Darn Good Camera Operating

[Peter McLennan]

NASA not only parachuted a car-sized robot onto the surface of Mars yesterday, they photographed its descent from another orbiting spacecraft.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-232


Also, for a heart-stopping, nicely edited two-minute sequence of the landing, take a look at

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=149948191

[RSL]

Thanks Peter, Looks as if the two thousand five hundred million taxpayer funded lander landed.

[bill t.]

Yeah I stayed up and watched the whole thing.  Reminded me just a little of the Apollo 11 landing, which was the media event heart-stopper of all time.  Sometimes poetry and art can come out science.  That meticulously coordinated ballet of satellites and landers was an elegant performance by any measure. 

I got access to it over the Internet, using a bunch of silicon chips that came out of the equally worthwhile technology investments from the Apollo program.  To penny pinching parties I would say, these technologies and infrastructures could have national security significance down the road, and I'm glad there was this opportunity to push those important capabilities forward.  To everybody else, if we ever stop doing that kind of high concept stuff our minds will begin to resemble those of farm animals.

I'm really looking forward to the scientific results, which regardless of their character will have philosophical implications that will be somewhere between interesting and mind boggling.  But in any case, I've already got my $7.00 worth, what a show!  Anything more is gravy.

[stevebri]

I'm pro space and as a non American living in NYC for over 7 yrs 'get it' and of course get the whole tech trickle down...

However.....

The 2nd link is just some animation spliced with a bunch of very excited people...... Did Pixar make it for them... .

It could have been anything landing anywhere (Vegas in the '60"s).

The rather more boring to look at thumbs were really cool and shows it with realism.

To end on a positive note, go NASA, get the very best people to push the tech and we do eventually see the benefits, smaller, faster chips... Shoving bigger better camera files from our lenses to our lives....!

Steve

[Peter McLennan]

  But in any case, I've already got my $7.00 worth, what a show!  Anything more is gravy.

No kidding, Bill.  Best movie I've seen this year.  It was like old times, getting up at three ayem to watch launches.  I was breathless and teary-eyed at touchdown.

Intentionally maneuvering spacecraft around so that they can photograph other spacecraft landing on distant planets just blows me away. The parachute image was planned, not chance. That's what I meant about "camera operating".  Besides, if we here on a landscape photography forum are bored with long exposures of moving water and single trees on California hills, what could possibly be more interesting to us than landscape photography from the surface of Mars?  Did you know that the "hand lens" camera (designed to mimic a geologists near-macro hand lens) does in-camera focus stacking? And who do you think invented stitching?  Adobe?

Considering that Americans spend seven billion dollars a year (notice how figures appear larger if you spell them out?) on potato chips, a ten-year mission to explore Mars seems a trivial investment in forestalling farm animal brain disease.  I'm amazed and disappointed at the lack of interest and nay-saying.  Just saying.

[WalterEG]

What amazes me with the control centre scenes is the great diversity of personal life-style choices that are visible amongst the operatives — from shaved sides modern Mohawk to long streaming beard and hair of the Country Joe and the Fish era.  What better depiction of the notion that it takes all types.

[bill t.]

The guy with the Mohawk was honoring Marvin the Martian.  You have to respect the mythology on those kinds of events.