Kinda like the surface of Mars maybe? I haven’t seen any of the NASA tech team’s little flash animations and colored pencil doodles yet, so I’m not totally sure about that.
Again, my mom died of cancer in 2008, so...it’s probably pretty blown. Or extra tight? I was originally asking a serious question, because I had heard that it was seven minutes of just hoping the thing did what it was programmed to do.
FYI, here's the raw Mission Control feed without all the kids talking about how they named the rover.
Well, they did it! The older NASA talking head just about had a heart attack, but they did it. Pretty impressive that they got such high quality images so quickly, too.
Yeah, no kidding. Historically it has taken what, 30 minutes? Unless then entire thing was on a 30 minute delay...
Here’s the first image sent back: Sorry, I’m just being a jackass today. I am all about space exploration, and getting our asses to Mars.
That's very cool. I'd love to know the technical specs around video resolution, compression, transmission time/bandwidth, etc.
The lack of size context is mind bending... when the rocket thrusters for the skycrane kicked in, I had no idea if they were 50 feet or 5 inches from the surface. Sure, my brain knew how high it was based on the mission briefing, but my eyes were "fuck you we're going nuts". Very similar effect to instrument flying in blackout conditions.
I had seen this simulation video before, so I kind of knew . . . but, it's still very cool to see actual video. It shows how incredibly well-planned and well-executed it was, which is kind of amazing. Especially compared to the manual landing that Armstrong did on the moon.
I always thought they were smaller. It’s the size of a large pick-up truck, with an ultralight front-and-follow drone this time that will buzz around with it. The thing that excites people the most is that it has more advanced ultrasonic microphones that will broadcast back what the Martian surface truly sounds like. And a coring drill that will eventually send samples back to earth on a following mission.
One question remains: how many rovers did it take to finally anger the millions of subterranean Lovecraft creatures that live there? We always conveniently leave an ID marker on every satellite, so the overlords KNOW who littered in their sacred Grok ceremonial layer.
It was very interesting seeing just how much autonomy they gave the lander in choosing where to land for this mission. There was some serious AI that went into that process.
The blades have to spin five times faster than they would on Earth, which means they had to be made from a carbon composite just to handle the extra G forces.
So.. just got an email... my Starlink dish shows up on Thursday, according to the FedEx tracking. Should be interesting. I'm almost tempted to do an Unboxing video.
My home network is a Unifi stack so that means that I can not only set this up on a separate VLAN, but also run some hourly tests for it to ensure/report on performance. Basically, it will run a speedtest every hour and report back. I'm pretty interested to see how it will do.
starlink just became available to order for this area, with service expected mid to late 2021 the email I got this morning said. Just wanting to register interest in you posting about how it works for you (not that a lack of interest would stop you). obviously, if it had the option of it being mobile, that would sway me in favor of them. Right now our current ISP gives faster speeds than what starlink suggests, though not by much.