First full color Curiosity Mars Panoramic Pictures | Hacker News Reader

First full color Curiosity Mars Panoramic Pictures

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24 pointslittlesparkvt15 comments

Maybe it's just me, but can I make a request to others who are interested in the NASA Curiosity rover? Can we please stop linking to blog-o-spam and link to the real sites, from NASA[1]? The sources are clearly provided, but the blog doesn't bother to link to the actual, full-resolution picture page[2], which provides full-resolution JPG or TIFF and additional information, in any way. I'm as interested in the mission as any other self-respecting hacker, but I'm tired of having to click through every time to get to the actual site. Considering the actual site contains real details and real pictures, from the horses mouth, as it were, it seems like we should all be making an effort to link to NASA whenever possible.

[1] - http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4372

[2] - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16029

Edit: if the blog, in question, has real value to add to what NASA is supplying then, by all means, link to it. But for cases like this where the link doesn't really provide anything additional and leaves out important links like those to the NASA Photojournal page, it'd be better (IMHO) to link directly to the NASA page.

They link to the photo journal at the bottom of the post as well as some other resources.

They link to the JPL multimedia image page. They do not link to the Planetary Photojournal page, where, one can find additional information and the various full-resolution options.

Actually, in this case I'm glad they didn't. Photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov has gone, so I didn't have any way to see this image until finding this post on HN.

A guy at FARK took the publically released "self-portrait" of Curiosity and "stitched" it together to correct it. I am not sure what he did, but it looks hugely better.

Original: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/675130main_image_2331_946...

Fixed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithgabryelski/7747623468/size...

Those are from vastly different source pictures, I think. The "original" was from mostly thumbnails and a couple full-res pics, I believe, whereas the "fixed" one is from the high-res pics they just released today. They just had a press conference at 1pm ET/12pm CT today about the debris on top of Curiosity, which you can see in those images.

Either way, that's a really nice stitch job!

That's a possibility. The FARK thread is here http://www.fark.com/comments/7259728/Stitched-together-by-a-... and you're correct, he doesn't say that's the original (and it does explain some of the differences between the two) but he does call the first one: "what the common folk got to see". Regarding the stitching, when asked, he said it was a friend's proprietary software....

...And @MarsCuriosity JUST tweeted NASA's version of the stitch: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16027.ht...

Looks like some different distortion correction, cropping, and levels correction was done between the two.

Do you have a link to the tldr of the conference about the debris?

I'm curious if they think it's a problem.. ?

One of the journos asked about that, and it sounds like probably not. I know @elakdawalla was live-tweeting it, so she might mention it.

Anyway the gist was that they had not predicted that debris would get kicked up like that (or at least not this much, I think), but it doesn't sound like it'll cause problems. My take is that even if they didn't expect to kick things up during landing, she's gotta be tough enough to withstand the winds as well as a bit of rough-and-tumble while roving around.

This panorama mosaic was made of 130 images of 144 by 144 pixels each. Selected full frames from this panorama, which are 1,200 by 1,200 pixels each, are expected to be transmitted to Earth later.

Despite the 2mp sensor limitation, this project is already yielding some fine imagery. I just hope people don't complain about it being a bit samey after a while.

> I just hope people don't complain about it being a bit samey after a while.

Hopefully Curiosity will find some cool stuff once she starts ambling around.

It's surprising how close old sci-fi moves got just by filming in southern california.

"The images in this panorama were brightened in the processing. Mars only receives half the sunlight Earth does and this image was taken in the late Martian afternoon."

This is a fascinating aspect of Mars that I'd never considered. Half the sunlight, but much less atmosphere... I wonder how much dimmer it is overall.

Mars receives half the light that the Earth does?! That is a ton of light!

For you photographers out there, just think: Mars's "Sunny 16" is a "Sunny 11". That's not that much darker!

I sincerely thought that Mars would be pretty dark out there since it's further from the sun. I was clearly wrong.

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