Is their a video from mars not some crappy pics?

Question

Because everytime NASA goes somewhere it seems like that they buy the crappiest disposable camera from walmart. why cant you put an 12 megapixel digital camera on another planet? but seriously is there any videos from any planet or at least a good pic? maybe even an audio. im kinda curious of what mars sounds like. pleeeeeese help

Answer 1

>Is their a video from mars not some crappy pics?

Unfortunately, I can't find any smooth video taken by any Mars rover. There are some choppy black and white animations of dust devils on the martian surface, you can see some here:

http://mynasa.nasa.gov/images/content/11...

http://mynasa.nasa.gov/images/content/11...

Those were taken by Spirit in April of 2005, about 15 months or so after it first landed.

>Because everytime NASA goes somewhere it seems like that they buy the crappiest disposable camera from walmart. why cant you put an 12 megapixel digital camera on another planet?

Spacecraft engineers have a number of important restrictions on their equipment that you average photographer doesn't have to deal with. First, it has to be light enough to be economically lifted off the Earth's surface and sent on an orbit to intercept Mars. It also has to be strong enough to withstand the acceleration of the launch. It then has to survive traveling for a year or so through vacuum, being bombarded by any cosmic rays that make it through the spacecraft's outer hull. It subsequently has to survive the forces of reentry into Mars's atmosphere, followed by any shocks that occur during touchdown. Assuming the rover deploys properly, the camera then has to operate under martian atmospheric conditions, meaning air about 100 times less dense than that on Earth, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, and experiencing temperatures in the range from 10 degrees celsius down to below -100 degrees. It also has to be able to deal with any martian dust or ice that gets stuck to it during the course of its operations, and furthermore, it will have no flash and will have to take pictures in less than a third the light level available on Earth at the same time of day. What this ultimately means is that designing a camera for Best Buy customers and designing a camera for autonomous operation on the surface of Mars are two very different propositions.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the cameras on the MERs were built back in, what, 2002 or something. Considering that a Mars camera built now would naturally be inferior (in terms of picture quality) to a commercial camera built now, comparing a commercial camera built now to a Mars camera built six years ago is really kind of unfair to the Mars camera.

>maybe even an audio.

A small amount of audio was captured from the Phoenix lander's descent. You can listen to it here:

http://www.space.com/php/video/player.ph...

Unfortunately that video also has some music which seems to partially obscure the sound. I'm not sure how the sound was captured in the first place, but I haven't heard of any other sound information sent back from Mars by any probe.

Answer 2

Even still pics take twenty minutes to reach earth.  A small video would take days to transmit to Earth frame by frame.  We'll have to wait until they send men there with a digital cam before we ever see any video.  Let's just hope they bring a good one.

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Answer 3

Eric is quite correct, as the data bit rate would be enormous!! Phew!

Answer 4

haha that is so true, this is the best i ever saw of mars, and its a composite image...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

peace

Answer 5

Can you provide a justification for using TV on Mars? What moves in the barren scenery that justifies TV pictures? To get the TV broadcast over that distance using the rover's batteries would require the resolution and frame rate to be lowered so much that the TV pictures would look *worse* than any still image sent back. That's the the Apollo lunar landing TV was such (relatively) poor quality compared to terrestrail TV. There'd be very little sound there as well due to the incredibly thin atmosphere. Can you also explain what is wrong with the hi-res images we do get back? The stuff you see online is quite often compressed to reduce internet bandwidth. Get the best resolution and the images are fabulous. Did you see the one from the MRO that showed the rover on the edge of Victoria crater?

Bottom line: everything that goes on one of those probes has to be justified in terms of weight, scientific return and cost. A TV system just won't provide enough useful information to justify the cost in terms of money, weight and power requirements. 'Because it looks cool' just isn't good enough.