Mars: NASA's Perseverance rover's first 100 days in pictures | Hacker News Reader

Mars: NASA's Perseverance rover's first 100 days in pictures

bbc.co.uk

130 pointsrwmj31 comments

Everyone's so excited by Perseverance, you'd almost forget we've been getting a constant stream of pictures of Mars from rovers for the past 20 years. Curiosity is still driving around and sending back similar beautiful pictures every day. Here's a color panorama from May

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25865/curiositys-360-degree-...

>Curiosity is still driving around

wow, I thought he's "lost"

No, but Opportunity is lost, it survived for 15 years though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_(rover)

I wish they would number these or following a naming convention that has that info integrated.

For those curious here are the rovers we have sent to Mars: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance.

"This photo is made up of 62 individual images which were stitched together once they were sent back to Earth."

I do not know how the operations work at NASA but I would like to think that some lucky individual stitched these together manually using whatever software they use at NASA.

For sure most of the work was automatic (the technique for automatically stitching together pictures into a big one has been around for a long time, remember seeing it in Photoshop CS2 (~2005) the first time I think, but probably existed before that too) and then manually touched up to fix anything weird. This is also how taking panorama pictures work on your phone, it takes bunch of photos while you move the camera, then automatically stitch them together based on similarity in the edges (and probably gyro/accelerator data today too).

PanoTools[0] has been around since 1998 and I doubt that was the first implementation of the idea ;)

Unlike your phone, I'd imagine NASA knows the position and orientaion of the camera for each picture and has precisely measured and calibrated their lens parameters even before launch, so hopefully there is not much manual work to do. Hopefully they can also rotate the camera around its focal point. On the other hand, phones have a continous stream of pictures which can make things easier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_Tools

In some NASA TV show around Perseverance were some shots of someone using their pano stitching software. Apparently none of the existing tools were good enough so they wrote their own and the users love it. I'll share a link if I can find it.

They've used Hugin[0] before for stitching photos from previous missions. Not sure if they used it here but I very much doubt it's a manual process.

[0] http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

With the Ingenuity helicopter being designed to take 3D images of the terrain, it would be amazing to get an updated VR rendering of Mars using real high-quality images. There was a VR experience from the Curiosity rover stereo mastcam 5 years ago that gave me an amazing feeling of standing with my own 2 feet on Mars, something I will never get to do. In an important way, I have already been there, so hope this keeps getting developed further.

https://accessmars.withgoogle.com/

Just looking at some of the images, does anyone know what creates these ripples? Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought those ripples are created by wind (or water) on Earth, so am I right in thinking there is a little wind on Mars?

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/pub/ods/surface/so...

Yes, there's very strong winds on Mars. There's even sound recordings of them.

"Very strong" is not quite right. The winds on Mars can be very fast, but given the low atmospheric pressure, they don't carry a lot of force. Enough to create sand dunes and significant aeolian weathering over millions of years, but they'd never knock you over.

I guess it would be an odd experience. You would hear the wind through your spacesuit, but wouldn't feel it and it would offer no resistance. But very light things (paper and so on) would be swept away in the 200+ mph wind?

This is the main scientific error in The Martian.

Seems all the images in the article are compressed and resized (I guess at least, judging by https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/F27C/production/... and others), anyone know the original source of them? Some would make excellent desktop backgrounds.

NASA posts the raw images https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

Yeah, the images in the article are not the raw images though, they are composites of the originals. Or are you telling me I should just stitch them together myself?

"cooked" images here:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/images/?t=636

I made a little script to download a random new Perseverance picture each day and set it as my desktop background.

NASA has an API that returns a JSON list of the day's photos with URLs and other data:

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/perseverance/...

I choose only NAVCAM_LEFT and NAVCAM_RIGHT photos since they're usually the prettiest, colored, and good resolution.

Some great images there. Maybe someday we'll get to take our own photos on Mars. I'd enjoy that.

Do you know any geology enthusiasts blog or similar that regularly comments rovers images? The photo are fantastic but I think would be betters with an expert description of what we are looking at

Wow the pictures are so much crisper than the last mars images I recall (which admittedly is not sure when).

I do not care about the pictures. I will get excited when they really discover something new.

I literally cannot imagine what sort of exciting things you're doing in your life, what sort of James Bond lifestyle do you lead where actual PICTURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET are not exciting for you. And in between all the explosions and heists and crazy adventures you must be up to, you still find time to post on HN telling us how little you care about something as mundane as PICTURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET.

There are already pictures from this another planet. Loads of them.

Now I understand that they have to test everything before they can get to the actual experiments. So I will wait.

I'm reiterate the earlier questions wondering what sort of crazy exciting things you're doing in your life to make this such a ho-hum thing for you.

And how is this even remotely relevant?

There are much more interesting instruments on board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_(rover)#Instrumen...

I will be really exited to hear about the measurements with these. Especially with SHERLOC.

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