Why can't NASA send a rover to Mars with a videocamera and sound recorder? How cool would it be to be able to see actual footage of the Mars surface? To see rocks rolling across the landscape; to hear the sounds of the Martian winds... I would LOVE to see that one day. Is it an issue of not being able to transmit video through space?
Not sure if you are serious or not, but I would suspect a video of Mars would look exactly like still photos of Mars.
On the Spirit website, you can see a bunch of pictures strung together showing it driving. Also, I don't know if the Rover makes noise, i think mars has a super thin atmosphere with just a little CO2 trace amounts of other gases and thats it..I will defer to the physicist types, but I don't know if thats enough to conduct sound, and I suspect if so it would be very faint.
Yeah, I'm serious. Probably right as far as the thin atmosphere and conducting sound is concerned. But what if one of the famous Martian dust storms could be caught on camera? This sort of stuff fascinates me.
I think it would be cool, ZRB. If the rover had enough memory, it could save what you're proposing and send it back. Maybe one of these years.
Do you really think memory would be the main problem? That would be pretty hard to believe. It has to be something about transmitting video through the long distances.
It's just bits of info, when you get right down to it. I don't see why the distance would matter, as long as it's transmitting as it should. But it's a tremendous number of bits for video. I know my hard drive is using a great amount of space to store high quality digital video. Maybe B-Bob or someone can weigh in.
Google groups to the rescue: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...7vadkl%242d6%241%40sun500.nas.nasa.gov&rnum=5
Because the people who sent it are scientists. Their no.1 goal is to retrieve sceintific measurements and analyses of the Mars environment. Taking video footage would deliver something that looks cool, but isn't very practical. Just having still pics is a bit of a luxury. And I'm not trying to knock video. Nasa recognizes that, in order to keep support from the public, they need to give the public eye-candy, and video footage would certainly do so. What I wanna know is, why don't scientists put a high-powered telescope into Mars' orbit? then, when they send landers, they could just program the telescope to track them visually. That would really help prevent us from losing expensive landers. Might even help us troubleshoot problems (if the lander is unable to communicate, maybe it could just emit a colored light and the telescope could just see it and know what's wrong). -- droxford
I heard that they arent done with the set in southern LA yet. and then they need to crop some photos, give it a week tops.
Thanks, MR. MEOWGI. That was an interesting read. Hey, if they are talking about designing a way to have video taken from a "Mars Airplane", should the slow-crawling rovers be a far easier challenge? Just a thought.
I wonder what that one European satallite's function is.... to spy the American probes for foul play . You gotta love it. But what they don't know is this mission is just a ruse for the nuclear proliferation of Venus.
