main thing was to examine the rocks there without having to bring them back to Earth. And later on, if you have a return-trip mission, you could probably just grab some convenient rocks then (though I suppose Perseverance will have a lot time to pick out only the best, most interesting rocks).
This also implies that a return-trip mission, if it happens, will be obligated to go to Perseverance's last location or else collecting the rocks was a waste. Which by then we might have more interesting places we'd rather land.
Are there any unmanned Earth-to-Mars-to-Earth missions planned, or is the current thinking that we'll be sending people there on the first return-trip mission?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/04/20/nasa-narrows-design-fo...
Edit: to your other points, I've thought of some justifications for this architecture:
* The sample return mission will have very limited payload capacity, so the samples should be chosen on the basis of potential scientific value, and selected from a large land area. This can probably best be done with a multi-year rover mission equipped with the best scientific instruments and locomotion available.
* Perseverance's scientific instruments are useful for studying rocks that won't be sampled, so spending weeks or months ferrying samples to a return vehicle would be a sub-optimal use of its very valuable time.
* Mechanically interfacing (to transfer samples) with an orbital solid-fuel rocket is probably somewhat dangerous, so it's best for Perseverance if there's a less-valuable robot to do that.
* The return vehicle will probably be limited in where it can land, because it will have to land on ground that is suitable to launch from. It is unlikely to be landed anywhere close to a bunch of interesting rocks and formations.
* Science instruments, and the manipulators to use them, are heavy, power-hungry, and fragile. If the sample-collection rover doesn't have any, then it can be better-specialized for the task: faster, less fragile, able to traverse softer or more rugged ground. Traveling many tens of kilometers to collect samples may not be nearly as difficult for it as for any previous, science-burdened rover.
We could send human geologists to bring the samples back (though they could obviously pick up rocks themselves), but sending humans to Mars is both more expensive and more uncertain (it's been on the agenda many times but is always vulnerable to budget cuts due to the price tag and long duration of the program).
The only other way to do it is to send a robotic sample return mission. Why do it as two missions to the same place instead of one? Because a fully kitted-out scientific rover and an ascent stage together would be very heavy, requiring a larger rocket and probably a different entry, descent, and landing (EDL) mode. Mars EDL is hard: gravity too high for an easy powered descent like the Moon, atmosphere too thin for an easy aerobraked descent like Earth. The current "sky crane" EDL mode does not scale well to heavier vehicles. So we can't just send an ascent stage with Perseverance, and a near-future there-and-back-again mission couldn't feature a rover as capable as Perseverance. The best compromise is to find the most interesting samples with a top-of-the-line scientific rover, then send the ascent stage to get them later.
And yes, this uncrewed return mission is planned by NASA/JPL and ESA [1]. The current concept involves two launches: one sends a lander with an ascent stage (and possibly a small rover to fetch the samples, or Perseverance could do it--it depends how soon the ascent mission gets there) and the second sends an Earth return stage to bring the samples the rest of the way home.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-moves-forward-with-c...
Edit: Well, this video is from 2012, so that trend has been going for a while..
It's pretty normal for NASA/JPL to release the coolest-looking pictures as quickly as possible for PR, and then follow up with the comprehensive releases of raw data later, especially in the early stages of a mission. I don't see anything to indicate that BBC was given any kind of special treatment.
They're probably still processing the whole video
The tweet: https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/1362825545227018240
The image from Nasa's website (which I would have submitted but couldn't find initially): https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25609/high-resolution-still-...
As far as planned missions go, a proposal by the Goddard Space Flight Center for a 2021 Venus atmospheric probe called DAVINCI+ was shortlisted in February 2020 [1], but was waylaid in favor of asteroid probes Lucy and Psyche[2].
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-venus-rover-challenge...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-goddard-team-...
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/watch-online...