** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Hunders said:
I'm just watching the documentary about this on iPlayer right now and the decent mechanisms just to get this thing on the surface of Mars is absolutely mind blowing in itself.
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Yeah. A good way to put it into perspective is to imagine yourself and some friends sitting outside at the pub or whatever and suddenly see this thing high in the sky hurtling towards you then opening up and doing all it's fancy stuff just 40feet away. It's like a scene from the blockbuster sci-fi movies. I'm sure everybody who witnessed it would be amazed but unfortunately jo average from the pub don't appreciate the engineering behind it unless they saw it happen 40feet away.
 
Yep the skycrane landing system is a masterpiece of engineering and rocket science.

It emerged in the first post landing news conference that a guy on the team named Adam had been from the beginning and throughout the main proponent championing the cause of employing that method for the MSL mission.
(On the right)
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When I watched the live coverage of the landing, the closer it got to the actual landing the more that guy Adam started really standing out with the way he was pacing more and more intensly, talking to himself and clenching his fists. He really stood out.

Now I know why. He must have been running through his head every little sequence of mechanical and dynamic events that he knew needed to happen for the skycrane method to work. He was cheering on the system he had championed throughout the project.

Anyway the whole MSL team is amazing.
 
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Absolutely AMAZING achievement!!!!!!

As if the unique landing was not mind-blowing enough they then aim a camera thats 230 million km away - in orbit around the planet - at the exact spot they know Curiosity would appear on its descent. I bow down to the genius people behind this mission.

Olympics faded away for me in the face of this news!!!
 
I just watched a Youtube video and heard that their will actually be video taken by Curiosity? Will these be actual videos of it in action or is my thinking completely wrong?
 
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Curiosity reminds me of Wall-E :D

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Anyway, descent video 4fps.

"The Curiosity Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) captured the rover's descent to the surface of the Red Planet. The instrument shot 4 fps video from heatshield separation to the ground."

 
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Aeleys said:
why are all the images B&W? surely 2 billion dollars buys a colour camera these days :p

more on topic, it's an amazing achievement.
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The main issue is that colour is a relative thing. Colour photos are actually a combination of 3 black and white channels combined. RGB - Red Green and Blue. Stacking these at various intensities produces colour images. On the last rovers they had a colour 'swatch' next to the camera so that they could reproduce the colours as the camera sees them on mars. If you take the raw images from any camera, they tend to be all different because they all 'translate' the RGB channels slightly differently so rather than relying on a processor on the rover to produce the images they do it more accurately here on earth.

Using the black and white images taken from mars they are able to translate the image into as true a colour reproduction as possible by using this as a reference image.

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They know what it looks like here, so they have a fair idea what it should look like on mars. What they have is the RGB channels, 40% grey and 60% grey. The 6th one apparently is fluorescent that glows red when a UV source is shined on it.

It also has a focus calibration on it and the coin is there as a size comparison reference.

The initial wide angle shots are taken using the engineering cameras that are used for hazard avoidance, the really cool photos are expected in about a week apparently when the big mast thing is deployed.
 
SteveOBHave said:
The main issue is that colour is a relative thing. Colour photos are actually a combination of 3 black and white channels combined. RGB - Red Green and Blue. Stacking these at various intensities produces colour images. On the last rovers they had a colour 'swatch' next to the camera so that they could reproduce the colours as the camera sees them on mars. If you take the raw images from any camera, they tend to be all different because they all 'translate' the RGB channels slightly differently so rather than relying on a processor on the rover to produce the images they do it more accurately here on earth.

Using the black and white images taken from mars they are able to translate the image into as true a colour reproduction as possible by using this as a reference image.

They know what it looks like here, so they have a fair idea what it should look like on mars. What they have is the RGB channels, 40% grey and 60% grey. The 6th one apparently is fluorescent that glows red when a UV source is shined on it.

It also has a focus calibration on it and the coin is there as a size comparison reference.

The initial wide angle shots are taken using the engineering cameras that are used for hazard avoidance, the really cool photos are expected in about a week apparently when the big mast thing is deployed.
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This is indeed how they do colour shots before MSL, but the mast cameras on the vehicle are indeed true colour cameras.

More shots in:

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