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Shooting a robot millions of miles from Earth and landing it on another planet is incredibly impressive and all, but it wasn’t just an aeronautical physics experiment. We went there to collect data. Now we’ve got some: the first coluor images from Mars Curiosity.
The image was taken by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera, and shows the north wall and rim of the Gale Crater. The image quality of photos from the rover will improve mightily in the next few weeks once the dust cover on its camera is removed, but this is plenty pretty for now. [NASA via Twitter]
That’s actually quite amazing. Any one got any idea on how the images are sent back to Earth?
I’m going to take a stab and say ‘electromagnetic waves’
Royal Mail, that’s why it took so long to get here, Nasa hadn’t taken the change in stamp prices into account.
They are captured by the rover, stored on-board until the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter passes overhead. When the MRO is in view the images are relayed from MSL and later transferred back to earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network. On earth, DSN consists of three listening stations around the world (California, Madrid and Canberra) that has huge telescopes pointed at the sky. The listening stations receive the signals and relay them back to NASA’s DSN Control Center at JPL in Los Angeles.
I saw somewhere that it is a 2mbit connection from MRO to Earth, not completely sure though.
Last I heard it hadn’t set up it’s x-band antenna yet, and since the orbiters were in the area yesterday I’d assume it’s sending images via one of the orbiters’ x-band radios.
Instagram?
But seriously this is unbelievable.
Last sentence first para – “colour”
#pedant